May 9, 2016 • 54 mins
Snake handling ranges from professional snake milkers for antivenin to religious handlers who tend to get bitten and sometimes die from it. Either way, it can be a dangerous business. Learn all about snake handling right here, right now.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start
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ten percent off squar Space. Set your website apart. Welcome
to you Stuff you should know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
(00:26):
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.
And my hair is now a fourth character. Laughed at
my hair. Everybody, Well, if my beard can be the
fourth character, your hair could be the fifth. Oh really, yeah,
we need Actually, Jerry's got great hair. She does have
nice hair, stylish salt and pepper, Amy Goodman level tasteful
(00:51):
salt and pepper. I'm not sure what that means, Amy
Goodman from Democracy Now, it's very tasteful salt and pepper hair.
Maybe that's the thing. It is clearly between Jerry and
Amy Goodman. It's the thing that beats shoe polish black. Yeah,
you know, like trickling down your forehead. Yeah, but what
(01:13):
makes you happy? You know? Well, sure, if you don't,
whatever makes you feel good, Yeah, I should, Uh, I
should get some of that beer. Blackener and coming into
my beard and come in with like that jet black
Beard and Clyde Drexeler will show up at your house,
urge you one. But isn't he in the ads? Yeah? Really?
(01:34):
Former Portland Trailblazer are great. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's
Clyde Drexeler. Wow, I think I'm gonna have to check
this out. It's him. And who was the one? I
think Keith Hernandez. I was gonna say the one that
Kramer spit on or that got spit that spit on Kramer.
I think it's Keith Hernandez and Clyde Drexeler. And then
just for men commercial, well there's our freed package. Are
(01:58):
just for men coming our way now, which we should
say thanks again again to Crown Royal. Man, you say
you like Crown Royal, they send you something, you say,
you drank it, and they send you more. I know,
it's pretty awesome. I'm brushing my teeth with this stuff now.
My lifestyle is improved for the better. Pretty neat. Thank
you dudes. Uh So, I was just discussing before we
(02:21):
record it. I said, it's going to be hard to
record a show on snake handling, and I'm talking about
the religious aspect of it without sort of like I
fear for their safety. And I want to say you
people are crazy. A lot of people do, but um,
we have a long standing tradition of like to each
(02:41):
their own. I just you know, I hate seeing people
die from doing something completely preventable. Yeah, you definitely do.
But handling rattlesnakes and kissing them on the face. From
from what I've seen of this or from what I've researched,
I've not actually seen somebody handle snakes in person. Um,
but from what I've researched, the people who handle snakes
(03:03):
are doing it through total and complete faith. And uh,
there's even if you did judge them, I think it
kind of rolls off their back quite a bit. So
it's not so much judgment. It's just like, no, it's not.
I'm telling you this is what is it my opinion,
(03:24):
and I'm judging your opinion. Oh that's what you meant
by its judgment? No, Okay, now it's not judgment. I
just I hate see people get hurt, Nina, uh and die.
Have you ever seen somebody handle snakes? You had a
religious upbringing, Well, yeah, this is rare though. This is Yeah,
it is Appalachian foothills stuffy, I know, but I mean
(03:45):
like Atlanta. We're in Georgia. I didn't know if you
ever took like a field trip or something like there.
You know that's you have no idea how church works
that there are a lot of field trips. No, I
got you. In fact, you don't go to other churches.
You're not supposed to do that. Oh really, yeah, he
stay at your own church. You don't go and field
(04:06):
trips to other churches? Are there like inner faith banquets
and stuff like that. Yeah, we had a field day right,
all the churches in the county. No, I suppose other
churches get together with as suppose to. Some gett together
with other churches. But that wasn't my experience. Typically frowned
on in New York. You just keep it in the house.
Although we would go to the big youth conferences, all
(04:29):
sorts of youth groups together. That's the field trip. Yeah,
I'll just kids thrown in the big gymnasiums, struggling to
fight their hormonal urges, going you believe what? So, No,
I've never done it. I didn't ask if you've done it,
I need. I've never witnessed it. I've never been anywhere
near it. Okay, although I I have a strange feeling, Chuck,
(04:50):
that it's possible we've both been near it just from
living in Georgia all these years without knowing it. Because yeah,
people who handle snakes um religious. It's actually called um
holiness serpent handling. Is that correct? Uh? Yeah, they say
serpent instead of snake. Yeah, and it has to be
a venomous snake to be considered a serpent. But for
(05:13):
holiness serpent handling um. Until two thousand and fourteen, it was.
They kept a pretty tight lid on it for many,
many decades. Who the the handlers, Yeah, the people who, um,
who practice this as part of their religious beliefs. Yeah,
and I think still even most of them are pretty
media shy. You'll see the occasional interview when someone dies,
(05:36):
they'll go knocking on the doors and they'll give an
interview to explain like why they do what they do.
