At a glance, it looks like your grandma’s arts-and-crafts room — tidy with wall-to-wall tiers of clear plastic drawers, but sans the beads and yarn.
Closer observation might reveal subtle movement inside. That’s the snake.
Klayton Mai is raising more than 50 nonvenomous ball pythons in an intentionally warm room of his Lake Highlands home.
He has steadily grown his snake breeding side-business over the past decade, though he was just a kid when his dad gave him his first.
This is not to say artistry isn’t taking place in this room. It is. As art often does, Mai’s work draws inspiration from nature and biology. His ball python collection is a result of meticulous design and genetic engineering.
“They are like a living painting, a work of art, each one unique,” Klayton says. His largest snake hangs around his neck like a beautifully patterned boa. “This one’s a champion,” he says of the female (typically the larger sex), who, if extended, would be almost as tall as her owner.
A ball python can make a fine pet, Mai says. They are low maintenance — they eat once a week, if that, and defecate infrequently.
But his pythons don’t have names, and he doesn’t consider them pets.
“They do not think like dogs, which think more like we humans do. They have a very different psychology,” says Mai, who also owns two cute canines, BB and Buster; the pups pay little mind to the snakes, though they are obsessed with the mice that the snakes eat.
Snake husbandry to Mai is more comparable to gardening than pet ownership.
“Like tending to plants, the work is relaxing and rewarding and you enjoy what you are nurturing and raising.”
There are more than 100 ball python mutations (“morphs,” in industry speak). Breeding for unique traits is a gamble, Mai explains, but understanding an animal’s history, as well as basic genetics, makes it less so.
Index cards placed at the base of each drawer contain detailed information — such as gender and genealogy as well as breeding, feeding and shedding schedules.
To produce an albino, ivory, piebald or any of the scarcer variations is exciting and potentially lucrative. Take the lavender albino ball python, for example. One sells for upwards of $40,000 today. But with many breeders working to replicate it, the morph eventually will become more common and drop in price — basic supply and demand. A normal, the most basic ball python found in pet stores, runs $40.
Mai and dealers like him sell their inventory through web stores and at herpetology expos such as last month’s North American Reptile Breeders Convention in Arlington. Mai relishes those events and the opportunity to spend a weekend showcasing and selling his snakes as well as sharing his expertise with attendees.
“All kinds of lifestyles, personalities and incomes attend the shows. I like helping people overcome fear and spreading knowledge about the animals, about breeding, about conservationism,” he says.
“A lot of people fear these snakes might hurt you. But they only bite if you get in the way of their food, or defensively. I’ve been bitten a couple times. It doesn’t hurt. They are constrictors, but they don’t get big enough to harm anything larger than a rodent,” he says.
Some states have enacted laws restricting exotic animals as pets, mostly due to dangerous reptiles absconding and terrorizing the public (are you listening, Florida?).
Mai notes that owners of reptiles, like owners of dogs and cats, can be irresponsible.
His own collection is secure and fastidiously cared for.
Klayton’s wife Hannah Mai, now six months pregnant with the couple’s first child, is circumspect but game when it comes to the snakes. She opens one of the drawers, reaches in, but retreats when the reptile hisses.
“He’s just letting you know that you are disturbing him,” Klayton says.
She replies, “Why don’t you get him.”
Klayton expertly seizes the serpent. It folds itself into a protective orb (that’s why they are called ball pythons, Mai explains).
He places the yellowish lesser in his wife’s outstretched hands, and she thanks him.
“This one is my favorite,” she says. “I love the eyes.”
Both Klayton and Hannah graduated from Lake Highlands High School, but they didn’t start dating until college at the University of Oklahoma. Back then he had just a few snakes, she recalls.
“But gradually more started to appear,” Hannah says. “Over the past three years, since we moved in this house, it has turned into a full-fledged snake raising business.”
And more snakes meant more snake food: mice.
Pointing to a neatly painted backyard shed, light illuminating its window, Hannah explains the mouse house, where her husband raises rodents that eventually become the snakes’ meals.
“They have very good conditions out there,” Hannah says. “A person could live in there.”
Buster the Boston terrier patrols the rodent shed, hoping to nab one for himself, she adds.
When it is time to make mice into dinner, typically he humanely kills and freezes them. A few snakes only eat live mice, he says, and mumbles something about the “circle of life.”
Despite his skill and passion for snake breeding, it isn’t Klayton’s full time job. He has worked years for his family’s plumbing business, Mai Plumbing.
He also is a professional, highly ranked mixed martial arts fighter.
The latter — unlike dealing in snakes or dysfunctional toilets — makes Hannah uneasy. Still, she supports him.
“I love this man, maybe to a fault, because when he’s doing what makes him happy, he lights up and I could probably accept anything.”
The hard part is seeing him lose. “It’s crushing, not just seeing him hurt, physically, but he takes it so hard when he puts so much effort into something and he doesn’t win.”
Luckily, he has only lost once. He won seven of eight of his last fights.
His nickname in the ring? The Python, of course.
“I do learn something from watching my snakes,” he says. “In all of my wins, I’ve had one knockout, and the rest have been takedown by constriction.”
Klayton is on the precipice of becoming a member of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) — the world’s largest mixed martial arts promotional company. It would mean more TV appearances and more income from MMA fighting.
Klayton and Hannah, neither yet 30 years old, agree there is nothing wrong with dividing interests for a while.
Klayton “never half-asses anything,” Hannah says. She believes he could make any of his three professions a successful full-time endeavor.
“If he put everything into snake breeding, for example, I am sure we would have a warehouse and that it would be a well-oiled machine of a business.”
