India's "Snake Savior" Protects People, Reptiles

Brian Handwerk
National Geographic News

Updated March 12, 2003

India is home to many dangerous snake species and more than one billion
people. Increasingly, these two groups are coming into contact as
India's growing population pushes into once-wild forests that serve as
prime snake habitat.

While human encounters with cobras, vipers, and pythons can prove fatal, more often than not it is the snakes that are killed. The often-feared animals have no voice of their own, but they do have at least one energetic and determined protector. For over a decade, animal welfare activist Snehal Bhatt has championed the cause of India's reptile residents—and taught her fellow Indians how to save both themselves and the country's snakes. She's done it by meeting snakes face to face.

Saving People from Snakes, and Vice-Versa

Bhatt once worked as a social worker, but she decided that animals need her help more than humans. "We are talking for someone who cannot talk for themselves," she explained to the National Geographic Channel.

In 1989, Bhatt began her animal rescue work, intervening in human-animal encounters to help avert the killing of animals where possible. Four years later, she founded the Gujarat Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in her home base of Baroda. Together with her longtime assistant Raj Bhavsar and a group of dedicated volunteers, Bhatt serves on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day—ready to help people who report unwanted encounters with dangerous animals.

While Bhatt's group stands ready to rescue any animal in peril, more than half of their calls involve snakes. Bhatt can often be found at work in towns, forests, and farms—the spaces where snakes and humans often meet.

Bhatt acknowledges people's common aversion to snakes. But she said she does not regard the reptiles differently than other needy animals. "What's the difference in a snake?" she said. "You know, [it] also has life. [It] also feels pain. In fact, I feel better when I risk my life for a snake, because they don't understand, and we do understand. So I'm much more justified when I'm rescuing snakes."

Snakes in India stand to gain from Bhatt's help. Many are killed by rural residents and poachers or maimed by snake charmers.

Awareness Key to Human-Snake Harmony

Most residents of Indian villages don't actively seek to harm snakes. But they will kill what they regard as a dangerous threat when they encounter a dangerous snake in a well or backyard.

However, Bhatt and her colleagues stand by ready to remove and relocate snakes for village residents in the Gujarat region of western India. Before her work is done, Bhatt will also try to teach residents a little bit about snake behavior and the actual threats posed by the often misunderstood animals.

Bhatt believes education is a key to easing human fears and violence toward snakes. To spread the snake gospel, Bhatt and her volunteers often put on what they call "snake shows" to acquaint people with their reptile neighbors.

"Through the snake shows, we want to achieve a closer relationship between man and snake," Bhatt told the National Geographic Channel. "Only if we educate them, if we create awareness amongst them, then they'll stop killing snakes. If they could touch the snake, if they can see it up close, maybe they can identify, and they will let it go."

Snehal seeks to enlist other Indians to join her in the fight against snakes' most dangerous human enemies in India—poachers and snake charmers.

Snake Charmers Prove Deadly for Reptile Charges

Poachers illegally trade in snakes such as the Indian python, slaughtering the snake for their skin. The python today is an endangered species.

Bhatt directs her most venomous anger at snake charmers. Snake charmers defang their animals to avoid lethal bites while still giving the impression they are handling deadly snakes. Defanging often leads to the premature death of the snake. Despite laws against both unlicensed ownership of a cobra and defanging, snake charmers still perform in India.

"The fangs are simply cut out very crudely with a knife and just at the fang base where they grow out of the mandibular bone," said Rom Whitaker of Draco Films. Whitaker has long studied the practices of Indian snake charmers. "More sophisticated are the charmers who slice the venom gland and leave the fangs intact. It's a ruse to show that the snake is not defanged," said Whitaker. The gland then atrophies if it doesn't rot away.

In the neglectful care of such tricksters, a snake's prospects for health are not good.

Bhatt hopes that by exposing the charmers' ruses, and explaining how they hurt their animals, she can dry up support for snake charmers in the villages where they ply their trade. Bhatt's ultimately seeks to put the charmers out of business.

As for captured snakes, Bhatt and her volunteers release them into the wilderness in the hope that their human encounters will be at an end.

"When I release the animals back into the wild areas, I really feel as if I've given a mother its child back," she said. "I feel like I've done my duty to mankind as well as nature."

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