But of course there was a TV show which really,
I mean, you know, you're clearly not media show if
you're doing a reality show. No, it's it was called
Snake Salvation and sorry not two fourteen, but two thirteen
it was on nat g O and it was all
about snake handling for religious reasons, and um, one of
(05:59):
the main eyes on the show ended up dying. He
didn't die on the show, but he died the next
year from a rattlesnake bite after it went off the air. Yeah,
it was only on for one season. But his name
was Pasty pastor Jamie Coots, and he and another guy
UM named I believe Steven Amblen are They are holiness
(06:19):
serpent handlers who believe in kind of bringing it out
of the shadows and into the Christian mainstream. Good luck. Yeah,
if you're if you're at all interested in that concept,
you should read even unto Death. It was in the
Chettanooga Free Press. It's a pretty good examination of that
whole movement and those guys in particular. I guess we
(06:40):
should talk a little bit about other kinds of snake
handling first though, Yeah, because when you see snake hangler,
I'm sure when people saw this the title of this episode,
they just assumed we were talking strictly about um religious
snake handling. Now like other people handle snakes as well,
non religious things. Yeah, they're called herpetologists or some of
(07:03):
them are. These are actually people who study snakes and
amphibians reptiles, and we talked about them on our Snake
Show and I think we dispelled a lot of rumors,
uh not rumors, but myths on the Snake Show, which
come into play when handling snakes, namely that they aren't
out to kill you. Um, but we'll get to that later.
(07:24):
But people display snakes, well, there's a few different categories
of people who handle snakes. There's people who display them
Like you drive through Florida, you might see like a
snake and gator farm where they do snake shows. And
there's a really famous guy we'll talk about a little
more in depth named Bill Host who is like the
man when it comes to that boy, let's see yea uh.
(07:44):
And then there are um, there are people. There are
snake milkers. Of course, there's veterinarians who care for your snakes. Yeah,
which I mean they have to handle snakes. Um. There's
also rescuing recovery people who come gets a snake in
my basement, right, a guy will show up and um,
most likely he's professionally trained at the very least you
(08:07):
would hope that he has a tremendous amount of experience
in handling snakes. Yeah, and they will show up and
you'll say how much does it cost to get the
snake out of my basement? And they'll say how much
you got? I'd like to see your last three bank
account statement please. Um. And in those cases they will
probably you'll probably see what's called an extension tool. Um.
If you've ever seen those tongs or those long uh,
(08:30):
they call it a snake cook sort of a just
a long metal not a prode because they're not product.
Senior adults use it to grab cans off of the
high shelves in their homes. Yeah, it's like that sort of.
I haven't seen them that actually flex and grab. Yeah. Okay,
(08:52):
if you got some money, you're gonna spend it on that.
The ones i've seen are just have a flat uh
you know, it's a long pole and then it has
like an L shaped uh you know, at a right
angle flat piece coming off that they pin the snake with. Um.
I've read this thing about handling snakes safely for like
just normal people or people who are starting out in
(09:13):
the rescue and recovery business. Um. And you can use
just about anything. The key is extension. You want to
put distance between you and the snake. And I want
to say, as a legal disclaimer, I'm not at all
advising anybody to handle a snake. But what I read
was that you want to put as much distance as possible.
(09:34):
So if you have a garden tool and a long one,
use that. But you also would want to use let's
say you have a hope, you would want to turn
your hole upside down and use these, just the wooden
end to manipulate the snake, because you don't want to
hurt the snake. I just want to get rid of it. Right.
I relocated a snake from my backyard a couple of
(09:55):
years ago. What did you use? Use my hands? Oh
my god, it wasn't big. It was, but it wasn't small.
So how did you describe this interaction? Um, I was
cutting the grass and I saw the snake. It was
about a foot long. Did you positively identify it as
non lethal or non venomous? Yeah? It was pretty Yeah,
(10:16):
it was definitely not well. Actually, it had the markings
where it could have been a copper head. It wasn't
just just like a green snake. Right, So he took
a shot of whiskey and approached it. I approached it,
and I did use an implement to um pin it,
but I can't remember what I used. It was something,
you know, blunt and soft. It wasn't you know, an accent,
(10:38):
you know head because like you said, it was you dropping.
What did I use it was? I can't remember. Let's
just say like a wooden paddle. It might have been
a piece of wood actually. And then I did like
I saw on the TV shows. I grabbed it behind
the you know, right behind its head, got a good
(10:59):
hold bit and picked it up and it wrapped around
my wrist and I went and then I ran across
the street like pee wee Herman through it in the wood.
