I was bit by a venomous snake and then went to a snake handling class
Yes. What was I thinking? We may never know.
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Once, I was bitten by a venomous snake, and then for a multitude of reasons, last year, I signed up for a snake handling course, and this is my story. *Dun, Dun*
Everything was about to start melting in southern Arizona when I decided I needed to know how to handle a rattlesnake. It was the beginning of summer, right before the air would be too hot to stand in. I was at the Phoenix Herpetological Society, a complex tucked away in what would look like just another residential area in the desert - on a dust road to nowhere. The group of us that had decided to spend our Saturday at the Herpetological Society were admittedly an odd bunch. We weren’t there for a tour. We’d all doled out a hundred dollars for a venomous snake handling class. We’d been promised the chance to learn how to handle a rattlesnake in the land of rattlesnakes.
The day before, I drove from outside LA, 5 hours down the 10 through the desert, to get this chance. Everything was hazy till I pushed through Palm Desert. There were sand storms swirling up dust, and I drove straight into dry heat, the car drifting from the wind. It was hotter every time I got out of the car, and I watched the mountains change from all green to desert mounds with date palm farms grasping at the land down the highway.
The instructional email that we received the week before class stated we needed to wear hiking clothes. In the class, it was clear we’d all interpreted this differently. Just the night before, I panic-bought a lavender Patagonia ball cap. I’d hiked before - tossing on whatever’s clean for a short, low-commitment walk in the woods, but the idea of needing to dress for snakes had my mind swirling on the dress code. I needed a hat, I decided - pushing all my nerves about handling a venomous snake onto my clothes. Not a hat that gives off safari vibes but a hat, so the night I arrived in Phoenix, I stood in front of a couple of REI employees, trying on different styles and discussing what I should buy. “This can’t look like a hat I bought the night before,” I told them. They said it didn’t, and I appreciated their dishonesty.
I was all nerves. I booked my last-minute campsite online and slept between a peach and a citrus orchard. I’d camped, setting a tent up but I got spooked by the loneliness of night and crawled into my SUV, which was set up like a pseudo camper van and then drank a coffee watching an inflatable air dancer, the kind usually in front of a car dealership, waving between the peach trees keeping the birds that flew above from swooping low, the dancer’s hum and movement a deterrent from them plucking the tiny fruit only starting to bud on the trees. After my cup of coffee made over an old RV stove built into an outdoor kitchen at the campsite, I packed up my campsite and got dressed into what I’d deemed appropriate for snake handling: a yellow shirt and green hiking pants purchased at Target that week. I felt awkward like I was wearing a costume, like I had no business handling a snake. And even though I probably didn’t, I got in the car and began driving towards it.
The Phoenix Herpetological Society started in 2001 in response to the green iguana problem. It was a completely man-made problem, as most herpetological problems are. People had bought green iguanas, and then once they’d grown, suddenly panicked that they had this prehistoric-looking lizard territorially roaming around their house. They were no longer the cute little thing purchased in the pet store but had grown unmanageable to handle. This is the story of so many animals that end up at the Phoenix Herpetological Society. Growing up, I had a neighbor with a green iguana. It would walk around their house, and sometimes, when it got aggressive, my neighbors would be stuck in a corner waiting for it to calm down. They ended up taking it to Florida on one of their trips and letting it loose on the beach. That’s how a lot of non-native animals become problems: suddenly, Florida is home to Burmese Pythons and Boa Constrictors. There are Northern African Pythons there, too, iguanas that walk the beach, and suddenly people’s homes are a little calmer without the wildlife they thought they’d raise, even though the outdoors have inherited their problems.
