The lady pictured above is Carol Woodford. Yesterday afternoon, she stumbled across a snake in her front yard. Naturally, she did what any concerned citizen would do. She panicked, killed the snake, proclaimed it was poisonous, and then proudly called Channel 4 to tell them about it.
The only problem? The snake (probably) wasn't all that dangerous or venomous. Of course, that small detail didn't stop KFOR from running with the "Dangerous Snake Found in Metro neighborhood" headline.
From a now deleted story on KFOR:
Dangerous snake found in Metro neighborhood
It's pretty scary when you see a snake slithering nearby, even if you don't whether it is venomous.
For one metro couple, they knew immediately when they got a glimpse of a snake in their front yard, it was a dangerous copperhead.
Carol Woodford says in 18 years of living in the Edgewater Park neighborhood, she has never seen anything like it.
"This snake started off over here, and I thought he was gone, he ended up over here", says Woodford pointing out where she first saw the snake at the corner of her yard.
Wow. You're telling me that snakes move? It's like they're living, breathing creatures or something. Who would have thought it!
Anyway, I'm not a detective (or KFOR reporter), but perhaps the reason Carol's never "seen anything like it" is because she's literally never seen anything like it. According to the amateur herpetologists known as KFOR Facebook commenters, the snake was not a dangerous venomous copperhead, but a... uhm... well, I have no clue. I would share what the always reliable KFOR commenters had to say, but KFOR deleted the story from Facebook overnight. In the news industry, that's what we call a 21st century retraction.
Even for an Ophidiophobiac like me, it wasn't that difficult to see some inconsistencies in the KFOR report. For example, compare this montage of scary copperhead snakes that KFOR attached to its Facebook post with actual images of the dead snake. They look nothing alike:
Once again, outside of being bit by one in Oregon Trail, I know nothing about snakes. That could be a king cobra rattlesnake for all I know, but considering KFOR scrubbed the story from its website and all social media channels, you have to figure they're guilty and got the story wrong. Oh well, like it really matters. It's always better to unnecessarily drum up fear and paranoia than get a story right.
(p.s. - Do you know what type of snake it is? If it is a copperhead, I'd like to know ASAP so I can pull a KFOR and remove this story like it never happened.)
