Do you sometimes dream of a very simple life?

Post Reply New Topic

Some place like Alderney might be interesting. They do have a school.

I dream of a life where I don't take orders from others. I am the master of my own narrative.

Snakes aren't so bad. And if you are really worried, get some peacocks.

As far as safety, some place like I live is far safer than any place that has high rise apartments. In my community, there are about 70 people spread out over about 50 square miles. Everyone knows everyone and everyone else and we all watch out for each other.

That said, around here you see more brown than green. It's rather dry.

Eh, snakes aren't a bother unless you blindly step on them or try to kill them with a shovel.

If you leave them be, they leave you be.

I live in the land of the most venomous too, but that's a misnomer, as they have to bite you to be that, and it's hard to get bitten by such (you have to go out of your way). You can always keep a shotgun handy too if you were really scared.

When I see a snake on a road, I stop and chase him off to try to save him from being run over. That includes rattlesnakes.

The only time I ever had trouble doing that was with a bullsnake. That bullsnake wasn't about to let me chase him off the road.

It took about 45 minutes to do it. What I ended up doing was to get a cardboard box out of the trunk, empty the contents, and then use the box as a shield so that it couldn't strike me. I was able to physically push that snake off the road.

I'm not sure what he did after I left. Probably just got back up on the road.

Rattlesnakes are easy. They act tough, but they are happy to get off the road to get away from you.

I'm so HAPPY to see that other people try to save the snakes!!Where I live there are lots of timber rattlers and copperheads and cottonmouths.I've never had a problem and I see them regularly.I respect them and enjoy getting a chance to observe their place in nature.Only an average of nine people a year die of snake bite,you are way more likely to die by drunk driver.Most people get bit trying to kill the snake,you'd accomplish more if you hit the drunk driver with the shovel.I saw a cool bumper-sticker that said " Give Snakes a Break".But if you get me started on reptiles I'll never shut up.They are my trains if you know what I mean.

Don't forget that snakes also eat mice. I'd much rather have the rattlesnakes that, as you correctly note, kills very few people a year so that they can eat mice and maybe save some people from hantavirus.

By the way, I fell on top of a rattlesnake once when I was a kid, but it didn't bite me. My father said that he couldn't tell which of us was in a bigger hurrier to get out of there, me or the rattlesnake.

I probably did save someone from being bit on their fingers by rattlesnakes once. I think it was a cousin from Houston, but it was 40 years ago and I'm not positive about that. We needed to load an empty stock tank out in a pasture (for cattle to drink from) onto a trailer so that we could move it to a different pasture. There was a fair sized prairie dog town in the pasture making it a prime location for rattlesnakes.

The other guy walked up to the first tank and started to bend over and pick it up from the bottom. I suggested that might not be such a good idea.

Instead, we both grabbed the top of the tank, dragged it our way about three feet and then from the top of the tank without putting our fingers underneath the tank, we picked it up high enough that we could see under it. Under the tank in the area where he was going to put his fingers there were three rattlesnakes near each other, the closest about three inches from where he would have stuck his fingers to pick it up.

So we dragged the tank another thirty feet or so, completely away from the rattlesnakes, picked it up again, and loaded it on the trailer.

There's no reason to kill them. Sure, they're potentially deadly (we get eastern brown snakes here around the house), but they're only potentially deadly if you step on them or try to kill them with a shovel. You generally have to be blind and deaf to step on one, or utterly carefree and not listening to the noises of the environment; humans have senses for a reason. Snakes will feel you approach and they'll move away, and said moving away is easy to hear--then you see them if they're close enough.

How'd people like it if something a hundred times their weight stood on them? They'd bite back just the same.

People who kill them for the sake of killing them are scum as far as I'm concerned.

I dont hate snakes but I used to enjoy throwing them to the chickens. for those of you that dont know chickens love to eat snakes. 4-5 birds would converge onto the snake and it would be gone in seconds

There are parts of my life that fit that description. I live 18 miles from the nearest "real" town, 6 miles down a formerly (kinda paved now) dirt road, in the woods with only 1 family for neighbors. We have a veggie garden and several pets and wildlife coming in the yard. It's really nice. Sometimes I'd like it to be even more simple -- just a rocking chair, a bookcase loaded with books and a bar of soap. But unfortunately, I'd be lost without satellite TV, internet and my cellphone.

And living in the country IS a lot of work. We have 6 acres, so there's lots of mowing to do, and tree trimming and raking and fence building, etc. And of course, if you wanna go natural with your food, there's the planting and watering and harvesting the veggies, watering and pruning and harvesting the fruit trees, then canning, freezing or drying your harvest, keeping animals and milking and getting eggs and feeding. In my head I'm a country girl; in reality I'm WAY too lazy for that kind of life. I'd be better off in the city. No bugs, not nearly the work, and everything within 5 miles of my house.

Thank you all so much for this bonus discussion, I've learned a lot from it! But do snakes attack cats?

Hubby and I are hoping to retire in the Carolina foothills -- we want to live as far out in the country as we can go, but still get good broadband. He wants the quiet, and I want the privacy to garden in my house coat if I so choose

if the cat corners the snake it will. I haven't seen a cat try to take on a snake though.

I think it's the other way around.

When you step outside and see a cat sitting still and staring intently at something in the grass/weeds, be careful because it might be a snake.

I have never sat and watched to see what the cat does with the snake, but someone else did just that -- a cat's encounter with a rattlesnake. He told me that every once in a while when the snake had let up on its guard, the cat would reach out and smack the snake in the face with its claws. He said that after a while, he went and looked and the cat had ripped into the snakes eyes with those swats and the snake was pretty much blind.

Like I said, I haven't seen this myself and can't verify this as being accurate. But I see no reason to disbelieve it, either.

Yes, that's what I thought, and they love to play with toy snakes. But my friend had her beloved dog bitten by a snake, and the dog died...

Cats will eat little snakes,I've never heard of a cat being bit but that does not mean it can't happen.I knew someone whose cat would bring snakes alive in the house to play with but it was always nonvenomous ones.