Letter: Watch Out for Deadly “Endangered Species”

Driving home at night our headlights shined on a beautiful six foot long Diamondback Rattle Snake taking up a third of our road. It had just slithered past our post office boxes, where one of our neighbors drove up and routinely got out to get their mail. I stopped and shined our lights on it until Rural Metro could take it out of a nearby front yard. In the past the fire department would catch and release the snakes in some deserted location. No longer. It was explained that the BLM will not allow the fire departments to transport snakes to the desert as they cannot survive outside of a one mile radius. So, after he grabbed the angry snake with his reptile tongs, he walked 20 yards to the nearby wash, thirty feet away from the post boxes, and let it go.