Weird news - Carrying a snake on a plane

How many of you would have seen the movie, 'Snakes on a plane' ? Well, it wasn't so good, but you can imagine the prospect of sitting in a completely closed tube, and suddenly a snake starts slithering around and you could be bitten at any minute. Sounds scary and weird right ? Well consider that it was just a mistake, that a passenger accidentally packed a snake into their bag, but it seems dangerous. In this case, the snake was non-venomous, but it could very well have been a deadly snake that managed to make its way into the bag. Equally dangerous was the fact that the plane was going to Hawaii, and snakes are very dangerous for Hawaii since snakes do not have any natural predators on the islands, and the snakes can cause havoc on the island. Fortunately, the snake was detected and caught (link to article):

A small snake managed to get a free trip to Hawaii - by hiding in a passenger's bag. According to the State of Hawaii Department of Agriculture, the juvenile snake was found in slithering out of a traveller's bag after he showed up at his rental in Maui on Monday night. The man had apparently not realised that he was carrying a stowaway, until the owner of the rental spotted the serpent. The snake had presumably slithered into his luggage in Florida. Snakes are illegal in Hawaii. As they have no natural predators on the archipelago, they pose a serious threat to the wildlife and environment

Weird news - Finding a snake in the toilet, and then finding many more

People get easily scared by snakes, especially when they appear in the relative safety of the urban environment; and it is right to get scared (but not panicked). There are many species of snakes that are venomous, and there are others that pack a bite that would need medical attention. Unless you are an expert, if you encounter a snake in a confined space (as opposed to say in a park where the snake has space to feel non-threatened and crawl away), it is best to call in an expert and get them to make the identification and remove the snake from that area.
Further increasing the need for calling in an expert is the following case whereby the expert searched for more snakes after one was detected and killed by the house-owners, and found 23 more snakes, and these were deadly venomous snakes, the Western diamondback rattlesnake. Now, these snakes may not have posed an imminent danger, but there is always the risk of some accident arising if the snake feels cornered or threatened in some way (link to article):

What do you do if you find a snake in your toilet? If you're Isac Mcfadden, you go get your mom. The young boy from Abilene, Texas, woke up Tuesday morning and headed to the bathroom. To his surprise, he found a rattlesnake slithering up his toilet bowl, KXVA reports. "I found this big clump, and I knew it was a snake," said Isac. He quickly called his mom, Cassie Mcfadden, who recruited one of Isac's older brothers to get a shovel to kill the snake. Cassie Mcfadden killed the snake while dad, Jason, called Big Country Snake Removal. When the technician arrived, he found 24 Western diamondback rattlesnakes -- 13 in the cellar, five adults and five babies underneath the house, and the one snake in the toilet, which had entered through a relief pipe.

Shopping - how about adopting a snake

With the conflict between man and animal getting more intense as man enters more and more into the habitat of wild animals, there is greater contact with wild animals and that can literally scare people, and it is right of people to get scared when they have such encounters, since wild animals can be unpredictable and can badly injure or kill you depending on the circumstances. For example, if you come across a 12 feet long snake while searching for a shopping basket, the snake could be venomous or non-venomous, could be aggressive or could be scared of people; most people are not expert enough to figure out. The right thing to do is to call experts such as happened in this case (link to article):

A cart attendant at a Walmart outlet in Texas received a huge scare when he found a large snake in a shopping cart. The employee was collecting shopping carts from the supermarket's return area when he saw the snake. His "loud scream" drew the attention of a cop standing on the opposite side of the parking lot, the Northeast Police Department said in a Facebook post. According to the post, the snake was identified as a nonvenomous rat snake. Found entangled between two shopping carts, it was removed with the help of a man whom the police identified as a "snake charmer" - John Heckaman.

