Creepy Crawlers Snakes anyone?

[sheepdog 10]

I'm not sure what animal this is the Chinese year of, but around here it has definatly been they year of the snake!Just yesterday, hubby and I were looking around in the building for some hinges we purchased many moons ago, and as I pulled open a drawer in a big cabinet He yelled at me to get back, which of course startled me, I jumped, but I hadn't even seen the snake laying in the drawer all curled up taking a snooze. His yelling scared me worse than the snake did. A few minutes later he said, hey, look in that drawer again, see if the snake is still there. He had just stepped around the corner to the other part of the building and there was another snake crawling across the floor. (yes, I opened the drawer again to see if the other one was still there) A few weeks ago my hired man brought his wife along to help him, He is deathly afraid of snakes, and his wife is just crazy about them. She came walking up to the kennel and said, hey, look what I find, she was carrying a 5 gallon bucket. I figured I knew what it was, but when I looked in the bucket, I calmly stepped back and told her, Ahhh....that is a copperhead!!!! Silly woman had just picked it up and put it in the bucket to show us. She said, gee, I was wondering why it was striking at me! Thank goodness she was wearing tall, heavy rubber boots. I told her she needed to go find a shovel and figure out some way to kill it preferable without getting bit. I normally don't kill the snakes, except poisonous ones like the copperhead. Most of what we see here are black snakes. We have one that has been here for years, he is HUGE! Well over 10 ft long and bigger around than my arm. He's been here so long and we haven't bothered him so that you have to poke him with something to get him to move out of your way. I don't trust him enough to just step over him. But he mostly just hangs out in the barn and the western part of the goat pasture. The only black snake I have killed was one I found a couple years ago, it had crawled into one of my rabbit cages and killed a whole litter of baby bunnies, not tiny one's either, these were almost weaning size. I ran and got my 22 rifle and shot it right in the cage. It really ticked me off. With all the mice around here, he didn't need my rabbits, those are for me to eat. That's generally why I leave the snakes to their own devices, they do eat a lot of annoying rodents. As long as they leave my rabbits alone, I'm fine with them.