Green Tree Snakes (Dendrolaphis punctulata) can be dangerous.
Yes, tree snakes or grass snakes, not brown snakes or taipans. Here’s why.
A couple in Townsville,Australia had a lot of potted plants.
During a recent cold winter (for Townsville that is!), the wife was bringing some
of the valued tender ones indoors to protect them from the cold night.
It turned out that a little green tree snake was hidden in one of the plants.
When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa.
She let out a very loud scream.
The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see
what the problem was.
She told him there was a snake under the sofa.
He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it.
About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the bum.
He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.
His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to
lie still and called an ambulance.
The paramedics rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the
stretcher and started carrying him out.
About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the paramedic saw it
and dropped his end of the stretcher.
That’s when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.
The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a
neighbour who volunteered to capture the snake.
He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the sofa.
Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in
relief.
But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the
snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the
sofa.
The neighbour, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.
The neighbour’s wife, who had just returned from shopping at Woolies, saw her
husband’s mouth on the woman’s mouth and slammed her husband on the back of the
head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a
point where he needed stitches.
The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbour lying on
the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that the snake had
bitten him.
She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whisky and began pouring it
down the man’s throat.
By now, the police had arrived.
They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whisky and assumed that a drunken brawl
had occurred.
They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all
happened over a little garden snake!
The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbour and his sobbing
wife.
Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the
policemen drew his gun and fired at it.
He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table.
The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and, as the bulb broke, it set fire
to the curtains.
The other policeman tried to beat out the flames and fell through the window into
the yard on top of the family dog which, startled, jumped out and raced into the
street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked
police car.
Meanwhile, neighbours saw the burning curtains and called in the fire brigade.
The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the
street.
The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power and disconnected
the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the housefire
out).
Time passed! The snake was caught and both men were discharged from the hospital,
the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all
was right with their world.
A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced an impending
coldsnap for the night.
The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in the plants for the
night.
And that’s when he shot her.