War On Snakes

We've been having trouble with snakes eating our eggs, so tonight I wanted to keep an eye out for them and sure enough Alex and I went out to check on the chickens and I opened the door to the henhouse and there were 2 bull snakes about 5 foot long each! I had already brought the BB gun but didn't think that was going to do the trick so I asked Alex to go get my mom - after some deliberation - she went inside to get her gun, but came back empty handed because she had no bullets - are you serious, mom? So it was going to be the BB gun after all and to town I went.

The first shot was at a pretty good distance, about 4 feet or lesss - straight to the head. That got one of them riled up pretty good, the other one just laid there - probably wondering if he just had his last supper - he would have been wondering correctly. I continued to lay into the smaller one for a little while, firing about 4 more shots at him until he stopped moving. Then I moved onto the larger one. He had hidden his head (smart fella) and I had to give him a body shot to get him moving. He finally poked his head but only by moving the rest of his body to get into striking position.

I took several shots at him, but he was a tough cookie and wasn't going to go down easily or quietly. He continued his little hiss fest at me, trying to slither out of the henhouse, so I threw a cinder block on him to trap him. With him trapped and his head exposed, I had a chance to pop him in the head at point blank range a few more times. It was a little nerve-racking at first, pumping up the BB gun between every shot, now I know what it must have been like in the Civil War having to reload your gun between shots, that's a lot of time to get shot yourself or in my case, bitten.

I know this sounds bad, but I actually had fun killing them - not because I'm some kind of redneck psycho killer, it was just gratifying to get rid of them. Believe me, I've tried to get my mom to do more humane things to keep the snakes out but I was met with opposition at every suggestion and it wasn't like we had time to debate the issue with the snakes sitting in the henhouse feasting on our hen's eggs. So, the inevitable happened and they were killed on the spot.