A recent rescue in St. Albans, England, has an animal welfare charity once again warning people about the dangers of garden netting.<\/p>\n
Staff from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals were called to help a grass snake, one of Britain’s protected species, that got badly stuck in netting outside someone’s house.<\/p>\n
According to The Herts Advertiser<\/a>, a homeowner spotted the struggling reptile in their backyard in early July and called for help.<\/p>\n Incidents like this are becoming all too common.<\/p>\n Animal rescue officer Ellie Barnes-Wilson said, “We do unfortunately get called to a lot of incidents where wildlife become entangled in netting, and many animals suffer serious or fatal injuries trying to escape.”<\/p>\n Plastic netting is useful for protecting plants, but it can also be a real danger to animals like hedgehogs, birds, and snakes.<\/p>\n The grass snake was lucky. After being carefully cut free, it was taken to a wildlife center to recover before being released back into the wild.<\/p>\n The RSPCA is now asking people to think twice about how they protect their gardens. One small change, like swapping plastic netting for wildlife-safe alternatives, or raising the netting off the ground, could make a huge difference in helping avoid these issues in the future.<\/p>\n People had a lot of things to say about this, and some were unfortunately dismissive of the benefits of protecting wildlife like the snake.<\/p>\n “Should have left the bloody thing there. Snakes are bloody vile creatures,” one commenter wrote.<\/p>\n “Just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean it deserves to suffer. It’s still a living breathing animal,” one more reasonable response read.<\/p>\n This rescue is a reminder that helping wildlife can start at home, even if that sounds counterintuitive.<\/p>\n Small actions like choosing a different way to keep your garden safe and more mindful activities such as joining a local conservation group<\/a> are some good options to get started.<\/p>\n Join our free newsletter<\/a> for good news and useful tips, and don’t miss this cool list<\/a> of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A recent rescue in St. Albans, England, has an animal welfare charity once again warning people about the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[55232,55228,55229,55227,55230,79,201,55231],"class_list":["post-78262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animal-rescue-officer","tag-garden-netting","tag-grass-snake","tag-herts-advertiser","tag-plastic-netting","tag-science","tag-wildlife","tag-wildlife-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}