Police support officers sparked an animal rescue attempt after spotting a deadly cobra wrapped round the handlebars of one of their bikes.An animal rescue attempt, or a people rescue attempt?
...clearing the area, near Thorpe Bay Yacht Club in Eastern Esplanade, and even called for back up while the police control room contacted poisonous snake expert Iain Newby.Lucky they have him on speed dial. Otherise, they'd have to issue all PCSOs with a PPM (Personal Protective Mongoose)...
Sadly, it turned out not to be a case for the Steve Irwin of Thorpe Bay, and more a case for an opthalmologist:
...as Mr Newby, owner of Dangerous Wild Animal Rescue Facility in Great Wakering, was en route to the incident, police called him back to say the snake was not real.Oh, red faces all round, eh? Well, mindful of his status as go-to snak wrangler for the police, Iain is keen to spare their blushes:
He said: “I grabbed all the kit I would need to protect myself from a venomous snake, including a snake hook and my snake stick, which I need to grab snakes to stop them biting.
“I spotted the officers beside the yacht club boat yard when they said it was a rubber model.”
Despite seeing the funny side, he was full of praise for the action of the PCSOs.They aren't getting that accurate, surely?
He said: “More and more people are keeping things like this as pets, and it’s not impossible for them to get loose. So they did exactly the right thing while they were not sure what they were dealing with, as even rubber snakes are getting more and more accurate.”
One of the PCSOs, Tristan Adams, said: “We will always err on the side of caution when dealing with incidents such as this, which could potentially pose a significant threat to members of the public. It was only a very realistic replica snake, but I’d rather we over-reacted to a false alarm than ignored a real emergency.”I'd rather we didn't have to pay the wages of people quite so utterly dim...
9 comments:
Idiots.
"More and more people are keeping things like this as pets."
F-ing brilliant observation. I keep pet rocks. In my garden.
I think they may have been rattled.....
They mistook a table leg for a shotgun and shot this man dead. 2 armed police shot him from a distance of 15ft. One shot him in the hand and the other supposedly aimed for his body but shot him in the head.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article500515.ece
They also shot dead a naked man thinking he might have a concealed weapon.
I have a small stuffed toy grizzly bear and if they saw that from quite a long way away... They'd have a bloody helicopter for that.
As I trimmed my hedgetops from scaffolding on the garden side, a brace of passing PCSO's unholstered their notebooks and shouted up "Hey, do you know those are sharp enough to cut someone?" "Yes" came my reply. (I do hate wasting words.)
"Could we have a look at them, please" "No, you might cut yourselves, now buzz off."
Of course I was fortunate enough not to have ended up in the sights of an armed response unit after being mistaken for a grazing Brachiosaurus.
But wasn't there a film about exactly this sort of thing...........Oh, no, wait a minute: that was 'Snakes on a PLANE'
Dummies! If it's wrapped round a handle bar it won't be a cobra; it will be a homeless vind-screen viper. Probably it's an adder from Danbury on holiday.
However, the Wickford/Shoebury area has snakes galore:
http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/986534.python_ends_year_on_the_run/
Not forgetting Diego who had enough sense to go home
http://www.asdafinance.com/news/pet-insurance/escaped-6ft-snake-slides-back-home/
Turns out there is a bloke in Wickford who sells False Water Cobras. They are venomous; they pretend to be cobras by flattening their necks to give a hooded appearance but they can't do the standing-up trick.
http://www.findmeareptile.co.uk/snake-classifieds/4819-false-water-cobra-poss-sale.html
Wickford is a darn site stranger than you'd guess from the neat rows of retirement bungalows.
Also note the absence of the RSPCA.
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