The Dreadful Hoop Snake
By Frederick Boyce
The king cobra, the longest and arguably most intelligent of all venomous
snakes, is the only snake that actually constructs a nest of vegetation for its eggs.
Both parents guard the nest, and they will readily chase humans and anything
else, even tigers and elephants, out of their nesting area. They do not specifically
choose to terrorize people—they are simply protecting their young, the right of
any creature.
Aside from this one possible exception, snakes do not chase people. That
bears repeating; snakes do not chase people. Period. I have spent much of the past
50-plus years chasing after every kind of snake you might think of (and many
more you might not) and have given them every opportunity (and every reason)
to chase me. Not one, not a single one, has ever done anything that I could even
remotely construe as “chasing” me, and this absolutely includes many hundreds
of both cottonmouths (or “water moccasins”) and black racers, the two species
that are most often falsely accused of chasing people.
Many snakes are indeed capable of putting on some mighty impressive
defensive displays that are entirely bluff and bluster, and I can easily see how
these Academy-award-winning performances might scare the wits out of
someone who is already afraid of snakes, and therefore likely to be unfamiliar
with their ways. But... chase? Seriously?
To me, the word “chase” entails running for your life. I was once chased by a
pack of vicious attack dogs, and that was truly a frightening experience. I ran
faster than I ever thought I could and narrowly escaped being mauled. Now that
is being chased, and about 6 to 10 times as many people are killed by dogs as by
snakes each year in the U.S.
Snakes, on the other hand, are actually much better at escaping from me—
diving quickly into cover, disappearing down a crack or hole, into water or an
impenetrable thicket. I have often wished that they would chase me. But even if
they did, I have yet to meet a snake that I couldn’t outdistance in just a few steps.
It is very simple: you see, snakes have no legs. I have two. More to the point,
however, snakes have absolutely nothing to gain from chasing a human, and in
the natural world, the behavior of organisms is geared toward survival. Chasing
a person would be suicidal for a snake, and thus an inherently maladaptive
behavior that would have long ago been settled by natural selection.
Snakes are simple animals that run on simple programs that they cannot
change or modify. They are secretive, private creatures that live in their own little
worlds and have no time or inclination to plot the downfall of people. They truly
want to have nothing at all to do with us. We are not prey—we are a potential
threat. A snake’s survival instincts are to respond to a threat by fleeing or, in
some cases, by trying to escape with a bluffing display of bravado, or even by
playing dead. People, however, apparently have a very strange and inborn need '
to believe that snakes will chase them. To fill this need, in the absence of any
real snakes that chase people, they did what people normally do and invented
one—the mythical hoop snake.
This beast reputedly takes its own tail in its mouth, forming a sort of snake
hula-hoop, in which shape it can presumably move much faster than any actual
snake, rolling after its hapless human victims like a crazed wheel Since it is.
A*?;
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Wm;
Mud snakes are large black snakes with a pink beWy.—Photos by Fred Boyce
after all, a snake, the hoop snake, of course, has to be “deadly poisonous”—but
rather than having the usual front-mounted fangs of any real venomous snake,
the hoop snake’s delivery system is a stinger located in the end of its tail. Just
as this dreadful creature is about to overtake its victim, it is said, it suddenly
straightens itself out, stiff as a board, and becomes a sort of javelin, flying tail-
first through the air and jabbing its deadly stinger into the poor unfortunate
soul, who, of course, dies instantly. The only way to escape this fate, it is said, is
to suddenly leap behind a tree so that the pursuing snake jabs itself into the tree
instead (where it promptly dies, further testifying to the virulence of hoop snake
venom). It seems to me as if another obvious way to defeat a hoop snake would
be to simply run uphill, but the matter of its propulsion is never discussed. I
can’t believe that they would be very effective in the flatlands (and I’m sure they
would need to let out some air and get a permit to drive on the beach).
In the U.S., the hoop snake myth is most commonly associated with the Pecos
Bill stories, but there is a description of one in a letter dating from 1784, and
it comes up in both Canadian and Australian folklore. There is also an ancient
Greek symbol, the ouroboros, depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.
The pointy, but completely
harmless, tip of a mud
snake’s tail.
In Japanese folklore there is a “snake-like being” known as the tsuchinoko that is
also said to take its tail in its mouth and roll like a hoop.
With typical injustice, the snake long thought to be the model for this horror
story in the U.S. is among the most harmless, imassuming and mild-mannered
creatures you could ever hope to meet—the humble mud snake, Farancia
.The StareHM ( August2019.
(Continued on page 6)