Editor's views 18-12-07

We had some excitement last night. Your editor was sitting down on the couch watching television with his wife at about 10:30pm last night when he heard one of his cats at the back door.

If you are a cat owner, you will know the meow that cats make when they have caught something…this was the meow that our cat was doing. Without thinking to much, we opened up the door.

To our amazement, our cat Keddi, had a snake in her mouth caring it by the centre. On closer inspection, it wasn’t just any snake it was a Tiger Snake.

For those dear readers who live outside Australia (which is the majority) we will explain a few things about Snakes in great land of Oz.

It is not a question of if a snake is poisonous, it is how poisonous is it. Our friend Tom Gleeson, in his TV documentary, A River Somewhere, summed it up perfectly:
• A Tiapan Snake is deadly it takes about 1 hour to kill you
• A Brown snake is deadly, it takes about 1 ½ hours to kill you
• A Tiger snake is not to bad, it takes about 3 hours to kill you
• A Copperhead snake is also not to bad, it takes about 4 hours to kill you
• A black snake takes about 6 hours to kill you (practically harmless)

So with a Tiger Snake, if you don’t get to a doctor in about 3 hours to get anti venom, your not going to be feeling to well. Out of all the snakes in Australia, the Tiger Snake is the most aggressive. While most other snakes will slide away if approached, the Tiger Snake will stay and fight, they are known to lunge at people, and chase people.

Our cat had managed to catch one. Our next job was to make sure that she hadn’t been bitten. We rang the 24 hour vet, who told us to look over her, and if she had been bitten to bring her in as well as the snake.

To us, the snake looked dead. As we soon found out this was not the case, as we tried to get the Snake into a container, we realised that she wasn’t as dead as we first thought!!! The Snake started moving. Luckily your editor had protective gear that included flip flops (we call them thongs here), a tee shirt and shorts!!! At last we managed to get the snake in the container.

We then had a delimma. Let the snake suffer (it has been hurt by the cat), or put it out of its misery. We thought about the microwave. We then thought about the freezer – neither option seemed humane.

We finally opted to call my father and one of his old friends, who came around and disposed of the snake with a few strikes of a shovel!!!

And the cat, we are glad to say that it somehow managed to not get bitten – it must have eight lives left!!!

In other views.

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Cheers

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