If I had a snake phobia I would have to move.
The black ones are OK.
It's the ones with patterns on them that make me nervous. We have cotton mouths, rattlers, and water moccasins. Those are all venomous.
They slither on the ground, pop out from under steps, entwine themselves in shrubs, and drop down from trees, so I never know where to expect them. We had some on the front porch, and even one in the kitchen. For a long time after that I was very careful about opening kitchen cabinets and drawers.
I kill some of them with a garden hoe (decapitation). Some I leave alone, some escape. When our Labs were alive they used to catch them.
When TCS was out to sea we lived in another house that had a drainage ditch out front. There was a huge water moccasin in the ditch but I couldn't get a good hoe-striking angle on it for a kill. So I called the county sheriff and a deputy drove out to my house. He took his shot gun out from the trunk and blasted the snake. Then he scooped it up and put it into a garbage bag. He threw the snake into the car trunk and drove off. Maybe he wanted to make a belt or hat band out of the skin?
TCS used to do maintenance and yard work at a private plantation as a second job. He saw lots of snakes there. Usually he would run over them with the tractor and chop them up. He also saw lots of snakes when he was on security duty at the Naval Weapons Station (it's in a very rural area). (The gators in those areas are another story.
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I also find lots of dried skins that the snakes shed; those are cool--they look like snake "ghosts."
Sometimes the skink lizards make me jump because their bodies look just like snakes. If one pops up, for a split second I might think it's a snake. If I know it's a skink then no problem. I like the skinks and other lizards that we have. They eat the mosquitoes and gnats.
