A thing you probably hope to never find underneath your home is one rattlesnake—much less a small army of them.
Nonetheless, this was evidently was the hell scenario that greeted a local snake catcher after he was called to a home near Abilene, Texas about a “few” snakes that turned out to be closer to 45, according to a roughly 18-minute video shared to Facebook on Sunday by the service Big Country Snake Removal.
According to the Facebook post, the removal service was called on March 13 after a man crawled under his home to check on his cable reception and noticed the snakes. It was then the service reportedly realised that a “few” was maybe not the most accurate representation of the considerably larger number of snakes it was dealing with.
Big Country Snake Removal’s owner Nathan Hawkins told USA Today that the largest snake he removed from under the home was well over 1.52m in length.
Hawkins also noted this number of snakes was “nothing” (what?!) and that he’s called to similar jobs “all the time.”
In fact, this lot was about half of what he claimed was his largest-ever snake removal job. Hawkins separately told the Washington Post he once removed nearly 90 snakes from another client’s home.
These snakes, identified by the Post as western diamondbacks, are venomous and prone to biting. But Hawkins appears largely undeterred by the dozens of large rattlers surrounding him in the video. He told the Post he traps and relocates the snakes he does catch on his jobs.
As for the more than 40 he claims to have snagged recently? Hawkins used it as a teachable moment.
“The interesting thing here was they only see a few each year, their yard was very well kept and their house was nice and clean,” he captioned the Facebook post.
“My point is, we run into this scenario often, and people don’t think it can happen to them. As I stated in the teaser video, rattlesnakes don’t care how nice your house is or what kind [of] car you drive—they care simply about survival.”
Good to know!