Weird news - Python falls into a conference room

We consider modern buildings as concrete houses, well protected and environments of peaceful working conditions where outsiders cannot get in. At the same time, many of the parts of the structure are very porous - there are air conditioning ducts, water pipes and sewage pipes, repair ducts that are essentially hollow columns within the building where repair can get in and access many common utilities. In addition, the ceilings in most places are artificial ones, meant to facilitate overhead lighting and increase efficiency of the air conditioning. With all these points, it is a wonder that more incidents such as these do not happen more often (link to article):

Surveillance cameras captured the shocking moment a massive python crashed through the ceiling at a bank in southern China, landing on the floor during a staff meeting of nine employees. Frightening footage shows the 5-kilogram snake dropping between two employees before slithering away. The video shows frightened staff members fleeing in different directions. According to ABC News, the incident took place last Friday at the Xin Cheng branch of China's Industrial and Commercial Bank in Nanning city. According to the Shanghaiist, the bank staff called wildlife authorities, who managed to capture the snake and take it away. The python was handed over to the region's Wildlife Rescue Research and Epidemic Monitoring Centre. Bank staff speculates that the python came to the building via a bird and flower market located next door.

Weird news - Cut off snake head bites back

The way of animals can be very different from that of humans. One of my earliest experience of an interaction with lizards was when I stepped on the floor from the bed and when my feet touched the ground, there was a sensation of something soft and icky. It turned out that there was a lizard on the floor and my toe had stepped on the tail. The tail detached itself and started hopping on the floor for some time, which was something very weird to watch.
In this case, a person found a snake in their courtyard which was a venomous snake, a rattlesnake. The guy cut off the snake's head with a shovel, and the head became separate from the rest of the body. 10 minutes later, having figured that he had given the snake enough time, he went to dispose off the head, but when he tried to catch the head, the head bit him and injected venom in him for a period of 30 seconds, enough time to inject a large amount of venom. According to experts, in such a situation, when the snake is dying, it injects more venom than normal. The wife hurried him to hospital, and eventually he was injected with many vials of anti-venom saving his life although there are still many complications that he is suffering, along with the medical expenses not covered by insurance (link to article):

Jeremy Sutcliffe, a 40-year-old Texas native, found this out the hard way. He and his wife, Jennifer, were outside doing yard work on the morning of May 27 when Ms. Sutcliffe discovered a four-foot-long, dirt-colored rattlesnake in their garden. She screamed. Her husband abandoned his lawn mower and ran to her, grabbing a shovel and lopping off the creature’s head with a single swing. After about 10 minutes, her husband tried to dispose of the snake’s severed head, Ms. Sutcliffe, 43, said in an interview. When he reached down, the snake — a Western diamondback — sank its fangs into his hand and held on for about 30 seconds. “Finally he got the snake head pulled off,” said Ms. Sutcliffe, who is a nurse. “I called 9-1-1 and just started driving because I didn’t know where to go exactly, what hospital carries antivenom.”

This is not the first time that this has happened, such incidents have happened to other people in the past, although very infrequently.

Weird news: Saves the snake but wrong action almost kills him

Snakes scare a lot of people. Because of the fact that some species of snakes are very poisonous and can kill people if threatened, snakes scare people. Some species of snakes are not poisonous but can be dangerous otherwise. Large species of snakes such as pythons are very powerful, much more powerful than a single person, and can actually eat domestic animals, a goat in this case. When villagers in this remote part of India saw a large snake eating a goat, they took the right action and called a forest ranger, an expert. The expert caught the snake, but that is where the action went awry. Dealing with such a large snake means that after catching the snake, it should be quickly enclosed and taken away to be released in a forest kind of environment.
The snake is an unpredictable wild animal, and when it comes across a strange setting, it can be provoked or feel threatened and will try to defend itself. When the forest ranger kept the snake in his hand and posed for selfies with a large number of people nearby, the snake took its normal action and started to squeeze this large animal that was holding it, and if the ranger had not taken quick action and got help, he was in real danger and just managed to get off (link to article):

It may sound like a cool thing to do - a display of bravado to entertain the masses - but a selfie with a snake is always a bad idea, even if you are a trained professional, as a forest ranger in West Bengal learned on Sunday. Called in by villagers to capture a rock python killing and eating a goat, the ranger and his assistants rushed to the village in Jalpaiguri 600 km from Kolkata and collared the 30-foot snake. The normal procedure in such cases is the snake would be stuffed into a sack and carried away, to be released into the forest later. But such is the power of the selfie and such was a vanity of the forest officer, he grabbed the snake by its neck with his right hand and slung it with great flourish around his neck. And the flashbulbs popped. And selfie-takers went wild and the forest officer preened. But not for long.

