I’m no fan of rattlesnakes. OK, so maybe snakes in general aren’t my cup of tea. I wasn’t always afraid of snakes. I used to like to catch garter snakes and bull snakes and let them slither up my arms.
But not anymore. After some less than positive encounters with snakes over the years, the sight of a snake now causes me to climb the closest object. On various instances, that object has been a fence post, my pickup hood, and even my wife, on one occasion. She’s never let me live that one down, especially since the snake that caused me to lose my mind was already dead. In my defense, though, her sister threw the dead snake at me, and as it flew through the air, it looked very lifelike.
My desire to get over my aversion to snakes causes me to pay extra attention when I see stories about the legless creatures. One of those stories caught my eye as I was looking for things to write about this week. A video on the Outdoor Hub featured a guy showing the “correct way” to kill a rattlesnake.
I know several ways to kill a rattlesnake. Shooting, shoveling, hacking with a hoe, or running them over with a pickup all tend to work. But this guy was correct when he said if you kill a snake any of those ways, the creepy little suckers can still bite you. That might be one of the reasons I don’t like them.
So he showed how to do it so you don’t get struck by a dead snake. He stepped on the snake’s head, grabbed it by the tail, then snapped it like a towel. The snapping motion broke the snake’s neck, and there was no post-mortem wiggling.
It was interesting, but I believe I’ll stick to blasting them with a shotgun. Or just staying far, far away from them.
