An Essay on Human Attitudes Towards Snakes

Two-edged charm of the snake
Michael Bywater/The Independent
(Arabian Standard Time) Oman Time

They’re lithe. They’re sinuous, graceful and elegant. Beautifully-ornamented, they shimmer in the sunlight. They have elegant cheekbones and a steady, challenging gaze.

They are silent and indolent, until roused, when they flow like volitional quicksilver. They can swallow things bigger than their head. If they were courtesans or burlesque artistes, they would be rich and notorious. They’re snakes. The fear of snakes is said to be on a par with those other leading phobias, the terror of speaking in public, or flying.

Snakes remain a shorthand for horror and malignity. Think of Indiana Jones in the snake pit, or the factory-chimney-sized anaconda in the imaginatively named Anaconda. Think of Snakes on a Plane (what is it about snake movies that cripples the imagination of the people who think up the titles?).

Sometimes the phobia goes to the very limits of creative horror. I was once summoned across London at four in the morning to assist a friend who couldn’t go to bed. A visitor had left, on her bed, a copy of the National Geographic magazine which she knew contained, somewhere, a picture of a snake; she was unable to enter the bedroom until I had come and removed it from her flat. That’s how bad snake-horror can be.

Count me out.
I love snakes. I admire their ancient silence, the flicker of their tongues as they taste the air, the sheen on a rainbow boa, dull dun indoors but, in the sunlight, iridescent, like petrol on water. I love the shape of their heads and the precision of their movements.

On the web you can find a photograph of the king cobra breeder and conservationist Luke Yeomans of Nottinghamshire, holding an adult male. It’s arched forward, stretching out from his hand. It is an amazing animal.

Yeomans wanted to create a ‘living ark’ for them, and spoke of his ‘lifetime love’ and his concern that this “end-of-the-line, apex predator” could eventually disappear from the wild.

Yeomans had intended to open his snake sanctuary to the public today. But, the apex predator lived up to his name, struck at him, and he died. For a man who had devoted 30 years to these magnificent animals, it was a strangely glorious way to leave the planet, and indeed, such a death would lead to his instant apotheosis.

My own favourite snake was a reticulated python called Betty. Betty was a constrictor, a relatively merciful snake which suffocates its prey (some species slowly swallow their luncheon alive), not just by the standards of snakes but by the standards of most predators. Dogs rip the guts out of their prey; cats play terrible, agony-prolonging games with theirs. Yet we welcome them into our homes and called them “Good boy!” and snuggle up to them in the evening as we watch Simon Cowell.

But if you’ve never snuggled up to 18 feet of python (not that big; they can grow to almost 30 feet long) you’ve never snuggled. And the knowledge that your snugglee could, without effort, eat Simon Cowell’s head adds a strange feeling of peace to the proceedings.

But an affection for, and admiration of, snakes is a tricky thing to admit. It’s a pit-bull sort of species in the popular imagination; a slavering, well-dodgy bastard biding its time.

People who keep snakes have tattoos, hang out on BDSM websites, live in Arizona trailer homes, ride motorcycles and hold up liquor stores. Or otherwise they live alone in an apartment in New York with 75 venomous snakes and eventually, when life gets too much for them (or, perhaps, not enough), they end it all, as Aleta Stacey is thought to have done last week by allowing a black mamba to bite her, and doing nothing to save themselves from death.

We mistake snakes for primitives, as though they are so steeped in ancient evil they haven’t even evolved legs. But we’re wrong; evolution has created the snake by taking away the legs of a proto-lizard, and their literally serpentine form is not crudity, but sophisticated adaptation.

Nor are they in any sense evil. They are simply snakes.

Giving out the speech day prizes at a well-known prep school last year, I was taken to see the snake club, which was a club devoted to snakes.

The biology master handed me a strong, healthy serpent which immediately swarmed up my arm, around my neck, down my other arm, laid its head on my wrist, and began to lick the back of my hand. This, for a herpetophile, is as flattering as it gets.
He then – the biology master, not the snake – told me that the journalist James Delingpole had been to visit the school for his young son. Delingpole, he said, was another snake bloke, but he and my snake didn’t hit it off. In fact, the snake bit Delingpole in the face and wouldn’t let go until it felt the point had been made. “What was interesting,” said the snake master, “was that he sent his son here anyway. As if he thought, yup, they’ve got snakes who bite your face, that’s the place for my boy.”

One has, of course, one’s limits. In the Australian outback once, I had a king brown – known locally, with laconic pastoral accuracy as the “fierce snake” – in my hat. My hat.

I wish I could tell you how fast a startled fierce snake can shift, but I was too busy shifting myself in the opposite direction to notice.

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