Photo: istockphoto.com

Chilling animal news comes our way this afternoon via the New York Post: Not only are the Un-Humans escalating their war on our fair city, but they're recruiting combatants from farther and farther afield. First there were the panthers roaming the Palisades when they should really be relegated to the faraway mountains where people with poorer dental care reside. Then there were the plotting pirate parrots who came from Africa. And now a woman in the Bronx caught a snake of nearly Olsen-twin proportions in her apartment — the species of which normally only survives in southern climates. From the tab:

Police said they removed the reptile from the home after getting a 911 call at about 7:30 a.m. from Maria Dominguez, a 37-year-old flower shop worker. Cops said the woman spotted the reptile — later identified as a yellow rat snake — in her living room inside her fourth-floor apartment on Gerard Avenue near Yankee Stadium. It remains unclear how the yellow-and-brown stripped [sic] snake slipped into the apartment, but officials have not ruled out that it could have once been someone's pet.

Wait, wait, wait. There's such a thing as a "RAT SNAKE"? Seriously? This is extremely worrisome. Are there other such double-phobia monsters out there that we didn't know about? Like a Pigeon Cockroach? A Bat Piranha? A Spider Clown? (Oh, wait.) A Vampire Teletubby?? We don't know if we could live in that world.

SNAKE SLITHERS INTO BRONX HOME [NYP]