New York City slickers are getting rattled.
The 311 hotline saw a 69% s-s-s-urge this year in complaints against snakes and their slippery owners, with 22 cases, up from 13 in 2021.
Seven of the “coils” were logged in Manhattan and the Bronx each, followed by six in Brooklyn and one apiece in Queens and Staten Island, the data show. None of the Gotham gripes involved snakes on a train.
In the Bronx, a vexing viper was said to have slithered into a residence on Park Avenue and East 172nd Street in Claremont shortly before noon on Feb. 17.
On March 17 a caller hissed to 311 that a serpent was being housed in a dwelling on Clinton Street and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The claim could not be substantiated.
The 311 data does not provide specifics, so it’s impossible to know if a venomous caller ratted out a neighbor for keeping a cobra or a neighbor went ballistic over a boa.
All vipers, cobras, pythons (including ball pythons, one of the most popular pets among snake owners in the state) and anacondas are banned in the city. Slitherers like king snakes, corn snakes and milk snakes, are welcome in the Gotham jungle, according to the city regs.
The last snake saga to make NYC residents recoil occurred in May 2020, when a crew of NYPD cops snared an eight-foot red tail boa constrictor that was wrapped around a light fixture outside a home in Soundview, The Bronx.
Snakes have plenty of supporters too.
“Snakes are the most misunderstood animal in the world,” said Ravi Ghulam, 30, an employee at Nature’s Reef & Reptile store in Jamaica, Queens. He has four corn and king snakes at his South Richmond Hill den, and believes vipers are great, inflation-proof housepets.
They are “cost effective, typically eat like once a week and don’t require a big enclosure or tank,” he said.
“When you work with snakes, you see they are actually harmless,” he added. He said horror flicks like “Anaconda” (1997) and “Snakes on a Plane” (2006) haven’t helped the reptile’s reputation. “It’s like ‘Jaws’ with sharks. Those movies scared the sh-t out of people!” Ghulam said.
Overall, the 311 hotline has logged 440 complaints since Jan. 1 about “illegal animals.”
Roosters ruled the roost (216), but New Yorkers also beefed about farm animals (87), went bananas over monkeys (9), fretted over ferrets (3) and frowned over 101 “other” unspecified critters.
Two people even made a tiff over turtles under four inches.
Most of the pet peeves – 180 — came from Queens, with 93 from the Bronx, 78 from Brooklyn, 52 from Staten Island and 37 from Manhattan, according to the 311 stats.
The city health code prohibits the ownership of a Noah’s Ark worth of animals from bats to elephants to zebras.
A city Health Department spokesman winged it with an attempt at humor: “New York City is always happy to welcome new neighbors into our communities, including many kinds of furry or feathered friends. That said, a rooster is a difficult neighbor and goats are usually happier chewing on something other than the wall-to-wall carpeting, and New Yorkers cannot keep these. For their sakes and ours, New Yorkers may keep only authorized pets in their lives.”
