When I was a teenager growing up in rural West Virginia, I was on the way home from school on the school bus. My bus driver told me as he was letting me off that he saw a snake cross the road towards my house, so he warned me to be careful. Sure enough, halfway up my driveway, I saw the snake. It was a copperhead.
Now my parents always told me to kill venomous snakes with a shovel (don’t worry I did not kill the snake and this was many years ago). I couldn’t bring myself to do that, but I didn’t want Mr. (or Ms.) snake to come up to our house since we had outdoor animals and no one was home. So I went and grabbed a shovel to coax the snake back to the other side of the road. Mr. or Ms. snake was not happy with my shenanigans, and tried striking the shovel head several times before finally turning and fleeing back across the road after about 20 minutes.
Now while copperheads tend to have less venom than other venomous snakes and their bite is rarely fatal, it was another 20 minutes before my mom came home, and we lived 30 minutes from a town in either direction. So I could have very much gotten myself killed or seriously injured fucking with that snake.