Two-ton snakes

What is it about snakes?

Is it that they are legless and armless, so much different from our well-appendaged selves? Is it because they slither so low and we walk so tall?

Or is it just that we fear some rattler or copperhead will sink its fangs into a leg and send us to the Great Beyond?

Prejudice, pure and simple. The snake is a wonderful creature that spends its days making our lives better by gobbling up rats, mice, shrews, voles, and other vermin.

Fear not our snakes. Fear, instead, a real killer: the shiny, glittering, ordinary, everyday automobile.

Over the past century, cars have killed scores of people in my own little town. Not one person has died of snakebite – or even snake-fright.