Didn't throw it. I've laid it down in the woods,
into the wood, and it was great. I think it
was a successful catch and release. It sounds like it
you weren't bitten, Yeah, and I don't. I don't. I'm
(11:23):
sure I didn't hurt the snake. Good. Yeah, that sounds
pretty successful. What I was reading in this one UM
article was that you most snakes if you just approached
them calmly. Um, And I guess smoothly is a good
way to put it. Sure, don't lunge at the snake, right,
and also don't be like, oh my god, oh we're
(11:44):
go ahead, right, just kind of come out the snake
and pick it up like it's just a stick in
your yard. It's probably not going to strike you, supposedly
according to this website of which I have no affiliation whatsoever. Yeah,
and I'm not my story. Please do not take that
as that was probably pretty dumb for me to do that. Yeah,
you know, and even if it's non I didn't want it.
(12:07):
I don't want to get bitten by a snake. I
don't care if it's venomous or not. One of my
biggest fears is seeing a snake attach its mouth to
my body. It frightens me. Well, I have to say, also,
this site put pretty plainly, do not ever touch a
snake that you haven't positively identified as non venomous, because yeah,
(12:29):
I mean, if you you could have easily been bitten
and lost your hand or whatever it was. Well, now
I could have getten the hospital pretty quickly. Yeah, I mean,
if you're you know, anti vennon works apparently of the
time if it's gotten to in a timely manner. Yes,
and for the pedants out there, we will say anti
(12:49):
venom and anti venom because both are acceptable. Yes, they
are alright, So chuck, let's take a break right here.
Huh it sounds good. Okay, did I say how how
(13:17):
far a snake can strike? No? Do you know? Uh?
But this is what I've got from the same the
same place that said just go smoothly and casually to
a snake, introduce yourself. Uh. It says that any snake
greater than four ft can typically strike about one third
to one half the distance of its body length. That's
a good rule of thumb. Yeah. Um, A snake between
(13:39):
one and three ft can strike about one half to
two thirds its body length, and then a snake underfoot
can usually strike about its whole body length. Okay, I
would take all those numbers and double them. That's probably
a good idea, just to be safe. Yeah. Of course,
I'm the guy who you know picked up maybe a
copper head, right man, that's scary stuff. You do the
(14:00):
same thing. You don't want to pay a guy? Um? Uh,
you probably I would do with this With this site,
what this site was saying was made a lot of
sense to me. Is like take a take a garbage can,
tip it over on its side, take a shovel, use
the wooden end of it, the handle it and just
kind of get it into the can, turn it over,
put like something on top of the can and then
(14:22):
call somebody. Or you could take the candy, um like
the woods or something that That's probably what I should
have done. In retrospect, I was feeling brave, like those
shots of whiskey, Like I watched enough Nature TV. All right,
I know how this is done. Um. So the last
thing that I think we didn't mention is snake milkers,
(14:43):
which snake venom is very valuable. Um one gram. What
you do is you freeze dry it into a powder.
After you get the liquid, and you sell it to
research labs. Big money, Yeah, one graham. A freeze dried
venom from an exotic snake is can go up to
five grand, but it might take a hundred milkings to
(15:04):
get that much. So do the math. Yeah, is it
worth it? Especially if you love hanging out with snakes
and it's a legit job. You can make you know,
bucks a month or more as a snake milker easily
depending on how many snakes you have that's right. Um.
So there are a lot of people that handle snakes,
(15:26):
but all of them, well, I should say all of
the people who professionally handle snakes have a rule of thumb,
which is don't get hurt, don't be stupid, because there
are two ways that snakes can typically get you. Venomous
snakes obviously inject venom, and that's why people milk snakes
is to get that venom so that they can create
anti venom um so that your life can be saved
(15:50):
if you end up getting bit by a snake, right, um,
and venom is pretty nasty stuff. I think we did
one on like what's the most poisonous animal in the world?
That sounds familiar yea, And we talked a lot about venom,
but it's worth revisiting. Basically, depending on the venom that
you're injected with, it can cause tissue damage wherever it's spread.
(16:11):
And by tissue damage, I mean just completely wipe out
your tissue. And if that is blood vessels, your blood
vessels bleed and you start bleeding internally. If it's a
your liver or your heart, those things start bleeding internally
and end up shutting down. You can have multi system,
multi organ failure, paralysis, respiratory um distress, all sorts of
(16:32):
horrible stuff. If it's on a limb or digit, you
might lose that even if you get the anti venom
time exactly because it's so thoroughly destroys the tissue right,
and it causes a lot of pain too. Like I
was reading about the Texas coral snake, it actually has
this um molecule that opens your the gates to your
(16:54):
pain receptors and just hold them open so that you're
just feeling excruciated, eating unremitting pain. So it's bad stuff.
So you don't want to get bitten by a snake.
