NEWS OF THE WEIRD

Animals on the Lam

Just north of Benton, Kansas, a rancher posted signs promising a reward to anyone who could help him find his missing longhorn cow, Mercedes. The Wichita Eagle reported the 3-year-old black-and-white bovine went missing during Cross Trails, a weekly cowboy church service at Greg Johnson’s Prairie Rose Ranch.

Friends, neighbors and family have searched high and low for Mercedes, recognizable by her 5-foot-wide horns, but the only sighting of her has been near the El Dorado, Kansas, Walmart, about 10 miles away.

Johnson says this isn’t the first time she’s run off: “She is more of a loner.”

Oops!

A family in Coventry, England, are “quite mortified” after calling the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to rescue a lizard peeking from underneath a bed in their home. But when officer Vic Hurr arrived at the home, she discovered the “lizard” was not a “lizard at all, it was a pink stripy sock.”

The dirty imposter sock, about 7 inches long and 2 inches wide, wasn’t moving, Hurr noted. “I think the family eventually saw the funny side,” an RSPCA spokeswoman told the Independent. “The sock had obviously been there quite a while. It was a typical teenager’s bedroom, I suppose.”

Questionable Judgment

Coolidge, Arizona, resident Victor Pratt boasts that he’s played with snakes his whole life. So when a rattlesnake slithered by during a family party at a nearby lake, Pratt grabbed the viper and showed the kids “how to catch it and I was playing with it like little kids do. I wasn’t thinking. I was showing off,” he admitted to FOX 10 News.

The rattler apparently didn’t want to play along and bit Pratt on his face and neck. Pratt’s sons quickly drove him to a nearby emergency room, and he was later airlifted to Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix, where Dr. Steven Curry treated him. “There is a 100 percent chance he would have died if he’d not made it to the hospital within minutes,” Curry noted.

Pratt remained unconscious for several days. He told reporters he had learned his lesson and would not play with rattlesnakes again.