[align=left]Garden Grass Snakes, also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis) can be dangerous.[/align] [align=left]Yes; that's what I said, Grass Snakes, not Rattlesnakes.....[/align]
[align=left]Here's Why.....[/align] [align=left]A couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants outside. During a recent cold snap, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.[/align] [align=left]It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the potted plants, and when it warmed up a bit it slithered out of the plant and the wife saw it go under the sofa.[/align] [align=left]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 screamed at him "there's a snake under the sofa"!!![/align] [align=left]He got down on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time, the family dog came in and cold-nosed him in the rear-end. Thinking the snake had bitten him, 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 the ambulance.[/align] [align=left]The Paramedics 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 one of the paramedic's saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he's still in the hospital, but the wife still had the problem of the snake still being in the house. She called on a neighbor man.[/align] [align=left]He volunteered to capture the snake, rolled-up a newspaper and began poking around under the sofa. Soon he deciced it was gone and told the woman, who then 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 and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa.[/align] [align=left]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 his head with a full bag of canned corn, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stiches.[/align] [align=left]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 that 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.[/align] By this time the police had arrived. They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occured. They were about to arrest them all, when the woman tried to explain how it all started over a little green snake. The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.
[align=left]The little snake again crawled out from under the sofa, and one of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of an end table. 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.[/align] [align=left]Meanwhile, the burning drapes were seen by the neighbors who called the fire department. The firemen had started raising the firetruck ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires and put out electricity and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area, but they did put the fire out.[/align] [align=left]Time passed; both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police got a new car, and all was right with their world.[/align] [align=left]A while later, they were watching TV when the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring their plants in for the night, that's when he shot her.[/align]
