'Huge' venomous brown snake rescued from garden netting

A temperamental species, the venomous eastern brown snake isn't one to be handled at the best of times, let alone when it's on high alert after becoming trapped in garden netting.

For professional snake catcher Stuart McKenzie and his team, however, there's no snake too risky to rescue. Last week, McKenzie and his colleague ventured out to a rural area of Queensland, Australia, to tackle this exact situation.

Typically, unless a snake is posing a direct threat to humans or somehow found its way inside a home, McKenzie recommends leaving it alone. This particular eastern brown, however, would have died without intervention, leading McKenzie to travel long-distance to save it.

Upon arriving at the scene, even the experienced snake catcher was slightly taken aback by the reptile's massive size. Thoroughly tangled in a length of netting surrounding a tomato plant, the eastern brown appeared every bit of 5 feet.

On top of that, the snake was absolutely incensed to be in such a predicament. And because it hadn't been trapped for long, it still had all of its energy and strength.

"So this snake's still got a lot of energy," McKenzie said, assessing the eastern brown's painful plight. "So even when I cut him out, he might carry on a bit."

As if on cue, the eastern brown thrashed its body the moment the snake catcher attempted to make the first cut into the netting surrounding it. Undeterred, the two reptile wranglers worked together to cut through the net, taking care not to snip the snake's scales.

"[The netting] gets under the scales, just because the scales, especially the belly ones, overlap each other slightly," McKenzie explained.

Because the eastern brown snake was so deeply tangled in the garden netting, the reptile wrangler worried it might require veterinary care.

Luckily, however, the snake was unharmed and required no rehabilitation. As such, McKenzie released it into the wild, away from the residential area, shortly after freeing it.

"Just a reminder that if you have any netting like this lying around your home, it's best to dispose of it before an animal gets stuck in it," he wrote in a subsequent Facebook post.

Should you ever find a snake in a similar situation in your yard, never attempt to free it yourself. Snakes aren't at all the violent creatures many believe them to be. But, like any animal, they can react with aggression when threatened.

Most snake bites are accidental – i.e., stepping on or touching an unseen snake while hiking or gardening. A large percentage of them, however, are the result of deliberate handling.

Only about 7 percent of all snakes are able to kill or significantly wound a human (with eastern browns being among them), but it's always better to be safe than sorry.