Otus the head cat

Powerful lobby has it out for all you snake killers

Dear Otus,

To quote Indiana Jones, "I hate snakes, Jock! I hate 'em."

All this recent wet weather has caused snake hordes to come up out of the Craig D. Campbell Lake Conway Reservoir and the Panther Creek bottoms onto my front porch here on Barham Loop.

So I chopped a few (maybe a dozen or so) with my hoe and now my snake-loving neighbor is giving me all sorts of grief and wants me to call Ron & Rico's Rapid Reptile Removal to relocate them back in the swamp.

My neighbor reads your column, so please tell him it's OK to kill snakes on your porch.

-- Bubba Schlangen,

Conway

Dear Bubba,

It was wholly a pleasure to hear from you, but you're on your own with this one.

Don't get me wrong. I'm on your side, but if you take on the snake lobby, you've opened a real can of worms.

Those folks are better organized than the National Rifle Association and twice as trigger-happy. You write one little column (as I did in 1991) about how the only good snake is a dead snake, about how you should go out and "hoe 'em, hack 'em and bash 'em with rocks," and the snake people slither out from their dens, label you an incorrigible ophidiophobe and come after you tooth and fang.

In case you missed my brilliant opus of long ago, I vented my lifelong animus against the slithery critters and all hell broke loose. The hiss of the offended was plainly audible.

After the column came out, it didn't take long for the well-oiled Snake Anti-Defamation League (SADL) to marshal its forces along its serpentine underground communication network and retaliate with a phone-and-letter campaign. Most of the outrage seemed to emanate from a mysterious and covert snake survivalist outfit calling itself Herpetologists Anonymous, or HA.

At final count, there were 286 phone calls to the paper's switchboard and 537 letters of protest over my snake column.

As you might expect, the calls ranged from the short and sweet ("Die, you scum-sucking pathetic gutter slime.") to the morally outraged ("I'm disappointed and disgusted that such a piece of trash as your column would be printed in a so-called family newspaper.").

Other letters, completely overlooking that my personal opinion is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, threatened a class-action lawsuit and other heinous litigation for alleged defamation of character, slander, libel and assorted other manufactured misdeeds.

That sort of blanket legal action could be expensive for them, but I suspect snake advocacy groups and the various bar associations have some sort of professional reciprocal courtesy membership agreement.

One caller, I remember, was typical. This guy was a seething, disgruntled cauldron of hurt and outrage. He called the paper, pointed out the 47 errors (he claimed) my column contained, said I was perpetuating snake myths that caused people to do harm to the environmental balance, and demanded the paper look at things from the snake's point of view.

The thought made my skin crawl.

Our patient clerk allowed the caller to plead his case for 10 or 15 minutes and ended up suggesting he write a letter to the Voices page.

The caller, who wished to remain anonymous and identified himself only as a state employee who gives up vacation time to educate schoolchildren on the benefits of reptiles, decided to go up the Democrat-Gazette food chain and lodge a complaint with the assistant deputy managing editor for subscriber relations.

The caller demanded a full retraction. Page 1A would be just fine.

He was politely informed the paper doesn't retract anything in an opinion column written by a cat and clearly labeled "humorous fabrication."

Another fellow (apparently some sort of Grand Pooh-bah in the Scott chapter of HA) penned a typical letter. Of course, he misspelled my name as "Otis," indicating just how much attention he was paying.

He claimed to have once been some sort of state park interpreter (what language do parks speak?) and had a sneaky approach to getting me to write something nice about snakes.

He wrote, "I am neither disappointed nor disgusted with your article. I am not going to ask you not to kill snakes. I simply ask that you understand them first, then kill them if you are still so inclined."

Then he hit me with the legal whammy: "All native snakes, including venomous snakes, are protected by law and are illegal to kill 'unless they pose reasonable threat or endangerment to persons or property' on your private property."

So, Bubba, best to lure that 6-foot cottonmouth off the porch and into the kitchen before you whack it.

Until next time, Kalaka reminds you that rattlesnakes taste just like chicken.

Disclaimer

Fayetteville-born Otus the Head Cat's award-winning column of

Z humorous fabrication X

appears every Saturday. Email:

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