Weird news - Texas deputy removes snake from bathroom

One hears these stories from time to time and even though one feels that these stories are now becoming common place, it still feels weird. For a large snake to come out from the most personal of places, the bathroom, it still feels like a massive violation. And when you see the size of this snake, it seems even more difficult to believe that the snake could have been hidden in the bathroom, most likely it make its way out of the sewage system.
The owner of the house reported the matter to the local sheriff's house, and sure enough when the deputy reported to the house, she must have dealt with these kind of matters before, because she showed a lot of expertise in manhandling the snake and getting it out of the bathroom and releasing it into a more normal environment.
One has to give credit, especially since the snake could have been poisonous, it was not but was a protected species that in fact kills other poisonous snakes (link to article):

By the time Scotten arrived at Vielock’s ranch, the snake had made its way out of the toilet and into the bathroom vanity, according to the Bee County Sheriff’s Office. As Vielock held a flashlight over her shoulder, the deputy got down on her knees and calmly wrangled the blue indigo out of there with her bare hands. “The snake was not harmed and was released back into the brush,” the Bee County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post. The deputy is pictured posing with Vielock’s son, and smiling as she holds onto the snake at both ends.

Weird news - Snake falls through ceiling and remains unseen for a couple of days

Seems a bit weird, that a large hole is there in the ceiling, which means some animal or something must have dropped through; and yet nobody detected a snake there for a few days. The hole had been detected, but it was assumed that this was because a possum had fallen through (and they have had possum problems before). It was only after the cleaner saw this large snake (and if you see the image, it is a pretty large snake); of course, the snake had eaten a large animal and hence was not likely to move much (snakes tend to become slower after they have eaten, they are slowly digesting what they have eaten). Hence, it became easy for them to evict the snake from its resting place (link to article):

On Tuesday, Chantal Vaughan walked into her gym and discovered a hole in the ceiling. The owner of Bokwa CQ gym in Rockhampton, Australia, she initially thought that a possum had probably fallen through the ceiling and didn't think much of it - the gym has a possum problem. Two days later, however, she received a terrifying text from her cleaner, informing her that a massive snake had been found inside the gym. The hole in the ceiling, it turns out, was made by a huge snake falling through it.

Weird news - Boy pulls out snake from car

Most people treat snakes with a lot of caution, given the fearful danger that poisonous snakes pose to the unsuspecting person who comes close to a snake and gets bitten. Even those snakes that are not poisonous can be dangerous in terms of causing a bite and being painful, and even the site of such snakes can scare people.
It is thus that makes people wonder at those people who can play around with snakes, such people can be very popular. It is even more incredible when somebody young is able to do this, such as in this case where a boy is shown pulling a snake out a vehicle before heading to school. The video of the Australian boy shows him under the car, pulling the snake out and was finally done (link to article):

Uploaded by Yogi McDougall from Queensland, Australia, the video shows the teen lying under a vehicle. You can clearly see him trying to pull the snake out from it. Another man can be seen holding the snake's tail. "I've got the head," he says as he tugs at the snake to get it out. He eventually succeeds at the job and puts the snake in a bag held up by an older man. The video makes for quite an interesting watch.

Weird news: Man killed by snake after he killed snake

Seems weird, I was totally shocked when I read this. It seems totally weird and impossible, but has been ratified by scientists that it is very much possible. It also means that chefs all over need to be very careful, or even anybody else who deals with poisonous snakes. What happened in this case ?
There was a report of a chef in China who died soon after removing the head of a poisonous snake. This was an Indochina spitting cobra, and the chef had cut its head off in order to prepare snake soup, with the head having been cut off around 20 minutes before. The chef could not be saved since emergency workers were not able to get to him before the effects of the snake venom (read article):

"The snake's venom apparatus and jaw muscles are all contained in the head -- as are the nerves that control these muscles and venomous glands," Lewin said. "Unlike humans, snake tissue can withstand long periods without circulating blood… The tissue doesn't lose function as quickly as a mammal and the reflexes remain intact" even after death. "It's a bit creepy to me because it blurs the meaning of being dead," he added. "People are susceptible to these reflexive bites probably because they are thinking of beheading from a human perspective."

