Rattlesnake in living room greets Arizona couple returning from date, catcher says
A rattlesnake sneaked into an Arizona home and apparently liked the accommodations enough to get comfy while the owners were out, according to the snake catching service sent to evict it.
It happened in Tucson, and the couple returned to find the venomous snake lounging in the living room like a lazy teenager, Rattlesnake Solutions reports.
“They went out to eat and got home around 10 p.m. and saw it stretched out on the floor in front of the TV,” snake catcher Dave Holland recently told McClatchy News.
“It didn’t rattle at them, but it did crawl behind the TV stand. Obviously, they were taken aback. It’s bad enough when you find one coiled in the garage, but it’s different when you find one in the living room.”
He didn’t specify if the snake was watching TV or just napping.
The snake was small, about 15 inches, which made it that much tougher for Holland to find. Western diamondbacks range “from 3 to 5 feet,” with a few reaching 7 feet, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum reports.
Holland spent 10 minutes searching under furniture and along walls before he found it against a sliding glass door.
Rattlesnake Solutions shared a photo of the snake’s hiding spot on Facebook in February, and guessed it was trying to find a way back out of the home.
The snake had likely been hibernating in the garage for the winter, and it managed to slip into the home through an open door, Holland said.
“To a snake, a garage is just a cave,” he said. “The owner had redone the floor in the garage and cleaned everything out, and he likely picked up a box that the snake was hiding under or behind. It then migrated into the house.”
He estimates the snake had been in the home less than a day when it was discovered.
“It’s rare to find them in a house. In eight years, I have had under a dozen cases where a rattlesnake got in the house,” Holland says.
The snake was captured and released alive into a nearby wilderness area, which is standard procedure for Rattlesnake Solutions.
This story was originally published April 10, 2023 at 11:44 AM with the headline "Rattlesnake in living room greets Arizona couple returning from date, catcher says."