India has 275 species of snakes, more than any other country on the planet. Every year over one million Indians are bitten. In an effort to reduce the estimated 20,000-50,000 fatalities, herpetologist Romulus Whitaker is launching an India-wide initiative to educate people about its oldest, most iconic and most misunderstood residents. Travelling throughout India, he introduces the huge variety of vipers, cobras and kraits that inhabit every niche of the subcontinent, from the seas and deserts to the rain-forests and the Himalayan alpine habitats. He delves into the evolutionary past to explain our primordial fear of them, looks at the myths and customs which have grown up around them, and reveals why anti-venom is so often ineffective.
Romulus Whitaker needs no introduction —so well-known is he as a herpetologist and wild life conservationist who founded the Snake Park and the famous Madras Crocodile Bank Trust on the East Coast Road. The Sony BBC Earth channel is premiering an exciting series called ‘India’s Deadliest Snakes’ on February 25 and none could have been more apt to take part in the educational and instructive show on the mystical snakes of India.
Tell me something about your initial life before snakes happened?
That goes pretty far back, I was four years old when I caught my first snake and prior to that I don’t have any memories. But I’ll give you a little background; I was raised in northern New York State until I was seven years old and then came to India. I had a very kind and wonderful mother, so when I first brought a snake home, luckily it was non- venomous, she said “how beautiful, let’s keep it!” So that was my first introduction to snakes. You can imagine it was quite thrilling to be four years old and having caught a snake and to be told “yeah, keep it”.
How did ‘The King and I’ happen?
As you can imagine, the King Cobra is considered as an iconic snake, and it is the largest of all the venomous snakes in the world. But quite surprisingly it’s a very gentle snake and it gets very frightened of humans unlike all the over the top stories about King Cobra that people tend to exaggerate. It’s a really wonderful animal which I wanted to learn much more about and so I started studying them in Karnataka and we even did a radio telemetric project which we are starting again next week just to find out what the secret life of King Cobra is all about as we know very little about them. Sometimes we are called to catch one in somebody’s house, we catch it and gently put it in a bag and take it to the forest to release it but that’s it, and it’s gone. And then we don’t know anything about it. But using radio telemetry we can follow these snakes around, night or day we know exactly what it’s doing what it eats, how it mates, how it fights between males, whether it climbs a tree or whether it swims. We can know all its secrets which is wonderful.
Indians have a lot of misconceptions regarding reptiles and these misconceptions stem from the folklores and myths. How difficult is it to eradicate such misconceptions and educate them?
It has been a part of my job as every time I hear some nonsense about snakes I quickly come up and say “hey, no that’s wrong, you need to get your facts right.” Unfortunately people will tell you that that’s what their grandfather told them. But you need to be very diplomatic and tell them that actually this is the real facts about snakes, they eat rats, they are very valuable, they don’t go looking for people and they don’t take revenge. So it’s been a lifelong job teaching people the right things about snakes.
Why do you think anti-venom is so often ineffective?
Right now the anti-venom that is made in India is one quarter as strong as it was in the 1950’s. For some reason or the other, it’s much weaker than it used to be. And the problem is not so much with the anti-venom, but getting it to the people and the people have to know about it and accept it as an emergency measure to treat snake bites. I think people are still not aware that snake bite is a medical emergency like a heart attack or an accident. But when a snake bites, there are usually several hours of nothing happening and people try all sorts of remedies like mantras and herbal medicines and then they go to the hospital but unfortunately it’s already too late. So teaching people about the right facts about snake bites is very important to save lives.
Tell me something about the snake park in Chennai. What did you have in mind while setting it up?
I worked in the US before I came to India, at a place called the Miami Serpentarium, it was the largest venom production centre in the world and it was wonderful because we had all sorts of reptiles there to educate people. I had grown up in India and thought to myself that I live in the land of snakes but there’s no place here that people can come to and learn about snakes. In fact, they usually hear stories from snake charmers and people like that who give you all sorts of lies and rubbish. The idea was to set up a snake park in India that would educate people about these reptiles.
Could you share something on the series ‘India’s Deadliest Snakes’ and what do you want to convey to the viewers through this?
It is important to get people’s attention and not to scare people about snakes but to make them respect snakes and to understand that although a snake does not want to bite you but if you go around without using a torch at night or you place your hands or feet stupidly into a pile of bushes where snakes might live, because the snakes get very frightened and bites in self defence. So I think the main message of this show is to tell people that, “look snakes are not there to get you, but you have to be careful when you are in a snake’s habitat. You have to look where you are walking and you have to be very careful.”