But the Phoenix Herpetological Society works to provide homes for reptiles that have, for whatever reason, stopped being a novelty to their owners and become a problem. On the property, entire habitats are filled with hundreds of turtles and tortoises that were bought when they were the size of silver dollars and fit in children’s palms. They came to Phoenix Herpetological Society after they grew large - when they were hundreds of pounds of tortoise burrowing in yards, digging out holes the size of small sheds could fall through, and eating everything that is green. There’s an entire building filled with pets from the pet trade - all animals that have been surrendered or confiscated. Reptiles you could buy in a pet store, online, or at an expo.
photo via Pheonix Herpetological Society
We were in the education building for our venomous snake training, where the venomous reptiles - the ones that have been confiscated or somehow found their way to the sanctuary by unusual means, like facilities closing or from Fish & Wildlife. No animal that enters the facility is released to the wild, meaning some of the animals will outlast the staff and volunteers by the sheer power of their lifespan. Owning a reptile is often a larger commitment than owning a dog or a cat. Yes, a dog and cat might live long, but an Egyptian Tortoise can live for 100 years. A Ball Python can live for 30. Meanwhile, a Bushmaster snake can live for 20 years, but all the while, you have to remember that the Bushmaster could kill you if you ever have your guard down in those twenty years.
Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash
Down the wall of the building were stacked aquariums housing mambas. There were vipers of all kinds. During class, while we are being shown different types of rattlesnakes, caged cobras line the glass wall to our backs. The room we were in for classroom instruction looked like the functioning back room of most zoological places I’d been in. The back rooms of aquariums and zoos give me the same feeling I got once when I toured a funeral home. The backroom where they prepared the bodies looked like a high school science lab with a drain in the middle of the floor. Flanking the sides of the room, there were black tables like the ones I’d worked at in Mr. Terzian’s Honors Biology 2 course. There were aquariums in every available space, a bookcase with old reptile titles leaned in a corner, and a glass display was filled with animal skulls and vintage snake bite kits. Each cage was labeled - some of the reptiles had been adopted online and had their adopters’ names proudly printed out and displayed. For every venomous snake, it was written in red, a clear statement that a strike from that particular reptile would undoubtedly mean a trip to the hospital and the Phoenix Herpetological Society riffling through their antivenin collection to treat the victim. For the state of Arizona, the Phoenix Herpetological Society keeps the antivenin bank. Most hospitals have the local stuff - the antivenin for native species that a hiker or homeowner, or typical person might stumble upon. But for everything else - the Mambas, the Eyelash Vipers, the Striped Cobras, and all the others— the Phoenix Herpetological Society has the rest.
When I asked Russ Johnson, the president of the society, how many vials he thinks he has on-site, he sighed and, after a beat, “A ton.”
I’m not the only one in the class who seemed confused by the instructions to dress like we were going on a hike. There were two guys in shorts, which felt like a bold choice even though a snake’s fang would easily slip through the thin waterproof fabric of my pants. There was a man in sweatpants, which seemed unmanageable in the dry heat. There was a woman in athletic leisure, another in a wide-brimmed straw hat and jeans, and a couple of adults that could have also been attending a rock concert. We all, however, took direction and wore closed-toe shoes.
“Who is here because they are having snake problems on their property?” our volunteer instructor, Louis, called out. Two couples raised their hands. “Who are my hardcore herpers?” he said next, using the shorthand for herpetological enthusiasts, looked around and spotted three hands go up. “And the rest of ya’ll are general interest? Okay.”
Our instructor, Louis, was tall, slender, and tanned. He looked like every athletic person that ends up living in a town like Phoenix - all limbs for hiking. I knew he was a cyclist before he told us. He doesn’t run anymore, though. It shot his knee. He was a pool guy, he said. He’d been finding snakes curled in pool traps and moving them with just sticks for 20 years. Some of his clients worried about the liability — their pool guy handling rattlesnakes and cottonmouths. Three years ago, one of those nervous clients called the city about a snake. They sent six guys out that ended up killing the snake after not wanting to handle it. This upset Louis so badly that he got trained at the Phoenix Herpetological Society. That’s how he ended up teaching our class.
We might have been there to handle the snakes, but before they put tongs in our hands, we were given a pamphlet and led through an hour of classroom instruction by Louis. He stopped at the disclaimer page on the pamphlet and read one sentence out loud several times:
This training DOES NOT make any participant an expert.
