Here are a couple good pieces of life advice: Eat in moderation, exercise regularly and if you ever cross a potentially deadly African Coral Cobra in the wild, just “leave it alone.”

Niagara Falls resident Sam O'Shea was caught off guard when he saw his cat playing close to a two-foot-snake in his truck, Monday night. He contacted a friend, who was familiar with handling snakes, and asked him to safely remove the reptile.

"As soon as I caught a glimpse of it, I realized that it wasn't a local species. So I took precaution to let it work itself out of the truck," Niagara Falls resident Connor Boese told CTVNews.ca. He owns a corn snake and previously had pythons and boa constrictors.

The snake is temporarily with him until a representative from the Indian River Reptile Zoo takes it to their facility Tuesday.

“Thank goodness, no one was hurt and no one was killed,” zoo director Bry Loyst told CTVNews.ca, explaining that African Coral Cobras, which are native to South Africa, have killed people living in residential areas before.

“It was a very scary situation,” he added. “If you see a wild animal of any kind—you should leave it alone. It’s lucky that (he) wasn’t bitten.”

Boese said that as he handled the snake, he had no idea how dangeorus it was. "I realize afterwards, I wasn't holding it in the best manner," he said adding that if he had known, he would have used special tools and snake hooks. "But I got lucky in that sense."

The zoo director suspects that the snake is someone’s pet, but he doesn’t know if it escaped or was released.

Although there aren’t any provincial laws banning the ownership of venomous snakes, there are municipal by-laws in Niagara that do ban them.

“Whoever had this snake as a pet was definitely breaking a by-law,” he said. Venomous snakes like this one require an antidote or anti-venom serum, if a person is bitten by them.

Once the snake is taken, it’ll be kept in Canada's only registered non-profit reptile zoo which already has a snake of the same species.

Loyst says phone calls about wayward snakes happen more than one might think. “But not potentially dangerous venomous snakes like this though.”