Phillip Clapham, the whale biologist I pestered at the start of this chapter, related the story of Gracie, a Doberman mix who once vomited a two-foot garter snake onto Clapham’s dining room floor during a dinner party. As he tells it, his wife at the time, assuming the snake was dead, picked it up in a wad of paper towels and then ‘nearly dropped it when its little forked tongue came out’. Clapham insists Gracie hadn’t been outside for at least two hours. ‘It had been in there quite a while.’