Cops episode - killing a harmless snake

[Lolo76]

(Not sure where to put this, so feel free to move to the appropriate forum)

OMG... I'm sitting here watching an old "Cops" episode, and this one segment just made me cry! They were in the south (Florida?) and a woman calls in that a snake is on her porch. The cops show up, find a gorgeous and obviously docile black rat snake (?) above the porch. The poor snake is just slithering around, minding its own business, and would probably have moved on in a minute. So there are THREE cops standing around with their heads up their arses, trying to figure out how to handle it. One yells "Spray it with the mace!" which the female cop proceeds to do - twice. Then another cop shows up, this big hulk of a man, and he strolls right up and bashes it on the head with his club. The poor thing struggled for a minute, until the cop finished the job with another blow & threw it in the garbage. What the heck??!!

They said "we really didn't want it to end that way, and hoped the snake wouldn't have to be hurt" - but they never even gave the poor thing a chance to move on. It made NO attempt to strike them, and was just crawling around and flickering its little tongue... probably just looking for a good mouse/rat to dine on. These morons also referred to it as a poisonous snake, when anyone with half a brain could see it wasn't a viper, cobra or rattlesnake. Even before I had snakes and knew anything about them, I could tell the difference between a poisonous and non-poisonous snake. Maybe it was too small of a town for this, but they didn't even attempt to contact animal control or anyone with snake knowledge. This reeeaaaallllly ticked me off, and I'm thinking of sending a nasty letter to that police dept. I'll have to rewind my TiVo to see where they were...

Has anyone else seen this episode? I couldn't find any clips online, but I did find this one discussion: http://forums.g4tv.com/showthread.php?t=25778 We really need to educate the public on snakes, seeing as they share our land... or do humans want to kill off that species too?? Argh.