I suspect even those people who love snow are getting a little tired of the white stuff after our twin snow storms (fraternal, not identical) dumped a foot-and-a-half of snow in central Missouri in the past 8 days. Especially those residents who are still without power! Can you imagine how area chionophobics are feeling right now? Chionophobics are people who suffer from “an abnormal fear of snow”, and I suspect their number is growing daily. In fact, after blowing and drifting snow negated my work clearing our driveway each of the past 3 days, I now consider myself a borderline chionophobic.
While
chionophobics are praying for an early spring, ophidiophobics are breaking out
the bubbly. Ophidiophobics are people
who suffer from an abnormal fear of snakes. Even though we live in a rural setting, I am
happy to report I have encountered zero snakes while clearing my driveway. No question that ophidiophobics are due for
some good news. The Chinese New Year
started February 10. Unfortunately for
ophidiophobics, 2013 is the “Year of the Snake”. (Just another
option to consider if your fortune cookie should say “That wasn’t chicken!”)
There has
been some encouraging news for ophidiophobics.
The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission recently
sponsored a Burmese python hunt in the Everglades. After taking an online training course and
paying $25, nearly 1600 semi-crazy people had the PYTHON stamp added to their
Florida hunting license. Rubin Ramirez
caught 18. The longest python caught in
the hunt was 14-feet-3-inches. If you
draped that snake from a basketball goal, one end could touch the floor and the
other would still be hanging down far enough to swallow the head of an unsuspecting person of
average height. There are now 68 fewer
pythons in the Everglades after those 1600 hardy souls sought them out for 30
days.
Good news
for Guamanian ophidiophobics! Funded by
U.S. tax dollars, 2000 Tylenol-laced dead mice will be dropped over Guam’s
Anderson Air Force Base this spring. If
ingested, these tasty treats are fatal to brown tree snakes, of which an
estimated 2 million inhabit Guam. The
cost - $500 per mouse. It would have
been higher but the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture is using generic Tylenol to hold
the cost down. As a patriotic American,
I hereby volunteer to pay my own way and personally deliver those dead mice to
Guam's brown tree snakes for the bargain price of only $250 each.
All I ask is a little help getting past the TSA. (SIR, some of these mice exceed the 3-ounce per mouse
limit for carry-on luggage!)
I imagine
some people will think killing and feeding dead mice to brown tree snakes is mean to the mice while others will consider it
cruel to the snakes. My late mother-in-law
once got involved in a snake/mouse controversy.
She wrote a letter-to-the-editor vehemently denouncing a pet store
owner. The pet store owner attracted
customers by placing live white mice in a glass enclosure filled with hungry
snakes in his store-front display window.
If there had been a society for
the prevention of cruelty to rodents, my mother-in-law would have joined. Yet, even with her Chinese bloodlines and fondness for
rodents, she became extremely belligerent when she found out I wanted to marry her daughter. Even though it was 1972 - the Year of the Rat! Personally, I think she had an undiagnosed case of gamafiliaphobia - the fear of me marrying her daughter. She finally got over it when my wife delivered her a little grandrodent.
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