Back in the old days, when I had to work for a living, I had a young man work with me for a summer while he was going to college. He told me about some of the odd jobs he's taken to get through school. One job he'd taken was with a Boy Scout camp somewhere in Southern California. His task was simply to hunt and kill rattlesnakes and he was paid by the number of buttons on the rattles.
Evidently, hunting was pretty good, since he paid for a year of college with his earnings, but here's where the odd part comes in. It seems that no one at the camp had ever been actually bitten by a snake, only frightened, yet the following year several kids were bitten by rabbits and had to go through a series of rabies shots as a precaution.
I don't live around them anymore but when I did, I generally left them alone unless they were encroaching on my space.
