If you encounter a rattlesnake in the wild, experts advise freezing and then slowly backing away from the animal. They certainly don't advise biting its rattle off and then turning it loose in your neighbor's trailer, as a Caldwell County, Texas, man is accused of doing. Police say that 39-year-old Ryan Felton Sauter placed the de-rattled snake in the trailer of neighbor Keith Monroe after a verbal altercation earlier in the day, the Austin American-Statesman reports. The snake was apparently silenced in the hope that it would attack without warning. Monroe says he spotted Sauter leaving his trailer, and when he asked his neighbor why he'd entered his residence without permission, he was told: "You'll see why."
Monroe says he then entered to see the 3-foot-long snake curled up on the floor. "I freaked out," Monroe says. "I couldn't believe this happened." Monroe says he killed the snake with a machete before contacting police, who arrested Sauter. "Deputies observed that the snake's rattles had been removed," states a police report obtained by KVUE. Sauter was arrested on charges of deadly conduct and criminal trespass of a habitation and is being held on $7,500 bond for each charge. It's not clear what led him to seek such a bizarre form of revenge, but Monroe says they had long-running disagreements on "several topics." (This upstate New York man heard an ominous rattle when he went to jump-start his car.)
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