I'm not a huge fan of snakes, but I rest assured that I'm quite unlikely to come across one in my current location.
Cyprus, however, was another matter. The lad I generally sat with on the 15 mile school bus journey each way was obsessed by every thing that moved. His mother told me that she hadn't been into his bedroom for the whole time that they had been on the island.
One day, he ran off downhill from the playground to retrieve a football and spotted the tail of a 'nice snake'. It was, apparently, hard to identify for sure, as there was a coating of dust and dirt on the few inches of tail that he could see sticking out from the pile of stone. Undeterred by the uncertainty, he grabbed the tail and pulled it out - it turned out to be a very disgruntled four-foot viper. He took a snap decision to keep a hold of it and whirl it round his head, in an attempt to stop it having a go at him. As he ran back up the hill, looking like some form of venomous helicopter, he cleared the playground of most of its occupants. Then he finally got it into a dustbin and put a stone on the lid.
He blagged the biology teacher into giving him some chloroform or something similar, to euthanise it with.
Taking the (presumed) corpse home on the bus, he was insistent that we should keep it straight whilst rigor mortis set in. So we sat with it resting across our four thighs and holding the head and tail up manually.
I was not at all convinced that it was necessarily dead, but we did get a far as his house without further incident.
What happened after that was not made public.