A San Esteban Chuckwalla rustled in the cage behind me.
The thing with reptiles - we all have a dinner party story of some obscure accident we read forever ago, though we aren’t sure where and we are pretty sure the person died, or maybe they didn’t. We don’t know. For every safe keeper story, there is another about a cobra getting loose and causing terror in a North Carolina neighborhood or a man taking his rattlesnake out at a party to give it a peck, only to die after getting struck in the jugular. Many of these stories come up in the class, and when I left, I’d think of about twenty more.
We puddled through the pamphlet, going over snake myths.
Myth: Snakes can jump their body length when they attack.
Fact: No, only a third of their total body length.
Myth: Snakes are slimy.
Fact: No, snakes are not slimy.
Myth: Rattlesnakes lay eggs.
Fact: No, you are probably seeing quail eggs in your yard.
Myth: Snakes want to attack you.
Fact: No, they typically are trying to avoid you at all costs.
“Will a king snake eat their own kind?” a woman with a blond top knot and acrylic nails asked.
“Yes,” stated Louis.
“Oh Jesus,” she muttered.
Louis took us outside, where there were two buckets, each holding a snake. We’d all be practicing with a yellow rat snake before we got the chance to try our newfound skills with a diamondback rattlesnake - as promised by the course description. We’d have to graduate by proving our skills with the yellow rat snake. The one he’d chosen, Louis said, was unruly - much more active than the rattlesnake. He took tongs in one hand and showed us the protocol. We were to first unscrew the lid of the bucket, then tilt the bucket lid away from us as we slowly backed away. If the snake didn’t slither out on his own, we were then to use the tongs to push the bucket over so the snake would tumble out, disturbed and seemingly pissed off. Louis assured us he would help us get the bucket back up. At this point of the demonstration, we were all giving each other unsettled glances. It seemed like a bad idea before, but now, it felt decidedly worse. When Louis first opened the bucket, and the snake popped his head out, we all gasped. He knocked the bucket over, and the snake moved quickly from the container, zig-zagging on the ground. Our class, standing in a half circle four feet from the bucket, instinctively recoiled.
To handle the snake safely, Louis showed us how to grasp the snake a third of the way down its body with snake tongs to give us maximum control. He expertly handled the tongs, using the lid under the tongs to balance the weight and moving the snake into the bucket. The tongs we were given are very different from a traditional snake hook, a long metal hook. These tongs grasp. This is crucial. They are long — about two and a half feet with a blue metal body. The handle and ends are silver - this tong, which we’re about to use to grasp a snake and hold from our body, kind of looks like something you would grab highway trash with. It’s the ultimate grabber reacher tool. One of the ends is flat to scoop under the snake, and the other clamps down. We were to hold it pistol style, not rifle, and a few of us were confused by the description of this instruction, so Louis modeled it. Pistol style means we are to keep our hands on the handle, and the rifle is to bring your hand down the pole to steady it. But for that steady grip, you trade the distance the long tong is giving you in the first place. It’s just bringing you closer to a snake strike.
Louis has instructed that we aren’t to immediately release the snake from the bucket. Instead, we are to keep the tongs clasped and hover over the bucket until we are able to see our newly captured snake put its head towards the bottom of the bucket. Then we’ll remove the tongs and put the lid back on. “That’s all it is,” Louis said.
There are, however, several ways to clearly mess this up. If you close the lid while the tongs are inside, you’ll give the snake a chance to jump out, and you won’t be ready. When I asked what would happen, Louis admitted, “Your mechanisms in the tongs could get stuck.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d throw the entire tong and snake as far from my body as I could,” he recommended. I wondered how far I could throw it.
Who’s first?
We all seemed to have some misgivings about the training. After watching a snake get dumped in and out of a bucket, only to be caught by an inexperienced person welding tongs, some in the group started to wince. “He’s not hurt,” Louis said encouragingly as we flinched with each person’s turn at the bucket.
“Man, I don’t know if I want to do this,” one class member said.
“Better here the first time than not,” his friend offered. They are here to handle snakes that have come onto their property.
