I Have Snake Trouble
I hate snakes with a tremendous passion. And by hate I mean I despise their very existence. They seem to serve no purpose, other than the death and destruction of mankind. Oh and they make for a nice pair of boots, with a matching belt. How some people can feel comfortable keeping a snake as a pet is beyond my level of understanding.
I can still remember the first snake trouble when I came face-to-face with a snake, as a young boy spending another summer at my Grandfather’s home. My Grandfather lived in the type of small country town where encounters with snakes are a practically an everyday occurrence. But for a city kid like myself, I was not prepared to get up close and personal with an armless, legless, slimy (I was a kid. I thought snakes oozed slime. Sue me.), cold-blooded and demonic reptile sent by Satan himself, with eyes frozen in a never-ending look of murderous intent. And I definitely wasn’t prepared to see one of those things slithering towards me at a speed that I would never have imagined that a snake could reach. Needless to say, as I ran back to my Grandfather’s house, crying and screaming, with soiled underwear and all, I vowed that I would do everything within my power to rid the world of snakes.
Of course as a got older I found that my snake trouble was nothing compared to what some others have gone through. Maybe your day has been interrupted by the sight of some non-lethal garter snake sliding its way across your yard. Well imagine laying in your bed at night and having to hear thousands of snakes slithering through your walls, in your roof, and across your yard, so many that the grass seems to move. Well that’s exactly what happened to a couple in Idaho recently when they discovered snake problems in the dream home they just purchased – it was infested with garter snakes!
Their life became what seemed like a horror movie as Ben Sessions, his pregnant wife, Amber, and their two little boys collected dozens of snakes in buckets, swept the house each morning in order to ensure that no snakes were inside, and often had to go out to eat because their drinking water had become infested with a foul-smelling musk that snakes release as a warning to predators. Yuck!
The couple eventually had to file bankruptcy and foreclose on the home all on account of their snake trouble, because they had signed a waiver noting the snake infestation when they purchased the home. “It felt like we were living in Satan’s lair. That’s the only way to really explain it,” said Amber Sessions.
The Sessions’ had to deal with snakes of the non-lethal variety, but what about the kind of snake trouble that can result in death?
Over 125,000 people die annually as a result of snakebites. Areas of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa have the highest number of snakebite incidents. Snake bite kits or snake repellent aren’t too available there. The country of India typically has highest numbers of poisoning at just over 80,000, resulting in over 11,000 deaths. You want to talk about snake trouble? In the United States the most common snake is the non-lethal garter snake. In India, however, the “big four” snakes are all venomous: The Indian cobra, Russell’s viper, Saw-scaled viper and the common krait, which is the most dangerous of the four.
Besides being bitten by a snake, imagine dealing with snake trouble big enough to actually eat you. Some feel that the man-eating snake is a myth, but there have been numerous anecdotes about discoveries of extremely large snakes