I also don't think I would have kept cats if they were forced to walk on leashes. It's against the natural order of things to prevent a cat from living free.
However, about snakes. I live right in the middle of the distribution area of several highly venomous snakes, including three cobra subspecies, black mambas, various adders, and some very dangerous arboreal snakes.
Although the numbers of all of them have declined in recent years due to increased development in my immediate surroundings, all of them are still present in fairly large numbers and many people here encounter dangerous snakes on an almost daily basis. For instance, two years ago, my neighbour from two properties down was killed by a 10-ft long black mamba that chased a rat into his house. Rather stupidly, he tried to shoo it out of the house with a broom, but the snake took grave exception and bit him seven times. My neighbour died before his wife could get him to the nearest hospital, which is about 30 minutes away.
Cobras, of which there are still many in the area, tend to enter houses in search of shelter in summer, and one of their favourite hidey-holes is beds. No one knows exactly why cobras like crawling into beds, but many people get bitten this way, so we all shake out our beds in summer before getting into them.
Puff-addders on the other hand, don't get away from you. They catch their prey by ambushing small animals, and people often get bitten simply because they never saw the snake. Some victims die, but those that don't suffer horrendous tissue damage that can take years to heal.
Enough of horror stories though. My biggest fear is for my two small grand children who live with me. Any of the venomous snakes that occur here can kill a child in considerably less than an hour, but even adults invariably die from untreated mamba bites. Sadly though, anti-venin is horribly expensive, and most state-run hospitals don't have any because that can't afford to keep it, so unless you have the money (and lots of it) to pay for treatment at a private hospital, you generally die from a mamba bite in anything from a couple of hours, to a few days.
Overall, I live in a beautiful area but I watch my grandchildren very, very closely, and I kill all snakes on sight (venomous or not) because that cute, harmless mole or brown house snake my grandchild may be playing with could turn out to be a black mamba. Pity my kitten was not big enough to have killed the snake she was playing with, though.
