Americans love their pets. You can often find that love on display whenever you see people out walking their dogs. You can sometimes see it among those people who take their cats out for walks.
In both cases, the essential inventions that many rely on to participate in that activity with their pets are the collar and leash, which date back thousands of years.
But those aren't inventions that work for every kind of pet. Those who keep snakes, for example, aren't able to take their slithery friends out for walks.
Or weren't until 2002, when inventor Donald Robert Martin Boys was awarded U.S. Patent 6,490,999 for a "Collar Apparatus Enabling Secure Handling of a Snake by Tether". Which is to say a collar and leash for snakes! And as depicted in Figure 4 from the patent, which inspired the title for this edition of IIE, that means snakes can now be taken for walks!
Believe it or not, there's a lot of innovation that went into Boys' patent. The familiar collar and leash used for other animals won't work with a snake, which has a very different physiology. Boys' described problems his inventions had to overcome to make it practical in the patent's background section:
Standard animal collars such as designed for dogs and cats as well as other legged animals are not designed for the body style of a snake because the snake has no external appendages. A snake exhibits concertina motion wherein the belly muscles of the snake act in concert to propel the snake in a forward direction. This type of forward motion is unique to a snake and is independent of any side-to-side serpentine movement. The concertina motion of a snake coupled with an ability to alter the shape of it's circumference enables it to move through and escape any known annular restraint such as a neck-style collar.
Also, because of the ability of a snake to gradually change in size (circumference) due to food conditions and normal growth, it would be extremely difficult to collar the animal with a prior-art style collar that would always fit the animal.
In prior art there are no apparatus designed for collaring a snake so that it may be casually handled giving the snake freedom to move about without being held in the physical hands on sense.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a collar apparatus and mechanism that enables a user to collar a snake securely such that it may be tethered and allowed to move about un-hindered in any area away from the snake's enclosure.
The description of the invention describes how Boys solved the practical problem of how to size the hook-and-loop fastened collar he developed:
Through empirical testing, the inventor has found that the preferred dimensions provide a comfortable fit (not irritating the snake) while minimizing concertina movement of a snake through collar 101 when in place. Moreover, the preferred dimensions prevent a snake from achieving a break or otherwise compromising the secured Velcro or hook and loop fastener connection when the collar is in place.
The end result is "a collar apparatus for enabling tethering and subsequent walking of a pet snake away from its enclosure".
Unfortunately, we were not able to find any collars for snakes for sale, which indicates the invention was not as successful as Boys' might have hoped. The closest we could find were snake collars or necklaces for people, which are available on Etsy and Amazon and are, of course, a very different kind of product.
From the Inventions in Everything Archives
We've featured a number of animal-related patents over the years. Here's a sampling!
- Inventions in Everything: Mirrors for Reckless Fish
- Inventions in Everything: Patented Improvements in Cat Toys
- Inventions in Everything: Keeping Dog Time
- Inventions in Everything: Texting Your Dog a Treat
- Inventions in Everything: The Salmon Cannon
- Inventions in Everything: The Ultimate Turkey Blind
Labels: technology
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