Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for August 04, 2016

If you are close enough to a snake to kill it, you’re close enough to get bitten. Snakes are an important part of the ecosystem that eat the vermin like rats and mice that cause us great trouble.

Better to leave the snake alone. It’ll move along, and nobody has to get hurt. Including the snake.

Secondly, most of the time people claim a snake is a copperhead or a cottonmouth, and they are entirely wrong, so they’re killing a snake for no good reason. Please, don’t kill snakes. They’re good for the environment. Just let them be, and they won’t bother you.

Why are there no snakes on Colorado pot farms?.No one likes a snake in the grass.

Snake stew tonight!

Oh, c’mon! She gonna tweet about it before heading back to school.Dad kills snake in garden! #copperheadless

I’m sure everyone on the farm can tell a copperhead from a non-poisonous snake. And if they just let it alone someone might wind up stepping on it or putting a hand too near it later. I prefer a 22 loaded with shotshells to a hoe.

I don’t care how beneficial snakes are. The only good snake is a dead, expired, headless, chopped in pieces snake.Oh – and it shouldn’t be breathing either.

Most of the people I know are afraid of snakes and want to kill them no matter what kind they are, poisonous or non. It seems to be something deeply engrained in the human psyche, or more likely, we are taught very early by our mothers or grandmothers to fear them. One has to learn to not fear them and to respect them and their purpose in the ecosystem. As much as I respect them and appreciate them, I still jump back in fear when I see a snake, even if it is a little ringneck.

Lived in NC for nearly 40 years and saw some really big snakes….some poisonous. Only good snake is a dead snake and I have a snake security system in place. Shoot…Shovel..Shut Up! (I don’t even like talking about them.)

Just killed a 2 foot rattlesnake this morning. No remorse.

Whenever anyone tells me that snakes are “important” to the ecosystem and we should just leave the poisonous one alone — the one that was at the front door — my first temptation is to want to bag it up and drop it off in the nice residential city neighborhood of the person who said that.

I live in the country — the same place where city dwellers go to drop off the dogs and cats they don’t want, thinking some “hillbilly” out here will just add it to the collection.

The last rattlesnake I killed was one that had somehow gotten into my house. My wife and I were bare-footed, and there was no way to go get a hoe or anything, and it was between us and the exit doors of the house. The only weapon I could find was my wife’s sandal, which I used to beat it to death.

Now, in the night, anything I step on feels like a snake. I don’t know if I will ever get over that one.

Human’s ingrained fear of snakes could have roots in the Garden of Eden.

If you’re afraid of snakes, move to an apartment in the city.

My garden’s full of slow worms … which aren’t actually snakes. (Nor worms!)Never seen an adder yet.

Yes panel 3 traumatizes the poor kid. She’ll be thinking about that all day in school. Life can be gruesome. But on a farm you are up close and personal with nature. The good and the bad. Think of our ancestors. Not 100 years ago but 5000 years ago. Life would not be so pretty. Thankful for today.

Of course you don’t want it around your home, but you don’t have to kill it. Catch and release in an unpopulated area. Although you might want to practice your catching technique first on a garter snake or two.

I like snakes…often had one as a pet as a child. Most snakes will run from you if they can…but copperheads can be VERY aggressive.

If that was my hubby that saw a snake he’d be on a roof! Never seen a grown man jump so high….straight up in the air!

I’ll stop shooting them if Becca will replace the Koi they are eating…I go for the fish.

I hear a lot of people talk about how the snakes keep the rodent population down. I listened to a man tell us something about this, and he seemed to know what he was doing. He was standing in a pit full of rattlesnakes, holding one while he talked.

He said that people and their rat poison have caused a spike in the number of rattlesnakes. Rattlers give birth to live young, and rats and mice eat some of those baby rattlers.

Because of rat control, more of those little rattlers grow up to be big ones and have more baby rattlers.

He told us that there are more rattlesnakes now than there have ever been.

Grew up in and live in Florida. By age 7 I could correctly identify rattlesnakes (all 3 kinds), water moccasins and coral snakes. At best the bite of any, is very painful and at worst fatal. It is possible, especially with water moccasins, that the bite will be infected and you lose a limb. In short, I kill every one I can find, the risk is too great to let them live.

My son said to stand perfectly still if I saw a rattler, then back slowly away! What I would do is scream and run. I just can’t help it,

She’s a pretty smart little girl, and I’m sure they all know the kinds of snakes they might encounter in the field. If it was my child and there was a venomous snake there, I wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing.

Best to whack ’em if children might be around.

