mfesharne

Working in my garden over the last few days has shown me it's the time of year for the snakes to get active.

I personally HATE killing snakes and take the view that they were here before us and it's their natural habitat rather than ours and therefore we should try not to give them them too much hassle.

All that said, we have two cats and are soon to get two puppies so it's probably a good idea for us at least to try to find a non lethal solution to the issue.

With that in mind, I went onto ebay today and have bought myself a set of 40 inch snake tongs. Tomorrow, I'll get myself to the Chinese shop to look for a nice deep plastic bucket with a firm fitting lid and will then be able to catch the snakes around the house and release them elsewhere.

The tongs only cost UKP25 plus postage so I reckon that's money well spent if it means I can keep our animals safe and not have to kill the snakes.

As far as I can tell with a bit of internet searching, there is only one species in Portugal that can cause any serious problems and that's the Iberian vipers of which there appears to be 3 sub species.

I should say I have no interest in this site but it may be useful to some forum members so if you want to know more about the vipers check here: http://www.viborasdelapeninsulaiberi...index-eng.html

One thing I have noticed is that a lot of the snakes in my area at least all look very similar. I think most are horseshoe whip snakes which are non venomous but my advice would be NOT to pick up any snake with your hands just in case your identification skills are as bad as mine are!

liveaboard

I've accidentally killed a couple of snakes during my time here; one was in an old irrigation pipe that I was cutting up with a power saw for disposal; that was pretty gross.
I killed another with my [VERY large] lawnmower the other day. My puppy found some pieces.

I wouldn't worry about snakes though; I used to live in India and we had cobras all over the place. they never bit any of our dogs, and only bit a human when he fell on top of the snake after tripping in the dark.

I think we have some instinctual fear of them.

newintavira

I'm not scared of them, as such, but when you're picking lemons and realise "hang on, that's not a branch" they can give you quite a shock!