She got what she deserved.

[conuly]

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/23/us/texas-snake-fire

What sort of person would try to get rid of a snake by setting it on fire? If you have the time to douse it with gasoline first, you have time to call animal control or to shoo it out on your own, depending on how likely it is to be venomous.

Comments

[conuly]

I don't know on first glance which snakes are poisonous or not. If all animal control does is say "that sort of snake is harmless" it's still a useful call, I can then take that knowledge to remove the snake without panicking and causing harm to innocent animals.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Living in NYC, I daresay you've never needed to know which snakes are venomous at first glance. There are only four kinds of venomous snakes in the entire USA anyhow: coral snakes (Florida only), cottonmouths AKA water moccasins in the South, copperheads in Eastern deciduous forest, and assorted kinds of rattlesnake, all of which have rattles, plus the characteristic tawny sand-camouflage coloring. The coral snake has red and yellow rings: "Red and yellow kill a fellow; red and black, venom lack". Cottonmouths, copperheads and rattlesnakes are all pit vipers, so they've got the triangular heads.

So, now you know. If you're in Texas, it's even simpler: either the snake is a rattlesnake, or it's not. If it's not a rattlesnake, it's harmless. There are a bunch of Texas species commonly referred to as "black snakes", even though they're not all exactly black - they're black enough to tell them from rattlers, and that's all the identification necessary.

It may be that the woman knew very well that blacksnakes are harmless - that's pretty common knowledge in the Southwest - but hates all snakes on principle. Some people do. Some people hate cats too, but that is not accepted as an excuse for setting one on fire.

[conuly]

Apparently there IS some poisonous snake living this far north (natively, that is, not a zoo escape), but the last time somebody told me that I deleted the comment. Best not to think about such an awful thing.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

There's rattlesnakes in New England, yes, and possibly copperheads too, but don't hit the Delete button; they're not coming after you in the city. For that matter, they're not coming after you out in the forest either, or the pine barrens, even if you were to go camp there. Rattlesnakes are shy; they'll flee from the vibration of your footsteps before you ever see them most of the time. Even in serious snake country, like the California desert, snakes are a minor concern, because they avoid humans, and they only strike when they're disturbed.

Rattlesnakes are not actually all that venomous, and the chance of dying from a rattlesnake bite these days is pretty low. They're not like some of the Asian, African and Australian snakes, that kill a person dead with no saving throw in five minutes or less. So IF you took to hiking the National Forests there, and IF you were so very unlucky as to manage to get yourself snake-bit, it would hurt, and you'd have to go to the ER, but you wouldn't be screaming in agony like somebody struck by a sting-ray.

Some consolation for ya: in all my years of rambling in the Wild, I've only ever seen two rattlesnakes in my life: one in Monterey, California when I was 5 (and I'm not positive it was a rattlesnake, because I ran like a rabbit) and one in the Badlands of South Dakota, where it was laying on the warm road after sunset. I never saw ANY wild snake back East, not so much as a garter snake - and that was thirty, forty years ago, when there was more wild space still left. Sure, there are some rattlers in New York State, but I think you'd have to search pretty hard to turn one up, because 'some' is not the same as 'a lot'.

[conuly]

I frequently see garter snakes in our yard, and this part of the island is the most built up (heck, all of the island is pretty built up nowadays). But I sometimes suspect wildlife is slowly returning to us. We've had coyotes in the city, if rarely, and now we have beavers again, and of course there are the falcons, but they hardly count.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Suburban New Jersey in the late '60's to '70's was the Land of Pesticides: nobody had mice in their houses, rats in their compost, moles or gophers in their lawns, slugs in their gardens. What's a poor snake to eat? There were plenty of giant flying insects - it's no surprise Mothman hails from Jersey - but not that much protein on the ground, it seemed.

Coyotes in Brooklyn, that would be ever so cool if not for the fact that they're probably mostly hunting cats. I remember when the falcons were first introduced, not long before my last trip to NYC - I didn't see them, of course, but they'd been in the news.

Beavers, really? I wouldn't have thought there was much of any place for them there; is it protected wetland where they are, or just unbuildable? Beavers create wetland; my friends on the Union River here had to go way back in the marsh and dynamite several old abandoned beaver dams in order to drain their back pasture before it turned into wetland as well.

LOL, if you gots beaver, maybe you'll get cougar too.

[conuly]

There aren't many beavers, I think all confirmed sightings are in the north Bronx, so maybe it's both unprotected and unbuilt. The coyotes didn't stay, they wandered in and then mostly wandered back out. One kept on going south and had to be chased out, as I recall.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

I'm British, have been to the US a small handful of times, in total 9 weeks across 5 trips and plenty of that spent in built up areas, the North East etc. But even in my small sample, I managed to see a rattlesnake (jn Utah).

Given that I have a horrendous phobia of snakes, and I had to walk within a few feet of it, this was not a fun experience. I hope that if I return I can maintain a time:ophidian ratio similar to yours.

(Dunno what the other snake we saw was, and didn't really care - just know that my dad was about to step on it so Mum had no choice but to alert our attention to it. I freaked.)

We only have one venomous snake in this country, the adder, and they're not common. But apparently I even managed to run into one of those in my childhood - I have no memory of this, thankfully.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Ah, bad luck - yeah, Utah has more rattlesnakes than most states, and the terrain is such that one is more likely to see them. I've only ever crossed the desert states by car, except that one night in the Badlands. I've seen lots of non-venomous snakes - we have quite an assortment of pretty, stripy little garter snakes around here, so my daughter grew up playing with them. There are rattlers in eastern Washington, but none West of the Cascade Range, so any snake one sees here is non-venomous.

When I first moved out here 25 years ago, I had a horrendous fear of spiders, but there are so many gigantic ones here that I kinda used up all my adrenaline coupons. When there are two or three huge spiders in the house every day, one just can't keep on freaking out about them - none of them are deadly, most aren't aggressive, they're just really big, really fast, and like to inhabit little old country houses, especially in Fall.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Best not to think about such an awful thing.

Clash of Worldviews. Wow.

If I am living in an area with poisonous snakes, I want to know what it looks like, where I'm most like to encounter it and how long I have to get to the hospital. I then tuck the knowlege in the back of my mind and go about my business.

(We don't.)

[conuly]

If there were any real chance of me bumping into a poisonous snake in the backyard, I probably would too, but I don't think I've ever heard of that happening to anybody, ever, around here. I suspect they're more in rural areas. So I'd rather continue on imagining they're not there at all. I don't like the very idea of venomous animals! I do know what the various poisonous spiders look like, but I've only once seen any of those. (Oddly, it was a black widow, which aren't common here.) edit: upon googling, last summer we had an awful lot of those, which is when I saw it. I shoved on gloves, brushed it into a coffee can, and ditched it away from the house.