Snakes in the treeline

I've never really cared for snakes, but I've always had the idea in my head that if you leave a snake alone, it will leave you alone. But as I've gotten older (and definitely wiser), I've learned that snakes are just plain gross.

Since moving to the farm, I've seen one snake in our yard; that was last summer. I went out on the deck and was going to look for something in my vehicle when I saw something slither from the flowerbed in front of the house. It was a snake. A long snake. A fat snake. A bull snake. And it scooted underneath my vehicle. I stopped in my tracks, retreated to the deck, and waited for the husband to return home and get rid of it.

I'm not sure what he did do with it though, because snakes don't bother him.

So a little over a week ago, when I was directing a camp, he calls and tells me that when he was walking through the windbreak to get to the cattle tank to turn on the faucet so he could water the garden, he found a snake. A long snake. A fat snake. A bull snake. Yes, this anaconda (OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating) was approximately 8 feet long and about four inches in diameter. And worse yet, he picked it up. Yeah, like playing nice with the bull snake will guarantee that it will stay away from me.

Now, I'm mortified, because I refuse to walk into the forest of a windbreak just to turn on the water to the garden. No, I'm being realistic because I refuse to let the slimy creature hiss or strike at me.

I understand that they serve a purpose here. They keep the rat and mice population to a minimum and that is very important when you have tons of silage, hay, and alfalfa all over the place. But still, they are not pleasant to look at, and I'm not sure what purpose they play at our house. Except to scare the hell out of me!