You also don't want to mess around with constrictors either,
because they will mess you up as well. Yeah uh
they will, I guess, wrap around you and then suffocates you,
(17:17):
break your back, stop your heart. It's big enough. Sure,
bad news, bad news. So snakes can be dangerous, is
the point. Yes, but again, not to feed into that
anti snake. I'm not trying to start a whacking. No. Um.
So getting back to the milkers, Oh yes, sorry, they
(17:40):
are what's called free handlers. They don't use you would
think like they should just wear anti snake gloves. Um,
but you need to really feel the snake. Um. I
read an interview with the guy that milks snakes for
living and he's like, no, you gotta feel with your skin.
The snakes are really fast, and you know, you have
(18:01):
to react and adjust to every little movement they make.
And even wearing a glove, even a thin glove, I
think club wouldn't help anyway, but a chain mail glove
or kevlar glove would not. You wouldn't be able to
feel what's going on anyway. Incidentally, like crush the snake's head.
They're not exactly made of kevlar themselves. That's true. So
when you're milking a snake, when you're free handling it,
(18:23):
you basically want to hold it the way you did
behind the head, right where the jaws meet, using your
thumb and fore finger. Yes, that is correct, and that
does two things. That keeps the head um from turning
on you. And um, it puts your fingers on the
in your thumb on those venom glands, which is what
(18:44):
they you know, they just kind of massage it. Uh.
You can also use electric stimulus electrical stimulation, but the
traditional way is to just just get a little squeeze
and it'll milk those little glands. Right, But first before
you start squeezing, you want to basically we take the
fangs the front. Yeah, you're not like spraying her on
the room into your hand. You put their fangs through
(19:09):
a membrane on that's pulled over a jar, and then
the venom just pumps out of the fangs into the jar. Yeah.
It's really neat looking. It is looking. It is man agreed. Uh.
And they recommend that if you are milking, if you're
a professional milker, you should have a little buddy with you. Okay,
something goes wrong. It's not a solo job. Really, anytime
(19:31):
you're handling a snake, there should be more than one person. Um. Well,
you know I didn't. That should have called Emily outside,
but she wouldn't let me pick up the snake. I
had to keep it quiet. I think I walked up
to hers like, look at this. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken. Um.
And they say for constrictors, they have a little handy
(19:53):
chart as well for at least one person for every
five feet of snake, unless it's an anaconda or reticulated
python in case in that case, you want every three
feet of snake because those are very heavy snakes. Females
can get up to like two hundred pounds, which is
(20:15):
I saw the Jackass bit the other day again where um,
I think it might have been in a sequel where
they put it's a python or anaconda and one of
those uh pits of a little red balls that kids
jump in and they, you know, Johnny Knoxville and the
gang get in there, and this thing bites. This huge
(20:35):
thing bites Johnny Knoxville like two or three times. And
thing's got the head the size of a baseball, and
it sounds like a Jackass bit. Hey, hey to Lance Banks, Yeah,
speaking of Jackass. Yeah, he was one of the filmmakers
behind that, and we had dinner with him in Portland,
very pleasant dinner. So hello Lance, if you're out there listening. Um,
(20:58):
I can't believe that they did that in it was
it was And he kept getting back in, he kept
getting bit. He's bleeding and he keeps getting back in.
I don't know why this isn't ringing a bell. I'm
sure I've seen Jackass two a bunch of times. You know,
plus Chuck, you also want somebody around any time you're
handling a snake, whether it's a python or a venomu
snake or any snake really, because you want somebody to
(21:19):
call nine one one if something goes wrong. You want
somebody to be able to drive you to the hospital
something goes wrong, or um, if a python is trying
to get around you, they can keep the tail from
fully wrapping around. Um. There's a lot of stuff that
an extra person can do, and things go really horribly
awry when that doesn't happen. There was actually a very
(21:42):
famous case not too many years ago of the Venezuelan zookeeper.
I think it was Venezuela, wasn't it. Um? Who was
I think a grad student working as a zookeeper, and
he or she went into a into a I guess
a python's cage, a ten foot for me's python cage
(22:07):
alone during the night shift, and they found there, probably
just to get something or to give it some food,
just something. I'm sure it was something mundane and losing
your life over And they found the person the next
morning like half swallowed by the python. Oh my lord. Um,
which is so you always want somebody around? Yeah, Um, well,
(22:30):
should we get into the uh, the religious knack handling.
Yeah for sure. All right, well you said it, dude,
It's called holiness serpent handling. And we actually you might
think like, oh, they've done this for millennia um, or
at least since you know, the seventeen eighteen hundreds. No, nope,
(22:51):
we have a definitive start date nineteen ten in Tennessee
the Dolly Pond Church of God in birch Wood, there
was a pre your name George Hensley, and the legend
is that he was having a faith crisis and was
reading Mark from the Bible sixteen eighteen thou shalt take
(23:14):
up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it
shall not hurt them. Oh, that was a good Appalachian preacher. Um.
