My wife found a habu snake coiled up in the bottom of an old bin outside our house. It was quite grubby looking and could have been momentarily mistaken for a bit of old linoleum that got stuck in the old pedal slot at the rear of the bin.
We called the police and a timid young officer from the local koban came along with his snake stick. Calling the police to deal with snakes is what you do at the weekend in Okinawa when the real snake catching team from the local government are not on duty.
The officer poked at the bin and banged it a little until the snake eventually fell out of its slumber spot. It wasn’t much more than 40cm (16 inches) long but it wriggled in anger and showed its biting potential before trying, almost with success, to flee. The officer panicked and chased it into the fallen tree leaves and, for all our sakes, was lucky to snatch hold of it in his snake stick’s pincers. If the desperate creature had managed to slide into the bush or deeper leaves we would have struggled to find it again and then lived with the anxiety of a poisonous snake hiding somewhere in our garden.
The police officer then suggested, after a bit of introspective deliberation and mumbling, that my wife drive her car over the poor reptile while he placed it under the wheel. Unlike in documentaries about Australian veterinarians, snakes here are not taken away to be milked of their venom to make anti-venom and then placed in a sanctuary or released far away from humans. This is a small island in the Pacific with no place or patience for poisonous lifeforms, and snakes are simply killed – by any means available.
So the police officer tried his method but the snake kept wriggling away whenever he left it under the tyre, and when it was occasionally run over there was no discernible depreciation of its existence. In the end, despite my own weak body still recovering from surgery only a few days before, I told the officer to hold the snake still with his stick while I hit it over the head with the heavy part of a wooden broom. I bashed in the pitiful creature’s brains and it was finally dead. The young man in the police uniform looked relieved and even thanked me in English before heading off. I think he took the body away with him but I didn’t hang around to watch.
