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PORT ARTHUR NEWS (Texas) 30 April 06 Rat snake provides late night adventure (Chester Moore, Jr)
The phone rarely rings out my house past 11 p.m.
If it does, its usually one of my hunting or fishing buddies verifying what time we’re heading afield the next morning or the case of an emergency of some sort.
I crashed out early for me last Monday and I heard the phone ring but knew my wife Lisa, who was still up, would get it.
She same running into the bedroom and said, “There’s a snake on the neighborís car.”
I didn’t quite know if I was somewhere between dream and reality at this point, but when you say ‘snake’ it always gets my attention. That prompted me to slip on some jeans and run over to their house.
When I got there, a five-foot long rat snake was climbing down the window of their car under the hood.
I could see my neighbors were not happy about the situation so I volunteered to remove it.
When we opened the hood, the big snake was wrapped around part of the engine and struck at my hand.
Now, rat snakes are not venomous but they do have a nasty disposition and I have been bitten handling them in the past. It’s not a fun experience.
At that moment, I felt like taking a machete and playing reptile executioner, but I decided to catch it alive.
My neighbors were pushing for the machete angle.
The snake started moving down toward the bottom of the engine and I grabbed its tail. It turned around and struck at me a couple of times as it wedge itself against the engine.
I am not sure if you have ever played tug-of-war with a constrictor, but it’s not very fun. These things are designed to use their muscles to crush and kill small mammals so it is not cakewalk.
This snake seemed to have figured out that if it were to wrap its head around some of the stuff below the motor it would be difficult to pull out.
Now, I was thinking of the machete thing again.
Just as I started to utter, ‘Hand me the machete,’ the snake broke loose.
I was able to pull it from the bottom of the engine and out onto the carport. My neighbors were really pushing for the machete angle now and it probably seemed like I was about to behead this ugly, stinking (rat snakes smell horrible) thing but I simply used the machete to hold down its head so I could get my hand around it without receiving a bite.
After posing for a photo, I grabbed one of the neighborís coffee cans and headed back to my house with the snake in tow.
I popped open the door while Lisa was watching television with the snake in my hands and she calmly said, “Gee, that’s a big one.”
It is not that she likes snakes because she doesn’t but I have brought all kinds of creatures (alive and dead) into our home over the years. There was the time I brought a live feral hog piglet I had caught into the house to show her and a few years back my cousin and I hung up a six-foot shark on the front porch to clean.
You can see where a rat snake is not that big of a deal around the Moore household.
“What are you going to do with it?,” Lisa asked.
I had considered letting it go in the nearby woods but rat snakes like to raid wood duck nests so I scratched that option since there are some woodies nesting nearby. I then thought it might be cool to bring it up to my band’s rehearsal room and leave it in that coffee can. Surely, one of them would open the can but that seemed a bit mean.
After considering my many options, I decided to bring it down to a local farmer. Farmers always have rat problems in their barns and if there is one thing rat snakes are good at it’s....well, you can figure that out.
Rat snake provides late night adventure

Many many parts that irritated me but all in all it was an ok story. Glad it had a happy ending.
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0.1 Snow Corn "Hope"
1.0 Ball Python "Wilson" (Castaway)
1. Orange Albino Black Ratsnake "Chunk" (Goonies)
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0.0.1 Mexican Black Kingsnake "Onyx"
0.0.1 Black Ratsnake "Molly" (Flogging Molly)

As we say in Missouri, "I ain't goin back to Missouri!"

To the author's credit: Most of the "mean" things that he said about the snake are pretty much true for a wild texas ratsnake. Much of their terrible reputation for nastiness is justified when a large wild one is encountered (my leucy stopped biting me long ago!). And as far as them "stinking"...When a wild one is pissed off you BET it does! The fact that the guy went to the trouble to remove it without "using the machete" is to his credit, and he did give it a good plug in terms of being farmer-friendly. But you're right...All's well that ends well. Duffy