The Washington Post reports:

If you were a baby copperhead snake in Montgomery County and you wanted to bite someone, you could do a whole lot worse than pick Sam Pettengill.

For starters, there was the place the snake slithered into: Pettengill’s studio apartment at Kunzang Palyul Choling, a Buddhist temple near Poolesville, next to woods by the Potomac River. Animals are loved there.

Then there is Pettengill himself, who was still laid up yesterday at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. The 36-year-old has been known to buy crickets and worms from bait shops, bring them back to the woods and set them free.

“It’s about accumulating merit,” he said of such acts. [...] He received help from two friends in the prayer room, John Pelletier and Elizabeth Cohn. Pelletier searched “poisonous snakes Maryland” on his iPhone, and the three concluded that it was a Timber rattlesnake.

Before heading to the hospital, Pettengill carried the vase onto the temple grounds to the Enlightenment Stupa, a 36-foot-tall sacred structure. He walked clockwise around the stupa with the snake for about three minutes, offering “prayers for a higher rebirth,” Pettengill recalled.

Read the whole story here. And big thanks to the mighty JB for the heads-up on this one.