Bear with me please while I share this…

Two weeks ago my wife and I were riding in our UTV about 300’ from our house heading over to our neighbor’s place. Boom! There is a 22” Prairie Rattlesnake crossing the 2-track path.

Any non-venomous / non-poisonous snake is welcome on our property…potentially deadly/fatal ones, nope. And of course, I neglected to have any self-defense tools on me at the time. We proceeded to the neighbor’s place.

Upon arrival at the neighbor’s place, the snake story was the first discussion…he was hungry, he is ex-army, he grabbed a tool, we headed back to the snake spot. Three minutes and a single .45 round later we were headed back to his place, snake corpse was placed in the kitchen, original reason for visit concluded, and we headed back home.

Back to present day…

It has been very hot here and we get our basic chores done early and in the house with AC by noon. The downside is simple…a bit of cabin fever after 3 – 4 days of that routine. My wife went outside last night at dusk to just stretch her legs and look over the garden…that is doing fantastic by the way. And now you know why the wording of this post…she stumbled across a Prairie Rattlesnake in the garden, this one about 15” in length.

She came back into the house and explained the situation, I grabbed a gun, she grabbed a tactical light, off to the garden with all due haste. About 20 minutes later, almost full-dark, we were back in the house, the snake was dead, head buried, the garden a safe place once again.

Later in the evening I started thinking about it and realized there was a perfect metaphor here. Do we have snakes in our ‘garden’…deadly snakes?

Ah, but you don’t have a garden! Well, a metaphor is a likeness of one thing applied in a story about something else…so the ‘garden’ in this case is our country…the USA.

Do we have snakes in our country that are just as lethal/deadly as a rattlesnake?

To get the proper perspective I went back in history to the later half of the 1700’s, Colonial America. The colonists did all the work, settled and cleared the land, planted crops, raised families, conducted trade, built towns and villages. And at every turn the British Empire sucked taxes and fees out of the life blood of Colonial America. Should a person resist the tyranny of the British they were mercilessly and brutally crushed.

As resentment and rebellion grew the oppression likewise grew and the British Empire became more oppressive, more tyrannical, more brutal, and more vicious against its own subjects.

Finally, the brave Colonial men and women had had enough and decided to run the snakes out of the garden…but the snakes were having none of it…and began to kill the Colonists in large numbers, burning farms, imprisoning citizens, confiscating property, and using the military as a police force to lock-down the colonies. But, the colonists were determined to drive the deadly snakes out of the garden…or kill them.

On July 4, 1776, a year after hostilities had begun, the colonists made it formal…they would have no more snakes in their garden. It would be 7 years before the last of the snakes were either dead or driven out. And now their garden, our garden, was safe…the United States was officially born.

I ask again…Do we have snakes in our garden today? Are they just as stealthy? Are they just as deadly as a rattlesnake? Are they just as willing to strike us and kill us…as they were in the 1770’s & 1780’s?

So how to rid our garden of snakes in this day and age?

_{Additional Info –}

• _{Yes, the garden was overgrown with both plants and weeds. I hadn’t done much to clean it up since my surgery 2 weeks ago.}
• _{Yes, the snake was looking for shade during the day, water, and whatever little critters he could find hiding in the plants and weeds.}
• _{Yes, a Prairie Rattlesnake in both venomous and potentially lethal and their strike potentially fatal.}
• _{No, we’ve never seen a Prairie Rattlesnake in our area before the one 2-weeks ago.}
• _{And FWIW…safety comes before any crap snake-hugging, snake-loving, liberal BS that we have to be one with our environment. A deadly threat is a deadly threat…and I won’t allow deadly threats on my property.} 

   

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