And so he supposedly turned in saw a snake there
and said, I'm gonna take this quite literally. The Bible
says to take up snakes, so I'm gonna pick it up.
And he picked it up and the snake didn't bite him,
(23:34):
and he said, well, there goes my crisis of faith.
And apparently George Hensley didn't start out a preacher. He
started out an alcoholic who had trouble keeping work. And
once this happened to him, he found his religious calling
and became a preacher in the Pentecostal tradition, and he
actually helped establish this separate group that's kind of within
(23:58):
the Pentecostal religion. Um. But the Church of God of
Signs Following is essentially the sect that he helped found. Yeah.
These are subsets of subsets and subsets of Christianity. Yeah.
And so Hensley's whole philosophy was you read the Bible plainly,
is how he put it, which means, if it says
you pick up snakes, you pick up snakes. It's God's
(24:20):
command to you. If it says you can drink only
any deadly thing and it will not harm you, you're
supposed to do that. Um. All churches are independent, so
you decide whether women can wear pants or not at
your church. Um. And it was about as simple as that,
and it actually took off and became very popular throughout Appalachia.
(24:40):
From the nineteen tents till about the nineteen forties, there
was I think thousands of people who went to these
um Church of God with Signs Following churches. Yeah. And Hensley,
for his own records said that He survived more than
four hundred bytes until nineteen fifty five. He was in
Florida and abandoned. I don't know if it was abandoned,
(25:02):
but it was a blacksmith shop and he was doing
a demonstration and I guess holding a little uh religious
service and um he got bitten and refused treatment because
that's part of the deal is they leave it up
to you. Like Coots us on an interview with him,
and he said, if someone gets bitten, I call the paramedics,
(25:24):
have them come down. And then I say, well, now
you have a choice. You can either too has God
commands and refuse treatment and He'll heal you if you
should be healed, and if it's your time to die,
it's your time to die. Or you can say i'd
like treatment please. UM. But in the tradition of you know,
a true believer, Hensley said no, I don't want treatment.
(25:47):
And he died the next morning. But he survived a
bunch of other bites. Like he said, yeah, he says,
although I lived by the snake, died by the snake
is probably a pretty good UM motto. Do people think
that um holding a serpent? Handlers are either worship the
snakes because they do keep them in in cages on
(26:08):
the altar during services UM or that they UM they're
doing this as a as a show of faith to
basically show, look at how how how much I believe
in God. Apparently this is definitively not the case that
when UM holding a serpent, handlers pick up snakes and
(26:29):
this still goes on. Like there are still churches throughout
Appalachia apparently from Ohio to Florida, UM, where hundreds, if
not a few thousand people uh do this go to
these services. UM when they do it. They don't do
it at every service necessarily, but when they do do it,
it's because they believe they have just been commanded by
(26:51):
God to show their obedience to God by picking up
a serpent and handling it. And when they do it,
it's apparently they just enter into um immediate religious ecstasy. Yeah,
it's like they kind of jump up and down and
maybe speaking tongues and sort of a trance like state. Uh.
I guess we haven't even really described it. I assume
(27:13):
most people have seen this at some point. Look up
a YouTube video. UM, they're not holding the snake by
the back of the head and they are literally just
sometimes there are five and six snakes and they're just
holding them and they're kissing them on the face, they're
rubbing them on their face. They wear them like crowns.
They'll throw them over their shoulders. Um, yeah, they're they're.
(27:34):
The big difference between religious snake handlers and professional snake
handlers is that religious snake handlers go to zero zero
degree to establish any kind of safety precautions. Right, that's
entirely uh an athetical to the point. Yeah, they don't
have anti venom shots standing by in a medical kit.
No they don't. That's one. There's a hundred things that
(27:57):
are different. But sure, I know what you mean. And
so this whole thing was very popular, um among the
Appalachians for a good twenty thirty years, and then the
forties there was a rash of people who died after
being bitten, and all of a sudden, the outside world
started to look in and say, what are you guys doing?
(28:18):
And the authorities were like, we don't think you should
be able to do that. I started to try to
pass laws, but none of them. There actually are laws
that and indirectly prevent people from doing this, And there's
actually some that directly prevent them, I guess in every
Appalachian state except for West Virginia, but they're very rarely
(28:38):
enforced because of religious liberties, right, yeah, religious freedoms. Um.
There have been some raids, uh, notably actually Coots Place.
Coots Place sounds like a sitcom, hanging with Mr Coots.
Coots Church was rated as a part of a series
of stings in two thousand eight under the code names
(28:59):
twice really you're kidding me. Um. In one church they
confiscated snakes and may to arrest and then it Coots
Um Church. I think they got about seventy five snakes
and arrested a few others, including him. But UM, I
don't think they stay in jail very long. UM, I
(29:21):
can't imagine what the penalty is. Well, the grand juries
typically refused to indict them. They might be charged with him,
they might be hauled to jail, but they there. There's
no indictment that's handed down, so they don't go to trial.
