The great ‘snakes in Malta’ caper (July 20)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The most interesting story this week has been about the fellow in Idaho who captured 25 rattlesnakes and took them to his motel room in Malta.
Malta, in southern Idaho’s Casia County, is on the outskirts of nowhere. One of the things it has is plenty of rattlesnakes, and you would not think a snake-catcher’s having 25 of them would matter much. But the citizens of Idaho years ago decided to protect their rattlesnakes, and made it illegal to kill more than four of them a year, according to the AP.
Maybe that regulation was passed to keep husbands from being killed by their wives. I know Mrs. Doud would reach for the shotgun if I brought home 25 rattlesnakes and they got loose in the house. But if I brought home only four, she might just make me take them outside and put them in the big gray trash can. That way, they would wind up at the landfill, where they might be dug up in the future by a paleontologist, who probably would wonder what the heck was going on.
But getting back to Malta, the snake-catcher was told he had to take 21 of his 25 snakes out in the wilderness and release them. It is said, however, that as soon as the sheriff’s deputies who oversaw this activity had gone home and horrified their wives with this story, the snake-catcher went out with a friend and killed those he had released.
Of the four which were left, he kept two as pets and cooked and ate the other two. No doubt about it, they make them tough in Idaho.
I have been in Malta, and I can tell you they don’t have snake festivals there, nor do they have statues commemorating snakes. The rattlers of Malta stay up in the hills, as the rattlers around here are wont to do. They don’t want trouble any more than you or I do.
But you would have to pay me a lot of money to stay in a motel there.
