Quiltingboard Forums - Garden snake warning

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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & started carrying him out.

About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa & one of the EMTs saw it & dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg & 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 & began poking under the couch. Soon he decided it was gone & 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 & 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 & slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out & cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.

The noise woke the woman from her dead faint & 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 & got a small bottle of whiskey & began pouring it down the man's throat.

By now, the police had arrived.

Breathe here...

They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey & 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 & his sobbing wife.

Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa & one of the policemen drew his gun. He missed the snake & hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered & as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.

The other policeman tried to beat out the flames & fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out & raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it & smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile, neighbors saw the burning drapes & 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 & disconnected the telephones in a 10-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 & all was right with their world.

A while later they were watching TV & 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.