Hey @equill, My apologies I didn't mean to come across that way.
But very honestly if you have a family at home especially with young kids, then you're not risking just your own health. You're risking the health and welfare of rest of your family and any friends who may visit if you permit venomous arachnids to take up residence there.
As I mentioned my son and his family live in New South Wales, Australia, which has all of these things that can literally kill you. That doesn't stop them from living, but they are all careful about exposure to dangers. And yes, all of these wonderful examples of venomous creatures can and do make it into people's houses. They typically deal with it swiftly and carefully. As a visitor I was a bit surprised at all the things that you had to watch out for and be careful about. But after spending a month and a half there, it wasn't that bad. You couldn't walk around clueless, but as long as you had some situational awareness it was not a big deal.
It did however necessitate taking the long way around back from the river we were fishing instead of walking the shorter way through the tall grass because you just couldn't see any of the many venomous snakes that inhabited the area before it would be too late.
I was a fly-fishing guide in California for many years and of course there are rattlesnakes there. The nice thing about them is that they let you know if you get too close. In areas where there was tall grass, I would always go first and bounce and tap my wading staff along in front of me. Every once in a while, a rattlesnake would light up. Then I'd just bounce and tap a detour around the area where we heard them. Not a big deal. It's pretty much the same in Oz, but the deadly snakes there don't give you any audible warning. You just have to be a lot more alert to the possibility.
Sorry about coming across as a jerk.
Apology accepted.
I do get your concerns, but believe me I also share them.
If I gave the impression of thinking "hey, you probably won't die, so who cares?" then that's from me not being explicit enough in the way I worded my comments. So that's on me, and on my slightly testosteronic way of emphasising dangers by being pointedly sarcastic about sounding like I'm downplaying them. I also forget that many people aren't as fully aware of some dangers, so the facetiousness doesn't always carry across.
I lived in NSW for 12 years, just under 3 of them in Lawson (Blue Mountains, 4 stops before Katoomba) where we had a bigger-than-theoretical-max redback in the woodshed. Did you know spiders can swagger? That one did.
I also grew up in New Zealand, where katipo are common in some rural areas. Basically the same species as redbacks and black widows, give or take the natural divergence that happens when populations are geographically separated.
Lawson is also where where a 1.5m tiger-snake took up residence in the ceiling-space until it dropped into our bathtub to get away from the heat ("ah, no wonder we haven't heard any rats or possums up there for a few months!"). I'm very well aware that those things stand a good chance of killing you if they bite and inject sufficient venom, and if you don't manage the bite well enough and get the correct antivenin in time - bearing in mind that the wrong antivenin can
also kill you. Even a dry bite is painful enough, before you get to the risks of an infected wound.
I'm also aware of at least one person who's died of snakebite in the waiting-room of the emergency department, because the effects of neurotoxic venom can be hard to distinguish from those of being blind drunk. The overworked triage nurse heard his slurred speech and had him sit off to one side in the hope that he'd either get bored and wander off, or pass out and sleep it off. Well, he did settle down and go quiet, yes...
I didn't know exactly what species it was at the time, but the shape of the head and neck suggested it was venomous. Besides, even if it was a smallish python, although I'd handled a 2m olive python previously without incident, I knew that they only take well to handling if it's a daily thing, and
we sure hadn't been training it. So we made sure it was contained, then made phone-calls until we got hold of somebody who could safely remove and relocate it.
Those things don't teleport in from nowhere by themselves, so there had to be a breeding population nearby. They're the third-deadliest snake in the world, and we had a young family next door with a backyard full of long grass, so the first thing we did
after getting the snake safely relocated was to knock on their door and make sure they knew about the danger to their kids.
The massive redback infestation in Leichhardt? We didn't quite call in an airstrike, but we absolutely did call in an exterminator and tell our neighbours to check their own houses. I have quite enough scars from misadventures already, thanks; I didn't need to find out first-hand what happens when you're half-asleep and discover the hard way that one of those things was somewhere I didn't expect, and neither did my partner, our cats or our neighbours.
From all of those encounters, plus the house-spider infestation we had to deal with in Lawson, my partner and I experienced a single bite between us. One of our pet cats was panicking because we were vacuum-cleaning, he couldn't hide under the bed, and she tried to calm him down without thinking it through.
She nearly lost her hand.
It was a single puncture wound, but it was
deep, and it turns out that a domestic cat's canine is a lot like that of a komodo dragon - it's the infection that does the damage. If we'd waited overnight, she
would have lost her hand to cellulitis and (I'm quoting the ER nurses here) most likely necrotising fasciitis as well, because the infections would already have passed the critical point.
A cat. Not a snake or a spider or a shark, but a pedigreed Siamese cat.
Horses kill 20 times as many people as snakes do in Australia, and cows are right up there with horses. They're more familar and not as scary-looking, so they don't get the same kind of press.
I mentioned growing up in NZ: its countryside is every bit as likely to kill you as Australia's. I've been the guy who had to get back to base-camp without being the second casualty in the group, get on the VHF radio, and talk the SAR team into sending a helicopter while the others kept the first casualty warm, stable and conscious.
Thus, my stance isn't casual dismissal of danger, but acceptance that the world is
filled with things that'll hurt you, and the smart approach is to be aware of what the dangers are, know how to avoid getting hurt, and do that - situational awareness, as you said. Don't pick up a blue-tongued lizard until after you've counted its legs (death adders look like bluetongues and don't like being handled), don't get between a cow and a scratching-post (it'll crush your ribcage without noticing), don't get on a motorbike without full armour no matter how hot the weather is (that's why I still have my left leg), and so on.
Not reacting in fright and panic is part of not getting hurt, and that's why I tend to pipe up in these threads to counteract the fear-stoking, rather than to emphasis the danger that people are already hearing about.
