Posted on 08/01/2007 6:45:24 AM PDT by Rb ver. 2.0
CHARLOTTE (AP) — A 15-month-old boy suffered minor injuries when he was attacked by a 4-foot ball python in a Mecklenburg County park here.
Christine Abdelmonem had taken her son, Adam, to get a better look at some ducks waddling nearby in Freedom Park on Monday. As she lowered the boy to the ground, she felt a tug and saw the snake wrapped around his leg.
She screamed for help and two maintenance workers rushed over. One hit the nonvenomous snake with a shovel before trapping it in a bucket, said Karla Thornhill of Mecklenburg Park and Recreation.
Adam was treated at Carolinas Medical Center for bite marks on his leg.
"When I pulled it off, he was fine," Abdelmonem said. "I wasn't."
John Calchera, a pet store owner in nearby Pineville, took in the constrictor snake. He thinks it may have been abandoned by a pet owner and that it won't survive being beaten.
"It's a totally harmless thing," he said. "Why attack a harmless thing?"
I’d whack it too.
lol “I’d hit it!”
I know, most people would. I have lots of experience handling snakes, though, and my first impressin would be to assess the situation, then act.
OODE- observe, orient, decide, act.
A snake was moving across my daughter’s boot and we just watched it go, waiting to see the back of it’s head clearly to see if it was a dark phase milk or a light phase copperhead (pretty rare anyway), it was a milk snake. There was a woman there with uis who was yelling KILL IT the whole time.
Different people see the world in different ways, especially when it comes to bees, spiders, and snakes.
Must....not...make...dirty joke...
Aw, to Hell with it. If I'd known they were that affectionate, I wouldn't have as many children as I do.
I was treated in the ER for a brown recluse bite on Sunday. Nurse said I was her first spider bite of the year. But she’d had three copperhead bites.
Red and yellow kill a fellow. or red on black kills Jack.
Ah well I ain't going near any red/yellow and red snakes just in case.
The article said this:
Adam was treated at Carolinas Medical Center for bite marks on his leg.I am very poor at rapid identification of snakes. If I saw a large snake latched onto a baby's leg, I would most certainly hit it with a shovel, chainsaw or wrecking ball and worry about how cute someone else finds the beast later.
Whoahhhhh....
Those things are deadly!
Ok — well — if I had the proper tool, I’d chop his head off in a heartbeat.
Just to show that I don’t irrationally hate snakes - here’s my snake story.
We have property out in the country on which we have a small home built. We go for weekends so we can ride dirt bikes, etc. Our dishwasher out there was on the blink, leaking all over the place so we had a repairman look at it while he was there to do some other work. He popped the kickplate off and then said “Oh my.” I, from across the room, said “Is it a mouse? Or a rat? I assumed something like that...” and he didn’t answer me. I looked over and he’s yanking on something pretty hard and comes out with the longest Black RAcer I have ever seen, drops it on the floor, and it starts heading for ME! (Ok - so here’s the part where I did the farmer’s wife running on the tiptoes thingy while standing on the couch! LOL) The guy grabs it by the tail and he’s heading outside and both hubby and I say “WAIT! Don’t just let it go, let’s put it in our pump house which is overrun by mice! He’ll have some good eating and we’ll get rid of our mice.” As of last fall, he was still living in there. We saw him heading across the lawn and back into the pump house at that time. He had somehow managed to get into our house and had crawled under the dishwasher because there was a mouse nest there. The funny thing was, the repairman, who seemed to know a lot about snakes, said that they are smart enough not to eat ALL the babies. They let some grow up and reproduce so that there will be more food. I thought that was really interesting. I AM really glad that guy got him out from under the dishwasher, because he was very likely stuck and would have eventually died (and REALLY stunk!)
The spider we call ‘daddy long legs’ in Texas is not poisonous.
heh, i love snakes. i take the kids out to the property in the country and i’ll pick up the racers and garter snakes and let the kids pet them.
i’m going shopping for one for a pet at lunch today. :)
Darn close. I've got one ugly lookin' foot right now.
Actually, Harvestmen (Daddy Long-Legs) are completely harmless. There is an urban legend that they have powerful poison but their teeth are not capable of penetrating our skin, etc. This is false.
Daddy-longlegs (Opiliones) - these arachnids make their living by eating decomposing vegetative and animal matter although are opportunist predators if they can get away with it. They do not have venom glands, fangs or any other mechanism for chemically subduing their food. Therefore, they do not have poison and, by the powers of logic, cannot be poisonous from venom. Some have defensive secretions that might be poisonous to small animals if ingested. So, for these daddy-long-legs, the tale is clearly false. Daddy-longlegs spiders (Pholcidae) - Here, the myth is incorrect at least in making claims that have no basis in known facts. There is no reference to any pholcid spider biting a human and causing any detrimental reaction. If these spiders were indeed deadly poisonous but couldn't bite humans, then the only way we would know that they are poisonous is by milking them and injecting the venom into humans. For a variety of reasons including Amnesty International and a humanitarian code of ethics, this research has never been done. Furthermore, there are no toxicological studies testing the lethality of pholcid venom on any mammalian system (this is usually done with mice). Therefore, no information is available on the likely toxic effects of their venom in humans, so the part of the myth about their being especially poisonous is just that: a myth. There is no scientific basis for the supposition that they are deadly poisonous and there is no reason to assume that it is true. What about their fangs being too short to penetrate human skin? Pholcids do indeed have short fangs, which in arachnological terms is called "uncate" because they have a secondary tooth which meets the fang like the way the two grabbing parts of a pair of tongs come together. Brown recluse spiders similarly have uncate fang structure and they obviously are able to bite humans. There may be a difference in the musculature that houses the fang such that recluses have stronger muscles for penetration because they are hunting spiders needing to subdue prey whereas pholcid spiders are able to wrap their prey and don't need as strong a musculature. So, again, the myth states as fact something about which there is no scientific basis.
Yikes. Those are nasty spiders.
After researching, I discovered that I was playing with fire since a copperhead can leap 5 times his adult length of 3 to 4 feet. My 6 foot shovel was worthless if he could strike me from 15 to 20 feet. The local animal control people said they are getting a lot of calls this year on copperheads.
I would have preferred someone else came to get the snake, but
he was inside my garage and blended with the foundation bricks where he was sleeping. I had to get rid of him because I didn’t feel very comfortable going to the garage!
Yeah — black racers and garters are what we mostly see, although one we did have to take out a nest of Copperheads at our lake. Our kids swim there all the time, and we just couldn’t take a chance. But our main problem is snapping turtles. Those things can be REALLY mean. Especially if you’ve got a mama protecting her nest.
Wasn’t me...
Generally speaking, Ball pythons are about as docile as they come. But any creature attacking a person needs a good whackin’.
No skinnydipping there!! LOL!
Not a chance! Especially for the boys! :-D
:shudder:
I’ll take my chances with the spiders.
What in bloody hell is a potentially dangerous African snake doing in an American park where kids play? This exotic pet stuff has gone around the bend. Was the "illegal alien" snake just attacking the kids native American snakes refuse to attack?
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