Subject:  Garden Grass Snakes

Garden Grass Snakes (also known as Garter Snakes.. Thamnophissirtalis)
can be dangerous .... Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why...

A couple in Stillwater, 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 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 his rear end. 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 man. 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 in 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, and the neighbor man, seeing her lying there
passed out, he 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 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.

Just then the little snake 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 that was on one side of the sofa. 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 out
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 and they called
the fire department, and the arriving fire truck had started raising its
ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore
out the overhead wires and 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 husband asked his wife if she thought they
should bring in their plants for the night.

That's when she shot him.