Keeping nature way further than arm's length.

In an article in my local paper it was reported that someone made a comment that there should be snake proof fences around a park after a poisonous snake had been removed from someones house and put out near a park where the is a kid's playground. They were naturally worried about children getting bitten. This seemed to me just another example of us wanting to completely expunge nature from our world or distance ourselves from it as much as possible. Besides it is ridiculous for other reasons, not to mention impractical. I'm hoping they weren't serious but it wouldn't surprise me if they were.

We have walls and fences around us, look at the shark fences around many beaches in Australia (the shark fences are another issue I will cover in a different post). The statistics show that the risk of snake bite is very low. This is from Earthling's comment on Bushwalk Tasmania's website: On average less then 2 people a year die in Australia from venomous snake bites.
On average 20 people a year die in Australia from horse related accidents.
On average 3 people a year die in Australia from an exotic introduced venomous animal from Europe....the honeybee. Bees in Australia kill even more humans then snakes!

This information is fairly old from this website: http://www.sydney100.com/snakes-spiders-sharks.htm but is useful because it gives statistics over a 10 year time period, which would help to show that over time it has been low and there is no reason for it to be any more now.

"Human Deaths in Australia Between 1980-1990, Inclusive (from Stevens & Paxton, 1992)

Cause of Death	Total Deaths	Average per year
Crocodile Attacks	8	0.7
Shark Attacks	11	1.0
Lightning Strikes	19	1.7
Bee Stings	20	1.8
Scuba Diving Accidents	88	8.0
Drownings/Submersions	3,367	306
Motor Vehicle Accidents	32,772	2,979

No deaths by Spider bites?

In Australia, only male Sydney Funnel Web Spiders and Redback Spiders have caused human deaths, but none have occurred since anti venoms were made available in 1981. Each year in Australia as many as 4,000 people are bitten. Of these 200 require anti venom treatment and one bite proves fatal

No deaths from Snake bites?

Less than eight presumably. You should also bear in mind that some of the snake attacks would be of people who handle snakes, keep them as pets or other wise live in close proximity to the beasties. "

Yet we worry about snakes! The irrationality of the human mind is strong. I am not saying to cuddle a snake (well Steve Irwin would have) but to be rational about it. Try and learn to live with nature. There are risks in living and even without nature in our world we can't be completely sanitised and protected from everything. Look at car accidents. If we worried about everything we wouldn't go anywhere and that's what happens to some people because of over blowing the risks. I grew up in the country and saw snakes now and then on my adventures in the bush, paddocks and old houses. I worked on the principle that if you leave them alone they won't come "running" after you.

Our world domination is practically complete and I am not comforted by this. Instead of enjoying the other creatures that share our planet we go out of our way to eliminate them from our life, even when not directly intending to do it. Look at land clearing for livestock production and to some extent development - millions upon millions of animals die from this - they lose THEIR homes. We spray harmless insects in our home with poison (eg. spiders) due to ignorance and fear and our wanting to control everything. We not only eliminate animals in directly we do it directly again in our usual self-serving way.

If we had embraced nature and learned to live with it we may not be in the sorry state we are in now.

New post on this topic:

Why I have "bats in the belfry at times"

Further on this topic. Again the local paper had an article a few weeks ago by people moaning about the fruit bats bothering them. The reason they are spending the time nearer to houses is because we have encroached on THEIR habitat. Yet we see ourselves as all important, centres' of the universe and that all other creatures should be eliminated from our world. This is a very sad state of affairs and is representative of the attitude that in part accounts for all the extinctions and suffering worldwide.