Snake Dreams

First of all, I'm definitely NOT a snake person. I don't hate them, but I'd prefer they not hang around my yard. Since I have an outdoor cat who loves to catch all kinds of critters during the summer, I frequently find myself running out to save a lizard or occasionally a snake. I do enjoy holding lizards but it's a real struggle for me to rescue a snake and relocate it with my bare hands. Unlike lizards, snakes have this disgusting tendency to wrap around you and you can feel those strong muscles. Yuck!

Most of the snakes around here are non-venomous, mainly garter snakes. I try to maintain a non-violent, kill-free yard. A few years back, my cat had cornered a rather thick and ugly snake against a rock wall. It had a pattern I wasn't familiar with, and quite a large head. I couldn't determine whether it was venomous or not. What I can tell you is that the snake was a loud and obnoxious hisser and spitter and it was pissing me off. I didn't have time to run get my snake book and try to find out what kind of snake it was. What I did have time to do was grab the shovel and chop it into several pieces out of total fear that it was going to strike me or my cat.

What I wish I hadn't done was to come in the house afterwards to look it up in my snake guide. As it turned out, the snake (I can't remember what kind) was COMPLETELY harmless and used all that hissing action as a defense mechanism. To this day I feel horribly guilty for killing it.

Last year, while txrad was away visiting his family, I saw the cat jumping into the air in the backyard and my brain said "snake!" I went out and saw a young snake, maybe 9-12 inches long and about the diameter of a pencil, with red, black and yellow bands. "OH shit," I said to myself. I grabbed the cat, put him in the house, and got my snake guide out because I couldn't remember the damn Homeland Security color-coded warning system. The last thing I wanted to do was kill another harmless snake.

Lo and behold, it was red on yellow, the dreaded Texas coral snake. I ran back out with the hoe, not with the intent to kill it but to usher it out of the yard. The damn thing crawled under a rock instead so I flooded the area with the garden hose until the devil came out. He crawled under the gate to the driveway and was slithering towards the open garage door. When I tried to block him, he got downright hostile. It was flailing around on the ground with determination to enter the garage, so I brought down the "hoe of justice" upon his venomous head, then buried it. (The next morning I noticed something had dug it up, apparently to have a snack, but that's another story.)

I was freaking out because logic dictates: if there's a small coral snake here, there's probably more here, along with a big mama. I did in fact see another coral snake in the same location while walking out to get the morning paper a few months ago. But let me get to the point of this post because I'm digressing...

hat-tip to my mother who told me about this story on the phone.

Burmese python swallows electric blanket.



Surgery was required to save the 12-foot (3.5-meter) snake when it made a meal of a queen-size electric blanket, complete with electrical cord and control box, as seen in this July 19 photo. The blanket's wiring extended through about 8 feet (2.5 meters) of the the 60-pound (27-kilogram) reptile's digestive tract (inset).


I'm curious to know if they were able to continue using the electric blanket afterwards. And if that's not enough
slithering news for you, there's this woman in Germany who tried to mail a 5-foot albino python to someone she had sold the snake to over the internet, and something went amiss.

"Staff accepted the package and put it in the back of the office -- they had no idea what it was," said police spokesman Andreas Blum. "All of a sudden, they noticed that it started moving around and then saw a big snake wriggling out of it."

One of the postal workers in the western city of Mechernich, who was familiar with snakes, wrestled with it and locked it into another container, while her colleagues ran away.

"Wrestled with it" indeed. Bottom line, I am thankful the snakes in my yard are not quite of "wrestling" size. I am not going to wrestle with a snake. And frankly, I do not understand the appeal of snakes as pets. That's just me. To each his own.