Do not kill Portland snakes! Yes, they look scary, yes some of them are dangerous, but there are more beneficial snakes than harmful ones. The rats in your roof are more of a danger to you than the snake in your yard. In fact, if you have a snake in your yard, you probably have fewer rats which is a good thing. Snakes are nature’s way of controlling vermin populations. They are built to rat and mouse hunt. Since most human settlements have mice and rats, the snakes you commonly find around humans are the rat and mouse eating variety. This means that they are generally not venomous, and are actually doing you a favour by keeping the Oregon rat and mouse population down.



It is dangerous for you to try to kill a snake. Snakes will always protect themselves and if you are seen as a threat, they will attack you. Most Portland snake bites, according to emergency room attendants, happen when someone is either trying to catch or kill a snake. The best option is always to either leave the snake alone and let it go away by itself, which they usually do, or to keep it confined to an area away from children and pets, and call wildlife experts or the police. Always let an Oregon professional deal with a snake problem.

Most of the time snakes are simply passing through your yard on their way out of urban areas. They need very specific habitats to live in and when urban development disturbs them, they usually try to move to a more hospitable area. Since they can’t fly that means they have to slither across people’s yards. Often human habitats aren’t suitable for Portland snakes, especially if there are no handy holes to hide in, nowhere warm to sleep and no food for the Oregon snake. Then it will simply move on. This isn’t a Hollywood horror film with vindictive snakes out to kill the human race. Snakes really don’t want to have anything to do with us, and usually just want to be left alone.

Of course if you are hell-bent on killing a Portland snake a lot of people use garden spades or shovels to chop their heads off. Usually the snake is perfectly harmless. Before you kill an Oregon snake, try identifying it.More often than not you’ll find it’s not a threat to anything larger than a rat.

Visit our Portland wildlife trapping home page to learn more about us.