One of the hardcore herpers seemed to be scared of the process and kept her body so far from the bucket that she didn’t have full control of the tongs. Her friend was quicker with it. He scooped the snake quickly and lowered it into the bucket. The woman in the wide-brim straw sun hat was a bit clumsy at first - in all honesty, we all were - holding the tongs with the snake writhing around. It seemed like our actions should have been intuitive, but faced with the snake, they weren’t. One woman kept trying to put the lid down before realizing halfway that she needed it. We’d been shown to use it as a sort of combat shield when opening the bucket and then to balance the tong’s new weight. Everyone struggled with the 1/3 rule, as the snake first dodged our attempts to clamp it and then squirmed, attempting to get out of our tong’s grip. If you tried to pick up the snake too close to the middle of the body, the snake would flop around, and it seemed hopeless to get it into the bucket. Its body was as quick as a saltwater taffy machine.
A few people in, I finally started to think I might not be up to the task with the rat snake. I’d been so rushed with work and my busy life in the weeks leading up to the class, and I hadn’t given much thought about how I would actually feel in front of a snake. On the drive to Phoenix, I’d told myself that I could handle it. I’d been bitten by a venomous snake before, I reasoned. It had been 2016, in North Carolina, and an encounter with a copperhead but still, I knew what it felt like. This one was just a rat snake, I thought. With that staunch justification, I pushed the nagging worry from my mind for weeks before the class and focused on just moving forward. But standing amongst a group of people waiting for their chance to release and catch the yellow rat snake, I began to question that logic. Sure, the rat snake wouldn’t hurt me — would I need a tetanus shot, though? — but a rattlesnake certainly would. My finger is still locked up from nerve pain since my copperhead bite. It seemed too late to just walk away from the class, but I could. No one was forcing me to be there but myself. I could have easily grabbed my backpack and excused myself. Everyone in the class would know exactly why I left — I could see it on people’s faces, the doubt. My heart beat furiously in my chest. I cracked the knuckle on my snakebite finger, a habit to release some of the pressure. Even though I’d had Crofab in the hospital after the bite, my finger was always too stiff and never again would fully extend.
Crofab is the antivenom mostly commonly used in the United States. There is a new cocktail out now, Anavip, made from South American serpents, but Crofab is a cocktail of 4 snakes in the United States. It treats bites from the Crotalinae subfamily of snakes — rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, and copperheads. Crotalinae snakes impart hemotoxic venom, the type that brings massive tissue damage and hemorrhage. The venom affects the blood or blood vessels. For some animals, the hemotoxic venom is a way to begin digesting the animal it struck by breaking down proteins. Crofab’s line is ‘Time is Tissue,’ and they’re right. The longer a bite is untreated, the greater likelihood of more tissue damage and potentially permanent disability.
Photo by Nick Cozier on Unsplash
The four pit vipers Crofab uses were chosen because of the protein, toxins, and diverse geographical range of the animals. The snakes used to make the antivenin live in Salt Lake City, Utah, in what they call a long-term captive care colony. On a monthly basis, they are milked for their venom - a process done by two scientists that carefully hold the snake’s mouth over a container covered in latex so it can pierce it and drip out the precious venom that they send to Australia, where it is used to envenomate sheep. The process moves to Australia because of the amount of prion—abnormal agents which, in the brain, can distort typical cell proteins and bring on a progressive neurodegenerative disorder family, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). The diseases are rare but fatal, and that’s why Crofab keeps four healthy flocks in Australia rather than rolling the dice anywhere else. An infected sheep can’t produce serum for use in antivenin, and that’s what they are there for. The proteins from the venom are used to immunize the sheep, and in time, they develop antibodies. Slowly, the sheep are put in rotation to have small amounts of blood extracted that are then centrifuged so the red blood cells can be separated from the now antibody-rich serum that is filtered, frozen, and sent to Wales to be manufactured. In all this process, Crofab is essentially making four different types of antivenin that will be blended together - a cocktail for the snakebite masses that can cover the different types of snakes in North America. A victim of a cottonmouth bite in Virginia will get the same antivenin as a rattlesnake victim in Arizona. It might be different amounts of vials and a different course of treatment, but it’s all the same antivenin counteracting the venom.
