I’ve never had that experience, thankfully, but I see cottonmouths sunning themselves on branches regularly. It’s USUALLY fairly easy to tell the cottonmouths because they have big heads that are NOTICEABLY separate from their necks. Most harmless water snakes have small heads and no obvious neck.
Most water snakes aren’t particularly aggressive, and most never pay us any mind- they just go swimming on their merry way, and would generally rather avoid people entirely.
Oh, it’s a fun link for the whole family! 
I used to love snakes as a kid but as I aged and encountered some dangerous ones in the wild in harrowing fashion (thread here) my love for them has been tempered and is decidedly on the wane. No doubt they’re often beautiful and the evolutionary complexity of their venom and efficiency of their design is impressive. But dammit, I just don’t want to get bit and watch all my skin and muscle slough off.
Our ranch in SE Colorado is littered with prairie rattlers, otherwise known as those poisonous pissed off little sonsabitches. When we’re out there it pays to stay wary.
I’m in the YAY SNAKES!/BOO SPIDERS! camp…snakes have really never bothered me, but spiders I cannot abide.
My cat, Prowler, is also a fan of snakes, in that she likes to catch garter snakes and try to bring them in the house. I rescue a couple from her each summer - she doesn’t usually hurt them so I take them away from her and put them in the fenced garden.
I did have a big black snake startle the bejeebus out of me once. I was walking alongside a stone wall that was covered with a lot of dry ivy and vines, Mr Snakey was sunning on top of the wall. I guess my footsteps startled him and he moved, I probably jumped ten feet in the air. Started laughing my head off when I came down.
One year I found a baby garter snake in my dad’s basement. It being Xmas eve, we named him Baby Jesus! We kept him in a little terrarium, he survived for about 2 months but we didn’t have a varied enough diet for him in the dead of the CT winter. RIP, Baby Jesus.
I like all critters - fur, feathers, or scales are all fine.
Little pythons/boas are easily transported in a tote or backpack. I had to transport one of my big Burmese pythons to the vet’s via public transportation. It ain’t easy to disguise 14 feet and ~120 pounds of critter within an enclosed space with multiple, potentially snake-phobic humans.
A rolling duffel bag and responding to inquiries in part with “… lots of laundry…” went a long ways to prevent a mass exodus.
Good lord, that is the stuff of nightmares for me.
Now spiders on the other hand, I have no problem picking them up in my hands, and putting them outside.
Only poisonous ones .
Thanks to a friendly zoologist at the Brookfield Children’s Zoo when I was a kid, I’ve never been afraid of snakes, but I do respect them. I’ve had a few close encounters with rattlers while hiking in Montana and Wyoming (“Close” as in the snake was hissing and rattling.), but generally, when I was in rattler country, I kept an eye out.
I’ve known two people who’ve been bitten by rattlesnakes. The first was a colleague of mine in his fifties who had a brief brain lapse and did what he KNEW not to do: lifted a section of irrigation pipe without checking for snakes. He was in the ICU for weeks and said it was hellish because the venom had attacked his central nervous system.
The second case was the nephew of a friend of mine. Though his dad had checked the dirt mound and found it to be snake-free, when the little boy put his fingers in a hand-hold, he got bitten. They were almost 50 miles to the nearest hospital, which did not, it turned out, carry antivenin.
Yep-still terrified of them. Zombie snakes especially.
no, I am not afraid of snakes I owned two gopher snakes …my problem was with the mice … for some reason, one of my snakes wouldn’t eat brown mice, so after sir rodney declined the dinner I gave him I stupidly put back in the little cardboard box …intending to take it back and get a new one which it took not long at all to escape
Well the problem was the rodent she gave me was going to be a mouse mom and for the next 6 months id see mice around the house … I even let one of the snakes out to catch them and never saw it again …the neighbors did about a year later and he was huge
Another time is the mouse DIED as the hunting ritual was going on and I went to take the dead mouse out but apparently he was still warm enough for dinner as i got bit … wasn’t too bad more like a cat bite … it itched for a while tho
Funny thing tho the best mouser out of the snakes and cats I owned? my mom’s Scottish terrier …he went on a mission until he took them all out …
Not at all afraid of snakes. Both Mrs. Cretin and I grew up, hiked, and camped in rattlesnake country so we know how to be cautious in such areas. But I think snakes are cool, Mrs. C loves them.
My (irrational) phobia has always been spiders, which pisses me off because nearly all of them are harmless (to people) and even the ones that aren’t are easy enough to get along with.
I never have been afraid. I was nervous about the kids playing out of doors when they were young. We’ve tamed the yard better over the years. The wood pile is always a nervous spot for all manner of varmits.
But…last year we had a snake-pocolypse. Snakes were everywhere.
Mr.Wrekker killed everyone he could. The barn was full of them, venomous and otherwise. It was horrible. I’ve seen a few this year, already.
I hope we don’t have as many as last year. I have grandkids running around on the place everyday.
I remember the posts. A hell of a story.
In the UK - the one venomous snake we have is the adder. They are common, and the bite can kill, but deaths are very uncommon.
Kinda puts it into perspective. Not afraid, but respectful. I’m careful if I’m in adder country (quite a lot around these parts) and you do see them occasionally. If I still had a dog I would find it more concerning.
j
Can’t say I’m afraid of snakes, but I’m certainly no fan. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I was visiting my then-girlfriend, another PCV, in the Lower North of Thailand when I became trapped in her bathroom by a snake that had slithered into her house fleeing the roadwork outside. Not a cobra, but I managed to kill it anyway. It resembled the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen kills a large bug in Annie’s bathtub using a tennis racket.
I grew up in Alaska where there are no a) snakes, b) poisonous spiders c) poison oak, or d) poison ivy. A walk in the woods or flopping down on a grassy hillside didn’t come with those sorts of worries, and I’m still fairly blissfully unaware of those sorts of things lurking about (except for spiders). I’ve lived in the tropics, in equatorial and sub-Saharan Africa, traveled in deserts and jungles, and never really ran into those sorts of critters. On the rare occasion that I’ve crossed paths with a small garter-type snake, it always startled me. Not my favorite critter.
Not afraid at all. We have a Western Hognose. Her name is Bubbles. We love her dearly!
No, I think animal phobias are stupid at best, and when they lead to violence to the innocent, cruel and utterly inexcusable. I like snakes the way I like all wild animals – they are fascinating creatures. I am cautious around animals that might kill me if I do something stupid but snakes hardly ever fall into that category. When I was a kid I had a few pet snakes along with all the other animals I kept, but they are fairly boring to keep. Their main charm lay in how freaked out some people got when I wore my snakes in public. But that eventually wasn’t enough to mitigate how caged snakes spend almost all their time sleeping, and eat like twice a month.
that and having an audience on feeding day was interesting especially when the little kids would root for the mouse to get away …
Irrational or not, I prefer to view snakes from a distance. I would not kill anything that wasn’t threatening me, though.
I’d give Mr.Wrekker a pass on killing snakes, though. There are rattlesnakes, copperheads, water moccasins, and coral snakes in Arkansas. Bad, bad, bad to have around the grandkids.
Right - 1000-lb brown bears provide the worries in those latitudes.