Dwight Howard owns a lot of snakes and guns

Dwight Howard may be keeping a lower profile in the league this season, but that does not mean he is not still the outsized personality that first brought him to the spotlight of the NBA.

Dwight Howard may be keeping a lower profile in the league this season, but he still has the outsized personality that first brought him to the spotlight of the NBA.

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The Rockets center recently spoke with Bleacher Report about his new life in Texas as the Rockets entered the playoffs as the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference, and he revealed that his house is filled with lots of dangerous things, including 50 guns and 20 snakes.

[Howard] likes going to the gun range—”It’s what you do in Texas,” he says—and he has about 10 different kinds in his collection encompassing more than 50 total, including shotguns, semiautomatics and handguns, such as one of his favorites, a gold-looking Desert Eagle pistol. He also collects, just for show, miniguns and bazookas.

But there’s no better way to describe Howard’s eccentricity and connection to Texas than through his pet snakes at home. All 20 of them. I tell him at dinner, not expecting a serious response, “I’ve got to see them before I leave Houston.”

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Howard's love of the slithering reptiles is so great that he even has a professional come in and handle their feeding and cage cleaning, including the 17 babies one of his red-tailed boa constrictors recently birthed.

- Brendan Maloy