But they confiscate the snakes at least yeah, usually because um,
in Tennessee, for example, it's illegal to keep venomous snakes,
and the snakes that they're using are very venomous. They're
(29:44):
deadly cotton mouths, rattlesnakes, um, all sorts of very deadly
venomous snakes. So they're breaking the law just by having
the snakes. But again, um, they're typically left alone as
far as the courts are concerned. And the reason why
you're saying at the beginning of this episode that it's
hard to not just be like stop. Um, I think
(30:07):
the reason why I don't have that much trouble with
this I came to see it differently after doing research
on it. There they have more a's involved with this stuff.
So moray eels more. No, I thought they handled those
two because never require like an aquarium and nobody wants that. Um.
(30:29):
They they have just kind of rules around the whole
thing where you don't go handle a serpent unless you
feel like you have been commanded by God to go
do that right then and you're you're imbued with the
Holy Spirit which is protecting you right then, there's no
pressure whatsoever to go do that. There's actually um discouragement
(30:49):
to do it for any kind of show of faith
or anything like that. Um. And then children are are
banned from doing it. They're not allowed to handle the snakes. Yeah,
in the same way that, like, you're free to walk
into traffic if you want. I find it even less
harmful than that, because you're endangering the other driver's life.
(31:10):
If your hand you're walking into traffic, somebody might steer
into somebody else to get around you. This is you
and a snake. Yeah, I do have issues with how
the snakes are treated. Well, that's one of my other
big problems. So let's we'll we'll get into that. We
gotta take a break. Okay, Chuck, we're back. What's the problem.
(31:47):
What's your beef? Well, over the years, let's get into
some numbers, um and and about a hundred years, they
estimate about a hundred people have died from doing it.
And if you look at the numbers and the number
of people handling snakes, it's, uh, you think there'd be
a lot more people dying from snake bites. Pretty pretty surprising,
(32:10):
especially considering that most of them do refuse medical treatment
after being bitten. They still recover. Correct, that is unusual,
It's remarkable, it is uh. MPR did a story on
this in two thousand thirteen, and some snake experts herpetologist
started coming out of the woodwork, specifically the Kentucky reptiles,
who has been sort of investigating this on their own
(32:32):
for years, and they said, you know what, there's a
lot of things going on here. Um that it's sort
of a rigging of the stacking of the deck. Stacking
of the deck and the humans favor for one, these
snakes are mistreated, which is one reason I have a
problem with it. By all accounts from their investigations, they
saw crowded cages, they were dirty, there was no fecal
(32:56):
matter in the cage, which looked like they weren't being fed. Uh.
They asked Coots about that, and he said, well, I,
um my, my my rat connection went away. Rat hook
my my mouse and rat hook up disappeared on me.
And he says, besides, they won't eat. Uh, they won't
(33:16):
eat anyway, I think was his quote, which I don't
understand what that means, because snakes eat, they want to eat.
That sounds like something someone says when they're like pulling
their collar away from them. Uh. And he said is.
They asked him how long is snakes lived and he said,
on average three or four months. The reptile Zoo in
Kentucky said snake should lived into it's twenty years. Oh wow,
(33:38):
he said they live on average three or four months. Yeah,
they're being mistreated. So because of this mistreatment these hungry snakes,
there's a lot of things that happen once you have
a hungry snake, and one is they are less likely
to strike if they're unhealthy. What else, when they do strike,
they're less likely to inject venom, So it's gonna be
it's likelier to be a dry strike, yeah, I think,
(34:01):
or dry strikes, but that's just under normal circumstances. Really,
if it's if it's a malnourished and less fed or
um underwatered snake, it's probably even higher higher incidents of
dry strikes than that. The venom apparently isn't as potent
if it's an unhealthy snake. Um. In two thousand thirteen,
(34:24):
they rated a church in Tennessee. I think that's Andrew
Hamblin's like you were talking about. Yeah, I think I
may have said as his first name incorrectly before, but yeah,
that's who I was talking about. Uh, And they confiscated
fifty three snakes that most of them died within months.
They were all unhealthy and so Basically, you've got these
malnourished snakes that you know, even when they do get bitten,
(34:47):
they're maybe even not getting any venom or less potent venom. Right,
So it's yeah, it's rigged in a certain way. Plus,
Also this article points out um it was a Julia
Layton joint. She points out that it's also possible that
those of us here on the outside, and maybe even
the holiness serpent handlers, overestimate just how aggressive snakes actually
(35:08):
are by nature. Yeah, like you were saying, if you're
handling them gently, right, they're not gonna strike you. If
they especially if they don't feel threatened. If there's like, oh,
that's just a religious person, right and they're in they're
in the throes of religious ecstasy. I'll just ride it out.
