Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/01/australian-man-returns-home-to.html
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Just another normal day in Australia, then?
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I’m guessing the 0.6 miles is a translation of the original ~1 km
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My mother had a rattlesnake removed from her yard and the guy said that they are required to take the snake no more than a mile from where it was found, as otherwise removing it so far from its territory is tantamount to killing it. My mother got on Google maps and confirmed that, as rural and rugged as their neighborhood is, there isn’t actually a location within a mile that isn’t someone else’s yard.
Now she just blasts them with her hose if they get into her garden (walled off by javalina-proof fence from the rest of their acre+ of desert). Apparently they really dislike that, and as a result, I think the resident diamondbacks have just learned to not hang out there.
Scorpions, on the other hand, seem to be completely untrainable. And they do drop from the ceiling fairly regularly, typically from the bathroom exhaust fan.
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If you can master the delicate art of scorpion training then you’ve got it made on the carnival sideshow circuit.
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…checks pictures…
Yup, one of them was definitely a carpet python. Ok, maybe a rug python.
The other though, well, the overwhelming evidence suggests it was a wood flooring python.
This concludes today’s snake identification training.
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I’m still shocked that snakes are so common in Australia there are whole businesses devoted just to catching and relocating snakes.
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“Brown’s Snake Removal Service: If it slithers, we come hither. Your 12th removal is free!”
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When the acid kicks in.
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I was immediately reminded of this infinitely sadder and stranger news item from a few years back.
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Not sure where you live, but it’s a regular city service here in Tucson.
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Why did it have to be snakes?!?!
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What would you prefer to come through your ceiling? Spiders? 
On a slightly different note: I’ve interviewed four separate snake catchers/snake handlers, all operating in different areas of Melbourne. They were all batshit crazy. On a scale of one to letting your 10 year old daughter be bitten by venomous snakes (which you claim you’ve somehow made not deadly) until she bleeds, they all started at about 8. The one who invited me to meet his snake collection - a single father of 4 or 5 who also encouraged his children to get involved with snake handling - was swiftly rebuffed.
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Mostly just channelling this vibe.
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“No no, you want New Zealand. It’s over that way.”
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As an Aussie I am shocked that you are shocked. I have a co-worker here who was originally from Canada. He said exactly the same thing to me despite knowing that Australia is well known around the world for being infested with things which creep, crawl and slither.
Also, this is from Brisbane, where issues like this are extremely common.
Here in Melbourne we only have about ten snake catchers in the metro area.
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It can’t be that normal if not even one of them was venomous.
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So when he broke up with his ex, he was the sane one who got all the kids…
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So how did you end up interviewing four different snake catchers? Were you doing a story on the trade?
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If he’d been faster thinking that could have been dinner for a couple weeks
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