Torturing Snakes for Fun and Profit

Update: Serendipity is a funny thing. Just a few hours after I posted this, I noticed that the University of Georgia Law Student Animal Defense Fund Chapter is highlighting a campaign by the Center for Biological Diversity to make rattlesnake roundups illegal in Georgia. If you live in Georgia, please take a second to sign on to their effort, and even if you don't live in Georgia, they have a pretty solid sample letter that you can use to start the fight against rattlesnake roundups where you live.

By the time the audience gets settled down and the barrels are rolled out, most of the snakes couldn't attack if they wanted to. They're starved and weakened, dehydrated, half-suffocated. Sometimes, they're completely suffocated, because there isn't a lot of air when you're at the bottom of the tank, locked in and trapped under the bodies of dozens like you.

Welcome to a rattlesnake roundup, where you can get up close and personal with hundreds of rattlesnakes that have been gassed out of their burrows.

What happens there can be sickening. The snakes' rattles are ripped off while the snake is still alive and passed out to kids as souvenirs. Other snakes are decapitated in front of the crowd. Some have liquor poured down their throats, or are burned with cigarettes. They're kicked and stomped. Pregnant females are especially popular.

As near as history can tell, rattlesnake roundups started in Oklahoma in the 1930s and 1940s. The practice spread to the Southeast, especially South Georgia and North Florida, where there were plenty of Eastern Diamondbacks rattlers. Nowadays, the show continues in Alabama and Georgia but thanks to continuing habitat encroachment by humans, rattlers are a little bit harder to find. It's not an insurmountable problem for roundup promoters. Just head out into the woods, find a gopher tortoise burrow (Eastern Diamondbacks live with gopher tortoises) and douse it liberally with gasoline. The half-stunned snakes come out of the burrow, you scoop them up, throw them in a box, and transport them to the show — and let the games begin. (The burrows remain uninhabitable for years.)

No bloodsport is without its defenders, usually people who stand to make money off letting people watch animals die. The biggest line you'll hear is that rattlers are dangerous and that this is somehow a public service. Rattlers are dangerous -- to their prey. But if you're reading this, you're not rattlesnake prey. Given an option, an Eastern Diamondback would much rather simply run away than attack anything too big to swallow whole.

Roundup promoters also like to point out that sometimes, their proceeds go to local charities. That may be true, but it doesn't excuse the barbarism of a rattlesnake roundup. Ever heard of a bake sale or a car wash?

Some communities are catching on. A paper on roundups [pdf] by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists praises San Antonio, Florida, for doing away with the wholesale slaughter of snakes in favor of using rattlesnakes and other species in an environmental awareness effort.

Despite the positive trend, the practice continues in some places, and it needs to be stopped. It could easily be handled legislatively, on the state or federal level. In fact, one part of the process is already technically illegal — using gasoline on Gopher Tortoise burrows. The rest of the cruelty can be made illegal with a simple bill.

When it comes down to it, the rattlesnake roundup is every bit as cruel and inhumane as cockfighting, dogfighting, or shooting down wolves from the safety of a helicopter.  While we continue to make strides in putting those bloodsports down for good, we should take a minute and think about rattlesnake roundups while we're at it.

Photo credit: mherzber