I've been wanting to be gently shaped for a while,
so let's see where this goes. Plus, a lot of
(35:31):
these snakes are raised in captivity, and snake experts will
tell you if you raise a snake in captivity, it's
less likely to strike at you because they don't fear
you as they should. Right. Plus, snakes don't typically speaking
from an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn't make any sense for
a snake to be like, yeah, I'm gonna strike you
(35:51):
thing that is way bigger than I am that I
don't prey upon. Naturally, I'm going to deliver all of
my venom because the venom they need it to actually eat,
they need it for prey, right, And the snake wouldn't
know this, but natural selection would have figured it out
by now that if a snake is striking something like
a hippo that's coming at it and delivers all of
(36:11):
its venom um, that hippo is still going to stomp
the snake before the venom actually has any effect on it. Yeah,
and you've lost all your venom, and you know you
can regenerate it, but you know it's not like immediate, right,
So it doesn't in a in an evolutionary natural selection standpoint,
it doesn't really make sense for a snake to strike
(36:32):
and deliver a full venom fight correct, right. Yeah, So
you have all this stuff together, and suddenly the mystery
of snake handling still is. It becomes a little clear.
It makes a little more sense how people are surviving,
but it's still remarkable that they aren't. They that more
people don't die, considering how often these snakes are handled. Yeah,
(36:56):
and if you if you look at interviews with Coots
on the YouTube, he'll he'll pick up his uh chunk
of rotted finger that he keeps and show you. He'll say,
look this. You know, my wife had to cut it
off at the mid knuckle with rose pruners. That was
a different guy. That was Bill Host. Well, no Coots,
(37:18):
it happened to him too. Oh really rose pruners again. Yeah,
like he literally held up his finger and showed it
to the lady on CNN. She was like, yeah, like
you kept that thing. Yeah, well, Bill Host's wife cut
his off with rose pruners. I think digits falling off
as the snake handler is pretty common. I don't think
it's like, no, that was that one guy. Um, so yeah,
I don't know. I mean, there you go. I'm against
(37:39):
it because they're mistreating snakes. Yeah, I have that. That's
my issue with it too. And so it's other than that.
I'm like, if you want to do it, it's your thing. Yeah,
it's just one of those rare instances where you are
it's again aside from the treatment of the snake, you're
not harming anybody, but yourself. Yeah, there's almost no other
(38:00):
instance that's just like that. You know what I mean, Right,
I guess I'm getting to be a libertarian. So let's
talk about Bill host Man, because that guy deserves maybe
even his own podcast one day. Yeah, this dude is
something else. Um, well, where do you start with him?
He was well as a kid, he had a dream.
(38:22):
Two he was always obsessed with snakes, and he had
a dream to one day have a a snake house
open to the public where he could educate people. And
he was an educator. He wasn't He wasn't a religious
snake handler. We should point that out up front. He
was a self trained scientist. Yeah, for sure, that's a
good way to say it. Thank you. So little kid
(38:44):
has a dream and he grows up and makes that
dream of reality and really believed, like really believed in
his heart and and through experimentation, that snake venom could
be very beneficial to a human. Yeah, he was actually
um after the Miami Serpentarium, which is his famous place
that he opened, was in full swing by this By
(39:07):
the late seventies, he was in clinical trials using snake
venom to help cure things like Parkinson's in multiple sclerosis
with a doctor, and the FDA actually came in and
shut them down because they were they were basically doing
human experimentation that was unsanctioned, but they were seeing results
from what I understand, Yeah, apparently he was seeing results
(39:28):
with his polio work earlier when Jonah Saul invented the vaccine,
and he was like, man, I guess it's great that
it's cured, but I wish it could have been mean
the snakes. So this dude started self immunizing in He
injected one part cape cobra venom with one thousand parts
sailine solution into his forearm and started gradually increasing the
(39:53):
amount of venom he would inject into his own body,
and within a couple of decades he was injecting every
day a cocktail of thirty two different snakes and reptile's venom,
which is a process called methrid it mythrid itism. Yeah,
methrid it is methrid itism. Methrid Itse was this famous
um I can't remember. He was an ancient king and
(40:17):
he developed a tolerance to poison because he was so
afraid of being poisoned, So he would drink a little
bit and this is it's so now if anybody who
does it, it's it's methrid. It is ism and that's
what he was doing. So he actually did this for
such a long time that his blood itself became anti
venom and it actually saved twenty one people's lives. Yeah,
(40:40):
he would, he would draw pints of blood from his
body to keep on hand, and he literally several times
flew all around the world with his blood to give
it to people to save them. Yeah. And apparently, and
I think nine he was bit by a Pakistani pit
viper and he didn't have any anti venom and the
White Hot used back channels to get their hands on
(41:02):
some from Rondout and saved his life. Pretty pretty neat stuff,
uh he Um. He has this famous quote, I could
become a poster boy for the benefits of venom if
I live to be one hundred, I'll really make the point.
