The Daily Dose of Deana: The Snake that Somebody Ran Over

On our way home from dance class this evening, I spotted a run-over snake in the road very close to our house. I stopped the car and backed it up so I could get a closer look. I just wanted to see if it was venomous or not; you know, so I would be aware to be on the lookout for more of them around, if it was venomous.

I couldn't tell very much about it at first glance, and I'm not all that very well-versed in snake identification. All I know for sure is that venomous snakes' eye pupils are slit-shaped (like cat's eyes), and that non-venomous snakes have round pupils. So I first tried looking at the snake's pupils, but I couldn't really tell very much about them.

So me and Lilly drove on up to the house and told Jamie about it, and we all walked back down the driveway together to investigate the snake carcass closer.

At first we assumed that it was a venomous copperhead. But I researched it on the internet a little while later and discovered that it turned out to be just a harmless corn snake.

Here's a picture of the entire mangled snake:

(I had moved it around with my foot a little to try to tell more about it).

Here's a picture of its head:

Here's a picture that I tried to take of its eye:

Here's a picture of the tip of its tail:

I had Jamie flip the snake over so we could see its belly, and much to my surprise, it was in a neat-looking checkerboard-type pattern:

We just so happened to have a crusty old yardstick on our porch, so I had taken it along with us so that we could use it to measure just how long the snake was. The snake turned out to be just a few inches longer than the yardstick when we stretched it out straight!:

(How do you like my stylish lunch-lady shoes & pants)? LOL (I included them for scale)

But most interesting (and kind of sad) to me was when I was taking one last very close look at the snake before Jamie pitched it off the side of the road, I noticed that its last meal was protruding from a hole in its side. A mouse:

It makes me so mad to hear people say "the only good snake is a dead snake". There are about 42 different types of snakes in our state, and only 6 of those are venomous.

I learned through my very brief internet research to try to figure out if the run-over snake was a venomous copperhead or not, that copperhead bites are actually fairly rare, and if someone does get bitten by one, they don't even treat it with anti-venom. Sure, the bite would hurt like *&^%$#@$$#%#$&$**, but it more than likely wouldn't kill anyone.

I was also surprised to learn that killing non-venomous snakes in our state is actually illegal.

I can't believe that people would actually prefer to have harmless snakes around as opposed to vermin. Snakes have their important place in the ecology of the environment just like everything else does. Just because they give people the creeps or freak them out is no reason to eradicate them. That's like choosing disease-carrying rodents over a harmless, beneficial mouse-eater that just happens to be in an odd, slinky shape. People think it's great when a cat kills a mouse; so isn't it even more great that snakes probably kill more mice and rats than cats do? A snake is just a long, legless, hairless cat that doesn't meow! LOL! Like, if you stripped most of the features off a cat's head and attached it to its own tail (and shaved it all)...then you've pretty much got yourself a snake! LOL!!!

Step 1 of Transformation: