Thanks for Snakes
By Frederick Boyce
.•'4
An elderly black racer allows itself to be cradled gently by the
author.—Photo by Amanda Goble
Someone suggested that I make the theme of the November article “Giving
Thanks for Snakes,” so jiist to get things rolling and see if I could maybe find .
a few ideas beyond the most obvious ones, I did a Google search for “Reasons
to be Thankful for Snakes.” The first thing that came up was something like:
“Thanksgiving—Time to be Thankful that Snake Season is Over!” Ouch!
Well, that rather sums up much of my life right there, being on a different
page fhan the bulk of humanity on this issue—but I really can t change what
I know from firsthand experience to be true, nor would I want to. And what
I know to be
true is that
snakes are
truly fantastic .
beasts—
marvelous,
lithe, graceful,
colorful
and, despite
having the
same basically
limbless form,
incredibly
diverse animals
with nearly
3,500 species
being grouped
into over 20 families. They have done an exquisite job of adapting their very
simple design to every habitat on earth, except for the very coldest regions and a
few islands.
Snakes live in mountains and coastlands, trees and caves, swamps and rivers,
deserts and oceans. They are all predators, and the majority of them tend to prey
upon things that are not really our friends and which definitely do not have our
best interests at heart. As long as humans have practiced agriculture, we have
been laboring to cultivate and store enormous amounts of food for... rodents.
Rodents not only move in and eat our food, they despoil what they do not eat
and spread harmful, even deadly, diseases such as Hantavirus, Lyme disease and
the bubonic plague. Far more people have fallen victim to rodent-borne diseases
than to venomous snakebite. My father was very protective of the large black rat
snakes on our farm, as he knew they were basically smart, self-propelled and
highly motivated mouse traps, which not only dispatched destructive rodents
but got rid of them entirely, turning them into very high-quality fertilizer.
Rodents can quickly learn to avoid traps or poison baits, but snakes, their
ancient and implacable adversaries, are relentless in their pursuit and, unlike
cats, are able to follow rodents right down their tunnels or between walls and
wipe out entire nests.
Snakes do not destroy property, nor do they alter the environment. They live
very gently on the earth, making use of shelter opportunistically rather than
constructing their own. The pine snake of the sandhills is the only one of our
The Shoreline I November 2019
5-1
native snakes to actually dig a burrow, which the mother snake creates in order
to lay and guard her eggs.
My own mother always claimed that our house was never broken into
because it was widely known to be “full of snakes.” Indeed, my older brother
had it well stocked with snakes (and other creatures) by the time I came along,
so I never saw them as being creepy or scary or indeed any different from other
animals. I may have been in kindergarten before I began to realize that most
people did not live in houses that were “full of snakes.”
I am thankful for all the great stories they provided, such as the time our pet
boa constrictor escaped while I was at school and disrupted my mothers bridge
club (which was constantly being disrupted at our house because of some sort
of animal), or the time my mother bent down to pick up what she thought was
one of my father s shoelaces that turned out to be a baby corn snake. It came
alive in her hand and sent her screaming up the bed-post, even though she
was generally quite
tolerant of snakes
when not caught off
guard. She had a very
sensitive nose and
therefore was not
fond of having small
mammals or birds
in the house, but
snakes are virtually
odorless when well
cared for, so they
appealed to her
greatly. Conversely,
a monkey that my
brother brought
home was evicted
after only one day.
As for my brother,
he worked his way
through college
performing live
rattlesnake milking
shows at various
road-side attractions,
such as Serpent City
in Myrtle Beach,
in the early 1970s
(a different era for
sure), and eventually
graduated first in his class from the University of Georgia Veterinary School. He
was always quick to thank rattlesnakes for his education and subsequent career
in veterinary medicine and could also be thankful that he was never once bitten,
though he had handled and squeezed venom from thousands of them. In fact,
there are countless people working in the sciences, not just herpetology, but in
all of the natural science fields, as well as in medicine, who. started out keeping a
pet snake or two (or perhaps many) as a child. Children are naturally fascinated
by these mysterious “forbidden” creatures, and as such, snakes (and other
(Continued on page 4)
Lockhart Boyce, brother of the author, holding a large eastern
diamondback rattlesnake at Serpent City, c. 1973.
—Photo by Don Alford