Venom Culture

 I've never worked with massasaguas, but I have worked with their even more diminutive cousin, the pygmy rattlesnake.  Despite all the time I've spent in zoo reptile houses, it's actually one of the few venomous reptile species I've worked with, so the little guys made quite an impression on me.

The pygmy rattlesnake is probably as good of a starter venomous snake as any other for a trainee keeper – well, probably a lot better than most. Its venom isn’t terribly potent – not saying that you should line up to get bitten, but if you do, the impact should be relatively mild. They’re sluggish, as crotalids tend to be, so less likely to pull a fast move on you. They’re small, which makes it easy to stay out of reach when servicing the exhibit – though their smallness has its disadvantages to, as they don’t sit on a hook terribly well, and tend to flop off. And, like all rattlesnakes, they’re considerate enough to (usually) give you a warning when they’re irked with you – though in this case, it’s of dubious benefit. The buzz of their tiny tails is so faint that I feel like your ear almost has to be within striking range to hear it.

At the two non-AZA zoos where I worked with this species, I was surprised (well, not really) to find that very few keepers were willing to actually work with them. This was brought to my attention when I realized that, when servicing the rattlesnakes for the first time in several days (I’d been rotated to another section), the water bowls were dry and there was a decent amount of poop and urate. I had similar experiences with tarantulas and scorpions at one of those zoos, with many keepers opting out of servicing those exhibits. To me, this screamed “management failure.” If a zoo director or curator wants a species, they need to make sure that they have sufficient staff trained and willing to take care of those species. If not, then perhaps that animal isn’t a good fit for the zoo.

To be fair, none of us were ever actually trained on venomous snakes – I had some experience and familiarity from previous AZA facilities, but it was hardly my forte, and my colleagues had none at all. That was a potential disaster in its own right. Proper training should describe not only how to safely handle or restrain/transport a snake, but how to respond in the case of a bite, from securing the animal to alerting staff and medical personnel to first aid precautions. It should also work to shape a culture of safety working around venomous animals – not handling them unnecessarily, what is acceptable versus unacceptable risk.

I’ll talk for a quick second about venom culture in American zoos. It’s really not one culture, per se, and can be highly variable based on several factors, the main one, in my experience, being geographic. Especially in the American South, my experience has been you see a keeper culture which is a bit more reckless and wild with venomous reptiles than you see in, say, the more staid northeast. Among these keepers (including some that I worked alongside for some time), there’s almost an addiction to the danger of working with venomous snakes, with safety precautions being deemed for sissies. “It’s like heroin,” one assistant curator told me, not explaining to me where his understanding of heroin came from. “You work with hot snakes, and soon you need more and more dangerous situations to get the thrill.” 

And this was a guy who certainly was adept at working venomous snakes. On a day when he was planning to clean the black mamba exhibit, I asked him if he’d mind if I took some pictures, and he agreed. I stood there, camera at the ready (this was pre-cellphone cameras) as he opened the back of the cage – and almost before I could even snap one photo, he’d opened the cage with one snakestick, hooked the mamba in one fluid motion, and transferred into a waiting trashcan, then plopped the lid on, seemingly in the blink of an eye.

eyelash viper

inside, which he had been trying to feed. The lid of the tank was off. He’d grown drowsy sitting their trying to coax the little snake to strike, and the heat of the building and the droning of life support systems had lulled him to sleep. I crept up and plopped the lid on the tank.
You always had to be careful, even if you weren’t the keeper. For example, one day someone rearranged the rack of Neodeshsas on my day off, and when I came back, what had once been a row of various Asian rat snakes was now home to Philippine and Samar cobras. The keys were all the same (probably not the best idea, in retrospect) so if I’d been working on autopilot, I might have opened a cage front and gotten a nasty surprise. Likewise, you could never be 100% sure if a trash can was empty, or held a snake, put your hands on a screen lid to steady yourself, and have a snake strike you through it, or who knows what. I was once cleaning a floor drain when I felt something sharp. When I jerked my hand out, there was an old bushmaster fang sticking into my finger.

Having been used to working in a building full of so many dangerous species, the pygmy rattlesnakes years later seemed like slightly nippy kielbasas.

My goal as their keeper was to maintain them to the same standard of care as the non-venomous snakes – with some safety modifications, as needed. Water got changed just as often. Poop was collected just as often; when one of our keepers was too scared to shift the snake, I duct-taped a large serving spoon to a broomstick so she could scoop out the poop. Weighed just as often. Enclosures done just as lavishly with furniture (I’ve seen some zoos in which venomous snakes have much starker enclosures than non-venomous species as a safety protocol – fewer hiding places, less clutter than a keeper could get entangled with, etc). A snake didn’t “decide” to be venomous, I told new keepers. Being venomous doesn’t mean they deserve a lesser standard of care. Fortunately, I see this viewpoint being shared more and more often in zoos around the US, and feel we’re starting to see better standards of snake care.