Living in a house with more than 100 snakes slithering around our furniture and personal space would probably give most of us an anxiety attack, but apparently not for a Canadian family.
In a rural area of Canada, a family shockingly discovered that their house had been taken over by 102 snakes, Yahoo News reported. Although the family initially chose to ignore a few small snakes in the basement, they eventually found it difficult to handle the invasion and had them rescued by a local wildlife rehab agency.
"The family contacted us when they found a few garter snakes in their basement, and then they started finding more and more. And then they were finding them in their kitchen and the bedrooms. And they decided it wasn't a good idea to have them there anymore," said Megan Lawrence, agency director of Salthaven West Wildlife Rehab, on Tuesday.
Since the location is based in Regina, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, garter snakes are known to enter houses and prepare for their hibernation during the winter.
"We were finding them basically anywhere - in the cracks of the stone foundation, under the floor, under some boxes and other things - and we just were picking them up in pillow cases and putting them into a bucket just to count them," Lawrence, who helps rehabilitate animals at the rehab center, said.
After filling up five pillowcases, the serpents were brought to the shelter. Over there, Lawrence separated them by size and recorded the longest one to be nearly one meter, or a little over 3 feet, and the shortest to be approximately 22 centimeters, or about 8 inches, according to Fox59.
"And the final tally - we had 102 by the end of the weekend," she said.
"I get a feeling that's about a normal count, so 100 garter snakes in the basement would not surprise me," Ray Poulin of Royal Saskatchewan Museum said, adding that there was nothing unusual for plain garter snakes to hunt for a warm place to spend the winter.
"Usually the snakes at this time are going down, right? So they're coming up to your house and going straight down one of the cracks in the soil around your house and finding a way in that way usually," Poulin, who is knowledgeable about snakes, said.
Meanwhile, Lawrence will need donations to feed the snakes with fish, earthworms, and minnows if the wildlife rehab agency possibly decides to keep the reptiles for winter before being released back into the wild, she stated.
"They eat things in the wild such as fish, earthworms, frogs and small rodents and insects, so we could use things like donations toward earth worms and minnows to feed them for the winter if we're going to keep them," she said.
