My wife phoned last week and shrieked into my ear: “There’s a snake in the bathroom! Get home and kill it!”
Whoa. Probably just a harmless garden snake or a blacksnake that was seeking a warm place now that the autumn chill us upon us. I have no beef with snakes. They might dispose of a few mice that live in our walls.
Nevertheless, I hustled home. My wife was downstairs in the living room, legs curled up on the sofa.
“I threw a shoebox in the bathroom so you can trap it,” she said.
Trap it, now. That would comply with Ward 3 council member Mary Cheh’s new Wildlife Protection Act of 2009. Cheh introduced her legislation last year, modified it and presented it for first reading this week. It defines “wildlife” as “any free-roaming wild animal.” It excludes rats and mice. Snakes are protected under the act.
My wife had stuffed a towel under the bathroom door, in hopes of keeping the snake from escaping to the bedroom. I looked under the vanities, behind the toilet, around the plants in the window greenhouse. No snake.
Cheh’s council colleagues seemed a bit skeptical of her legislation. It calls for “wildlife control operators” who would be trained and licensed to remove animals “in a humane manner,” which is spelled out in great detail.
“A wildlife control operator may perform wildlife control only of an animal that is causing actual damage to property or posing an immediate health or safety threat to persons or domestic animals,” it states.
This snake was posing an immediate threat to me, because my wife said she wouldn’t leave the chair until I had removed it.
I went on the hunt. Our two cats had cornered something under a bedroom bureau. Sure enough, there it was: a two-foot-long snake, which I thought was harmless, until I touched it with a stick, and it reared up and struck like a cobra.
I returned with a longer stick. The snake had retreated up the wall and wrapped itself around some electric cords. I knocked it down. It slithered toward me. “Get me a hammer!” I yelled. No reaction. So I grabbed the leg of a table that had fallen off and whacked the snake on the noggin. No reaction. I banged it again, and it slowed down. I picked it up with the stick, dropped it in the shoebox and took it out on the porch.
“Snake’s out of the house,” I said. My wife stretched her feet to the floor and thanked me.
But in the process I had violated so many of Cheh’s requirements. No wildlife operator, no license, not quite humane, “lethal control.”
Council members laughed at the bill’s language that called for “reasonable effort to preserve family units using humane eviction and/or displacement and reunion strategies.”
In this I complied. When I went out to check the box next morning, the snake was gone, perhaps reunited. No joke.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