Rat LoversA snake can only strike one third of its length. It doesn’t have to coil to strike, but can reach over and chomp down if you pick it up. I have stepped on a rattlesnake without waking it (just my toe, not the full weight), and almost picked up a very pale water moccasin, thinking it a non-poisonous yellow-bellied water snake, before noticing the pits (heat-sensing organ of pit vipers to help them find rodents at night)..comicsssfanLots of people like wolves, especially more than disease-carrying rats. Wilhelm and Jacob were studying folklore, not ecology. Get over your “big bad wolf” fiction. We still have idiots around here bragging about killing a wolf when the last one was in 1938. The only canines we have are coyotes, feral dogs, or hybrids of the two. Coydogs are sometimes a problem, but feral hogs are much worse. Since people finally learned to stop killing hawks, cotton rats are a lot less a problem than two or three decades ago.

I grew up in Nebraska and we used to kill as many as 3 rattlesnakes a day. I never saw a dead snake I didn’t like.

We don’t have Copperheads. We also live in one of those “unpopulated areas”; parcels vary from 40 acres on up. I was bitten on the hand by a western diamondback rattlesnake and vouch for the pain. It could as easily been on my face. I didn’t kill the snake; I was too concerned about me. Later, my son, at 5 found a baby rattler inside a Tonka Truck. My granddaughters now they live on the property, so we are very attentive to all snakes as most aren’t seen until very close. and are mostly harmless varieties: King Snakes, Gopher Snakes, Garter Snakes, Ca. King, Racers and even Legless Lizards. Except for the rattlers, we let them all alone. Even the rattlers are ignored if they are far away from the most used areas. We have many lizard varieties and some similarly colored and big enough to throw a good scare when crawling around doing plumbing and electrical work under the house or working in the shop.

Bull snakes eat rattlesnakes. Bull snakes can be aggressive, but if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. Rattlesnakes want to see you about as much as you want to see them. The majority of human rattlesnake bites occur in men ages 18-24 on their hands and arms. Don’t mess with the snake!

I grew up on a farm next to a swamp and we had rattlesnakes all the time. The problem with rattlesnakes is that they blend into their environment so well that you don’t usually see them until you’re close enough for them to strike. When my family first moved to our farm my aunt came for a visit and didn’t realize that she’d parked her car right on top of a rattler until she started to step out of her car and my mom came running at her, yelling for her to get back in her car. The snake missed my aunt and my mom cut it in half with the hoe she’d been using in the garden, but that didn’t kill the snake and it started slithering toward my mom, suddenly Skipper, the family dog, came out of nowhere and grabbed the snake right behind it’s head and started whipping it around until every bone in it’s body was broken, he didn’t let go of the snake until he was sure the snake was good and dead. My mom was never a dog person, but she loved that dog.

Then there are the people who go out of their way to be stupid, the Pentecostal snake handlers of Appalachia.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling

Very irresponsible of you to promote the unfounded notion of killing ALL snakes, simply because they are snakes.

It is illegal in many states to kill snakes. And the overwhelming majority of the population could not identify a poisonous snake. Much less a little kid.

But, Arlo & Janis is a daily favorite of mine and will continue to be so. But, please, respect the environment.

I spent a fair part of my childhood on a farm, and my grandfather and my mum would sometimes find a garter snake, which they would catch and allow it to wrap itself around their hands. If I was very careful, and promised to be extremely gentle, they would allow me to hold the snake myself. “Take it behind the head, this way, and don’t squeeze too hard.”I was never taught to be afraid of snakes, but I did learn early on that if the snake was “like your finger” – that is there was no break between the body and the head – it was safe, but if it had a head that resembled an arrowhead, it was poisonous, and to be left strictly alone.

Its a comics, make believe…..move along.

Considering where they live, she wouldn’t have to be working o the farm to encounter a copperhead.

Meg should know,you never pick fruit on the copperhead row.

" One day too many snakes will die and when you are overrun by mice and rats it will be way too late.".Any snakes bad at hiding will be killed.Snakes good at hiding will be left.The idea that snakes will be wiped out is unlikely..I read that hogs tended to survive snake bites and liked to eat them. Rattlers effectively announced they were available to eat by rattling.The ones who don’t rattle are becoming more numerous.

Last fall and winter a wolf pack numbering8 to 10 wolves roamed the area where my cabin is,eating the odd dog that people tied up at night,and generally making folks nervous.I could hear them howling at night as I lay in bed.People were advised to carry a stick when they walked about. No big deal. It’s just nature people,just nature.

By “unpopulated area,” I meant an unpopulated area. Not your backyard, or your barn, or the vacant lot across the street.

The only good snake is a pair of cowboy boots.

One of the reasons I like Minnesota. Almost no poisonous snakes (a few rattlers can be found in the Mississippi bluff area in the extreme SE part of state), and almost no poisonous spiders (if you look hard enough, you might occasionally find a black widow, but they’re definitely not present in significant numbers).