A video of a long black snake being yanked out of a toilet at a Tucson home is a hit on social media.
The situation that more typically resides in the category of irrational fear started when Michelle Lespron returned to her Tucson home from vacation.
After finding the snake in her loo, Lespron called Rattlesnake Solutions to remove the unwanted visitor.
“I’d been gone for four days and was looking forward to using my own restroom in peace. I lifted up the lid and he or she was curled up,” Michelle Lespron, a Tucson attorney, told The Associated Press. “Thank God the lid was closed.”
“Everybody has the same reaction: Oh my god that’s my worst nightmare,” she said.
Other people thought it was a prank video and the snake was a prop.
“Even my law partner was like ‘Ha ha. Nice gag,’” Lespron said.
After her reptile run-in, Lespron used her guest bathroom for three weeks before feeling comfortable enough to go back to her own.
And Lespron said she no longer enters the bathroom in the dark, and always lifts the lid ever so slowly, she told AP.
During the summer, the company deals with 10 to 20 snake removal calls a day said Bryan Hughes, who owns Rattlesnake Solutions.
Getting a snake out of a toilet happens “maybe once a year,” said Hughes, who estimated his company relocates more than 1,400 snakes each year across central and southern Arizona.
“Originally it was called in as a rattlesnake,” Hughes said. His employee initially thought it might be a kingsnake, or someone’s reptilian pet.
The worker kept his can-do attitude and after three failed attempts was able to grab the snake and pull it from the commode.
And he did it while videotaping the encounter with his free hand.
He later shared the video on YouTube, which has since been seen over 26,000 times on the site alone. It has also been viewed over 8,000 times on their official Instagram page.
Luckily for the homeowner — and the worker who was bitten during the struggle — the intruder was ‘just’ a coachwhip snake. They’re a nonvenomous species common throughout the region that can grow up to 5 feet long.
They are extremely fast and, not surprisingly, are hard to catch.
“A coachwhip is a pretty intelligent snake,” Hughes said. “You try to get one out of a hole you can see it looking at you, deciding whether or not to evade you.”
While a situation like is not to be taken lightly, Hughes said a call to a removal company like his is not always required.
“If it’s a harmless [snake] we usually try to just let the homeowner know it’s not necessary, but of course if they want us to come, we will, because we know at that point we’re also trying to keep the snakes safe from the person,” he said. “A snake in a toilet, of any kind, is a little bit of a different matter.”
“Where’s it going to go? It’s just going to go into the house.”
