Vernon woman defends kitchen against 2 snakes

Deborah Burdette went into her kitchen Monday morning to find an unwanted visitor: A large snake.

“I thought to myself, no one is going to believe this, so I went to get my phone to take a picture,” the Wilbarger County resident told the Wichita Falls Times Record News. “When I got back, it acted like it was coming after me, then it tried to get away by escaping through a hole behind the dishwasher.”

She didn’t see rattlers on the end of its tail, so she grabbed it. She tried to kill it with a knife grabbed from the sink, but that didn’t work. So she reached for a nearby meat cleaver and whacked the snake on its head. That did the trick.

But later that night, in the dim light, she didn’t see a second snake near the sink.

“It bit my hand,” she said. “I killed it and called 911 because, at the time, I didn’t know what kind of snake it was. But after the EMS arrived, we determined that it was a bull snake.”

She told the newspaper that she has a “healthy respect” for the reptiles as long as they’re outside. She has since patched up the hole they used to get into her house about four miles south of Vernon.

According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife website, the Lone State State is home to “15 potentially dangerous snake species or subspecies.” But it also warns that more Texans died annually from lightning strikes than bites from venomous snakes.

@bryanbastible

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This story was originally published July 26, 2016 at 8:30 PM with the headline "Vernon woman defends kitchen against 2 snakes."