If we were to be bitten by a snake in the venomous snake handling class, we’d most likely be treated with Crofab. It’s the snakes behind the glass in the educational room - the mambas, the baronet’s lance head, the Milos viper — those are the bites that get tricky, the antivenin that regional hospitals won’t have, the antivenin that will have to come from the Society’s bank of antivenin, the one they use to supply hospitals around the state for when a patient shows up with an exotic snake bite, typically one that would kill them.
“I’ll go next,” I said.
When I began the process, I realized the yellow rat snake was heavier than it looked. With each quick jerk of its body, it unbalanced me. “Use the bucket lid to stabilize,” encouraged Louis. I placed the bucket lid under the tongs for support. I’m sure I, like everyone in the class, looked medieval, like ill-trained knights headed for combat, uneasy with our new weapons. But when I get the snake in the bucket, I’m settled. A calm has come over me, a won confidence. A little bit of my nervousness goes down, and with it, my guard.
The second time I stood in front of the snake bucket, the bucket had a red lid and a red triangle painted on the side, and there was a diamondback rattlesnake inside. I could hear it rattle, its tiny body angry at us for practicing on it, taking it in and out of a bucket. On the lid, there was a small plexiglass window, and I could see the movement of the snake back and forth in the bottom of the bucket. Diamondback rattlesnakes are in the viper family - their venom is hemotoxic. It’ll start eating away at whatever it’s injected into. It’ll kill tissue, disfigure limbs, and cause colossal nerve damage.
My heart chattered, and I willed it not to move to my hands. I did what I’d been shown: with the tong in one hand, I slowly turned the bucket lid. I heard the rattle. The process felt different once I was working with a rattlesnake, and my guard went up. The confidence I had from working with the rat snake melted off. The stakes were obviously higher with a rattlesnake and its promise of venom. With the tongs, I pushed the bucket over to its side. The snake didn’t slither out, content to stay in the shady bucket. I walked around to the bucket’s opening, wary of keeping four feet between my body and the bucket should the snake strike out. I wasn’t nervous anymore, simply focused. Everything in my body was alert, and I felt all my reflexes listen to me. My body, the one that so often feels distant from me, was somehow completely connected to my mind. I had total control. I poked my tong into the bucket and used it to pull the snake out. It was mad and rattled, and the head moved quickly. I stepped back and lowered my tongs again towards it. There was a strange amount of pressure you had to use with the tongs - too much around the snake’s body, and you would hurt it. Not enough, and the snake would slide right through. I grasped the snake’s body which Louis had shown us - 1/3 down from its head. It was lighter than the yellow rat snake I noticed and unexpectedly more docile. I drew it up higher, lowering its tail first in the bucket, still firmly grasped by the tongs, until it lowered its head to the bottom of the bucket, and I carefully screwed the lid back on.
“That’s exactly how I would have done it,” Louis stated.
I’m too prideful with that, too confident. I feel powerful. Invincible. And with those feelings, they are distracted — which is exactly how most snake handlers feel before they get bit.
My second time around with the rattlesnake, I lost focus, forgetting to bring the snake down, still clamped by the tongs. Instead, I dropped him in. “NO,” Louis said, horrified. I started again.
After the class, my body reverberated with adrenaline. I am not a snake handler. But if I was, this class showed me what kind I’d be — reckless, a show-off, quick to an arrogant rejection of snake hooks. This is ridiculous, of course, and will I volunteer myself if I see a rattlesnake in a garage one day? Probably not. Probably though, I think on the other hand. My mind is still open to the possibility that maybe, one day, I could be fearless with snakes.
This seems to be exactly how an obsession starts, I remind myself, and maybe that is more dangerous than a snake bite.
Is there a subculture or obsession you want us to explore in the future? Let me know: elgieguidry@gmail.com