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[The typical Indian male attitude to snakes is to kill them, while the female one is to worship them or despise them outright. All are anyway plain scared of snakes. Zai Whitaker, daughter of naturalist Zafar Futehally, niece of the famous ornithologist Salim Ali and wife of Romulus Whitaker (the American herpatologist who has made India his home) writes about the fallacious knowledge that we have of snakes. Ed] FRIENDS and relatives always seem to have fantastic stories to tell about snakes. “This one can sting with its tail,” or “That one strikes at people’s eyes and pecks them out”. If you don’t know very much about a subject, it is easy to believe anything strange. But when you learn about the natural history of snakes, you realise how ridiculous such stories are. For instance, many people believe that snakes drink milk. At the Snake Park [in Guindy, Chennai] visitors have sometimes brought pitchers of milk for the snakes — which I have to admit — went into the staff coffee. A very thirsty snake may take a sip of milk, but it is certainly not a natural food for snakes. Where would snakes get milk in the wild? You might as well say that tigers drink orange juice! But, people may argue that snakes suckle milk from cows and goats. What they seem to forget is that snakes have extremely sharp teeth and no cow would stand for that. Another popular and untrue myth is that cobras mate with rat snakes. Snakes mate only with their own kind. There may be cases of cross breeding in captivity, but it is not a natural occurrence. These myths do a lot of harm to snakes. The easily tamed, kind-looking vine snake is feared everywhere for its supposed habit of pecking out people’s eyes. In Tamil, it is called kannukuthi pambu (eye-pecking snake). One day when my husband Rom was holding a vine snake, telling a group of children that it was harmless, it turned around and bit him on the nose! “It’s not an eye-pecker, it’s a nose-pecker,” yelled the delighted children. The bronzeback tree snake, which very rarely bites and is not venomous, is associated with another absurd belief: that after biting someone, it climbs a high tree nearby and waits for the funeral of its victim! Such stories are told and retold, often even by the educated. The snake does not have a brain that can think beyond feeding, resting and avoiding enemies. All this it does by instinct. It cannot think ahead or plan like human beings can. It is therefore wrong to attribute complex emotions like revenge and jealousy to snakes. Snakes have small, simple brains which tell them when to chase a rat, where to find water — nothing more complicated. Myths about snakes exist in other countries too. In America, people talk about the hoop snake. They say it puts its tail in its mouth and becomes like a hoop or wheel and chases people down hills. Like Indians, many Americans too believe that all snakes are venomous. There is often a fairly simple explanation for the origins of myths about snakes. Perhaps once a harassed vine snake struck someone’s eye. Not that the soft, pointed nose could do any damage, but that could have given rise to the eye-pecking story. The widespread belief that if you kill a snake, its mate will return to the same spot to take revenge, may be attributed to the fact that all snakes have musk, which is released when the snake is excited. If killed or injured the snake releases its musk and a nearby snake may smell it and come to investigate. It certainly hasn’t come to attack the person who killed the snake! There are several beliefs about snakes making people sick. It is wrongly said that sand boas cause leprosy. The only way to learn about snakes is to check your facts from a book or from a person who has studied snakes. Zai Whitaker |
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