Garden snakes can be dangerous
I didn't think twice about this tiny
fellow on my baby boxwood until I got this letter:
GARDEN SNAKES CAN BE DANGEROUS...
Snakes also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis) can be
dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why.
A couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants. During a
recent cold 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. When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw
it go under the sofa.
Terrified, 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 had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told
him to lie still and called an ambulance.
The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him
on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.
About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and one of the
Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the
stretcher. That's when the husband 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 who 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, the snake
rushed back under the sofa.
The neighbor man, 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
the snake had bitten him. 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.
Breathe here...
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 garden snake!
The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his
sobbing wife.
Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and 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, 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 out and raced into the
street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the
parked police car.
Meanwhile, neighbors saw the burning drapes and called in the fire
department. The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they
were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead
wires, put out the power, 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.
And that's when he shot her.
P.S. It's been a long time since I laughed that hard at an email!