Gives an entirely different meaning to the phrase about death being the end.

Weird news - Man bites and kills snakes in revenge after snake bit him

In areas that have forests or green land nearby and the temperature is more tropical, there are snakes to be found. And given the increased presence of humans in such areas (and especially with activities such as agriculture where there is a lot of disturbance of the ground), there is bound to be more interaction between humans and snake. And when these snakes are poisonous, when the snake feels threatened by some activity of the human, snake bites happen, which in turn can be dangerous. These cause a large number of people to die by snake bite in such regions, especially when these regions can be away from medical facilities that can provide the anti-venom.
But there are far fewer cases of humans attacking the snake after the snake has bit, such as in this case where the farmer who was bit by the snake (a non-poisonous one) got angry and got after the snake, biting it to death (which is not at all a common reaction after being bit by a snake) (link to article):

A Nepalese farmer who was bitten by a venomous snake took revenge by sinking his teeth into the reptile and killing it, police said on Thursday. Mohamed Salmo Miya was farming near his village 200 kilometres (125 miles) southeast of Kathmandu when he encountered the deadly common cobra, district police chief Uma Prasad Chatrubedi told AFP. "A farmer in Bardanga village has killed a white cobra with his teeth out of anger," he said. "The snake bit him while he was working in his paddy field on Tuesday evening and the man chased it and killed it."

Spending 100,000 Euros to find a missing snake, which was dead all this time

Once in a while you come across stories that could make your blood boil as a tax payer, to see municipal authorities spending huge sums of money for something that may not seem to require so much money. But read the following case and wonder about else could have been done, given the situation. A poisonous snake escaped from its owner, and other people in the area are in danger. The authorities need to find the snake, and this is not a lion or tiger that can be trapped easily. Snakes are far more difficult to find, slithering into hidden places and so on. So, you had the authorities literally blocking the entire neighborhood to find the snake, while running up huge expenses; in the end, they found the snake, which was dead (link to article):

After the highly poisonous monocled cobra escaped from its container in March, fire services cleared the entire apartment block, removed all the furniture and gutted the owner's flat. They then sealed all the doors and windows of the building, so the 30 cm (1 foot) long reptile couldn't get out, and set large sticky traps to catch it, Wiebels said.
Officials finally found the snake lying dead in the rooftop apartment of its 19-year-old owner on Thursday. By that time the cost of the operation had ballooned to about 100,000 euros ($133,700). Taxpayers are likely on the hook for 40,000 euros, because an escaped snake is considered public hazard, Wiebels said.

Pythom stalks family dog and eats it

Australia is famous for its dangerous animals, and this was proved in an example that you will read below. The python is a non-poisonous but dangerous snake that kills by squeezing its prey to death. In an attack hitting a family in Queensland state, a 16 foot scrub python stalked the pet dog of a family for days before attacking, killing and eating the pet dog in front of the horrified members of the family:

Stuart Douglas, owner of the Australian Venom Zoo in Kuranda, said scrub pythons typically eat wild animals such as wallabies, a smaller relative of the kangaroo, but sometimes turn to pets in urban areas. "It actively stalked the dog for a number of days," Douglas said.
"The family that owned the dog had actually seen it in the dog's bed, which was a sign it was out to get it," he added. The zoo manager, Todd Rose, said pythons squeeze their prey to death before swallowing it whole. The 5-year-old dog would have been suffocated within minutes.

Using a snake to scare police

A drunk driver, when threatened by police, used a snake to scare them. A young person, swerving across the road in Australia was spotted by police. They stopped him, did a breath analyzer test and concluded that he was indeed drunk.
At this point, he found that there was a snake slithering pass; and showing tremendous presence of mind, he picked up the snake and threatened the police. In the confusion, this guy managed to escape.
This is however not going to be the end, to his misfortune, he is known to the police, and they will pick him up somewhere else.