AMERICAN-STATESMAN (Austin, Texas) 02 November 08 Whether a snake is harmful shouldn't be guessing game (Mike Leggett)

Two high school students — who had been told the reptile they were handling was a rat snake — were bitten by a water moccasin during a science class at Big Sandy High School.

Both appear to be recovering from their wounds, though they were still in the hospital this past week. Snakes have been declared off-limits in Big Sandy schools, and the furor has subsided to a few posts on blogs and Internet chat sites. Most of the Internet chatter has blasted the science teacher who incorrectly classified the snake, though one student logged in to take up for her.

My only question is: WHAT THE …?

It's not uncommon for nonvenomous snakes to be mistaken for poisonous ones in snake-aware Texas. Happens all the time.

Back in East Texas, for instance, we had the infamous ground rattler, which was any snake without rattles that was still called a rattlesnake and was ritually separated, head from body, by a hoe. We also had the dreaded spread-natter (spreading adder, aka hog-nosed snake) that would kill you and the horse you rode in on.

To be avoided as well were the milk snake, hoop snake and racer, which would chase you to exhaustion or charm you into submission. OK, they were all dangerous to East Texans, who couldn't get a .22 fast enough to suit the fear that snakes struck into their hearts.

I can't tell you how many poor old water snakes around Central Texas have been sent to the happy rat-hunting grounds by people who were convinced beyond all reason they were water moccasins. I once pulled up to a boat dock on Lake Travis where one man was plinking away with a rifle at "water moccasins" any time they showed their heads among the rocks on the rip-rap where he lived.

I tried to explain that they were water snakes and that moccasins usually lived in low, slow backwater kinds of lakes, but he was undeterred. Most people are.

And some of my neighbors — hiding in their car for fear of being attacked — once warned me away from a head-high live oak one afternoon as I walked. "There's a rattlesnake in that tree," they yelled out the window. I walked up to the tree and saw not a rattler but a big, old Texas rat snake, spread out in the upper branches as he tried to suck up some mockingbird eggs from a nest.

I would have pulled it out to show them, but a rat snake comes armed with some of the worst-smelling musk you'll ever encounter. Pick one up and you'll find that just a smudge of that musk is enough to get you asked to leave your favorite restaurant.

That's why the incident in Big Sandy was unusual. The students , who didn't know they had been bitten by a cottonmouth, were done in by a reverse misidentification. Instead of chopping the head off an innocent snake without fangs, they were bitten by one that they thought wasn't poisonous. And I wonder how they could have been bitten multiple times on the hands without figuring out something about this snake wasn't right.

What does it all mean? Not much, except that the statistics on snake bites will reflect the most common situation in Texas: that bites occur when a poisonous snake is being handled in some way, though it's usually by a guy in his early 20s who utters those famous last words: "Wonder what would happen - hold my beer."
Whether a snake is harmful shouldn't be guessing game

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• TX Press: Guess if snake is harmful? - W von Papineäu, Sun Nov 9 23:19:02 2008
• RE: TX Press: Guess if snake is harmful? - viper9, Thu Nov 13 16:23:20 2008