On New year’s Day (after the celebration for life for last year), Lola spotted a visitor and warned us with emergency barks (4-5 repeated forceful short barks followed by a longer break then resumed). we went out to investigate and found out that the visitor was a red belly black snake, a medium size [to two metres long] Australian native venomous snake. Generally, black snakes are placid (not aggressive) and prefer to flee (move out of sight), but if they feel threatened (of getting hurt), they can strike (and bite). The venom can cause severe local pain, swelling, and bleeding, along with systemic effects like muscle damage (rhabdomyolysis), kidney issues (port-wine colored urine), and blood clotting problems (coagulopathy), alongside nausea, headaches, and potential paralysis, requiring prompt medical care, often with tiger snake antivenom [from Google AI overview]. This black snake went into the rock and pot plants arrangement around our footbath and hid quietly.
Australian snakes normally go about looking for mating partners in Spring (July-November). For black snake females, they would be giving birth to live (full featured but small) babies in Summer (December-January). Black snakes are not territorial (in the sense that they would vigorously defend their home hunting ground) but they do have home range (meaning that they will live and hunt for food in certain area for a long long time). These two facts combine to prompt my decision to evict this black snake.
We arrested the snake using minimal force and placed her in custody in a cloth bag. She will be released in a forest reserve some good distance away. We thought about this and felt odd that we’re placing a native in exile from her natural habitat. We have outweighed our safety (and survival) over one of our native neighbours’. Though, we have been getting along with kangaroos, wallabies, possoms, pacific black ducks, whistling ducks, wood ducks, herons, currawongs, rainbow lorrikeets, noisy miners, blueface honeyeaters, butcher birds, friar birds, apostle birds, choughs, lyre birds, wagtails,… and many lizards like gekgos, iquanas, skinks, tokays, water dragons and…, many kinds of frogs, fish, turtles, many kind of insects, butterflies and moths dragonflies and mosquitoes and flies and… including bees, wasps and hornets,… because we live among the gum trees. We get used to see pythons of various sizes (from 1m to 5m long), tree snakes, keelbacks (water snakes) and rarely eastern brown snakes and once only a taipan. As you can see, our list of wildlife is long. We share a bush ecology.
What are the charges against this black snake? She was charged and convicted without legal representation for first, being seen at our footbath that we use several times daily, (we have considered the possibility that she is fleeing the big wet up North Queensland, but that’s a thousand kilometers away; or that she was chasing a prey and just happened to end up here, this seems a good excuse, but if inside her bulgy body is a lizard, then she will hide for a few days to digest her food, and then she would go for another prey around here, not away), and second, she is a home-range snake (this she cannot defend herself, even though the evidence is merely human observation). Her babies will also be living in the home-range with her - near our footbath. And the the verdict: She, as pregnant as she may be, is to be deported as soon as possible!
How would you handle this or a similar case like illegal immigrants (blackchin tilapia), in a Buddhistic way?
