Snakes As Pets (Part 2): Common Snake-Owning Mishaps

The information is very nice.

But.... why trouble those creatures. Let them in their natural abode.

well, that's where the trouble is with domesticated animals.

animals that have been raised in captivity may still retain some of their natural instincts, but many are too familiar with humans and are accustomed to situations that wild snakes wouldn't normally face in the wild.

my snakes, for example, trust and rely on me. I provide their food, water and shelter. because of this, they don't mind when I hand them over to a new human for a little while.

and it's for that reason why they would have a hard time surviving in their natural abode.

if someone were to give me a snake they had just caught, I would say "put it back where you found it" - and I have. it's a different story for animals that have never been wild.

also, given proper housing and respect, I don't believe the snakes would ever feel troubled. snakes get curious sometimes and will wander if they aren't looked after. sometimes they get spooked. it happens to all animals.

A long story about the danger from snakes...for some comic relief

Always carry a large flagon of whisky in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake." -W.C.Fields
Garden Grass Snakes, also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis), can be dangerous.
Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why.
A couple in Morro Bay, California, had a lot of potted plants. During a recent chilly spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.
It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants and when it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa.
She let out a very loud scream.
The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa.
He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.
His wife thought he had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still, and called an ambulance.
The attendants rushed in, wouldn't listen to his protests, and loaded him on the stretcher and started carrying him out.
About that time the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher.
That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.
The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor.
He volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief.
But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, and the snake rushed back under the sofa.
The neighbor, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.
The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.
The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that he had been bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat.
By now the police had arrived.
They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little green snake.
The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.
The little snake again crawled out from under the sofa. One of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it.
He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over and the lamp on it shattered, and as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.
The other policeman tried to beat out the flames and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped up and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.
Meanwhile, the burning drapes were seen by the neighbors who called the fire department.
The firemen had started raising the fire truck ladder when they were halfway down the street.
The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the electricity, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out).
Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car, and all was right with their world.
A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in their plants for the night.
That's when he shot her.

This is a really nice collection of tips. It sounds like snakes are like any other animal in that they sense fear and pick up on that emotion.

I found the ways to make a snake release from a bite really interesting! They do make sense though, since they sort of shock the snake's system.

I don't know if they sense fear or not, but when I was a news delivery boy, I learned to very loudly confront and run against attacking dogs (all of me trembling in fear), and they ran away, always !.

Yahlasit

There is nothing about snakes which matches any human relationship. Owners of snakes create a value or connection which could be just as easily be directed at anything alive or not. Snakes take a different discipline of management to be safe for the snake and the "owner", but so do tattoo's, motorcycles, cars, boats, horses, dogs, cats, wives and, children.

Do whatever you choose but at least do it well and take the advice of people like this blog writer if you intend to start out by befriending a snake.