And he lived to be one hundred one years old
with snake venom pumping through his blood all day long. Yeah.
(41:22):
And there's a really neat um discussion about this guy
in a larger article called the Mathridityes of Fondue lock Um.
I can't remember the guy who wrote it. It's a
really great article tweeted out or something, um, but it
has some some stuff about Bell Hasten it. But it's
also about this other dude named Tim Freed who in
(41:43):
the article he takes four venomous snake bites in forty
eight hours, although the whole things about whether or not
he can live through five. But he's been doing the
same thing. Yeah. So the Serpentarium in Miami closed in
nineteen be four because and I saw that the accident
(42:03):
was in nineteen seventy seven, so I'm not sure why
it took seven years to uh to close. But a
six year old boy had crocodiles and other stuff right
at the place. Six year old boy fell into the
croc pit and was mauled, and it really, uh obviously
disturbed Bill because he wasn't a bad guy. He wasn't
you know. He tore him up and he shot this
(42:26):
crocodile nine times with the luger pistol um, and I
guess seven years later decided to close it. Apparently the
dad didn't blame Bill, which is remarkable for the accident.
I just thought was strange if he took safety precautions
(42:47):
and the kid went around him. Then yeah, maybe so
it's not that dude's fault either way. It's horrible and tragic. Yeah,
and he he ended up closing the serpentarium as a
result of it, although I did realized it was seven
years later too. But he kept his um milking operation going.
That's right, in his own self injection routine, and he did.
(43:09):
He flew to Venezuela once into the Amazon to deliver
some of his own blood to save a boy's life.
And he was made an honorary citizen in Venezuela as
a result. That is so cool, Yeah, pretty amazing. He
claims he had never been sick a day in his life,
didn't take never had the cold, never had the flu,
didn't take aspirin um. In this article that you sent,
(43:30):
says he was unusually youthful looking. I don't know. I
looked at pictures he I don't know if he looked
a hundred, but I don't know about unusually youthful looking, right,
Maybe so he had a glow about him, Yeah, glow
from venom. I'm gonna start shooting that stuff, I guess,
Oh yeah, No, I'm gonna stay away from it and
(43:51):
just be fascinated by the whole concept. Alrighty you anything else?
I got nothing else. I don't neither. If you want
to know more about snake handling, you can type those
words in the search bar how stuff works dot com.
And since I said that, it's time for oh, you
know what, it's time for Facebook questions. All right, So
(44:12):
what we do here, uhs when listener males have dried
up a little bit, we put it out to the
people on Facebook to send in questions and we'll answer
over the next two episodes as many as we can
that aren't dumb. And it's sort of a rapid fire
thing starting now. I'm like Billy on the Street. Who
(44:35):
Billy on the Street, Billie Eigner, No great TV show?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven't seen it, but
I'm aware of it. It's wonderful. Let's start with Griggs Dorkin,
good old Griggs Dorkins. Yes, he says, if you woke
up to find that you had replaced a character in
a movie, you know, well, what movie and character would
it be? And how would you handle the circumstances differently,
(44:58):
fans is a really good question. I feel like Josh
has probably had an answer to this for years for
the shining wink emoticon. You spell out wink emoticon or
did it just print out like that? I don't know.
I'm not sure, but no, he's spelled it out. I
had my answered easy, John Rambo, And what would you
(45:19):
do differently? Would you just immediately surrender? I would have
In the very beginning of First Blood when he drives
him across the bridge and says keep going that way,
I would have just kept going that way instead of
turning around and going back into down the end. Yeah,
John Rambo that would be a boring movie. Well, it
would be very short. Yeah, to be a short phone,
John Rambo. Hitchhiker, that's a good one. Yeah, what about you.
(45:41):
I'll have to think about that, all right. And hey, Storkin,
we'll see in Denver, buddy, all right, smile emoticon. This
from Jamie Whittaker. H Josh always refers to his favorite book. Josh,
you want to say it fo that's right, but I'm
usually driving and I never take it down. I can't remember,
so he says it's eighteen something. It's not right, Chuck,
(46:05):
what is your number one recommendation? Um? I don't know
if I have a favorite book, but I always recommend
the book middle Sex just because it's one of the
great books that I read. Jeffrey Eugenness, Yeah, I think
that's right. He wrote. Uh well, he's written a lot
of great books, but Middlesex is wonderful, so great, great
(46:27):
all around book. Yep, Okay, nice one, man. Uh, let's see.
Trey mclamb has a great question. How different would our
health be if we could sleep every day until we
wake up naturally? Is if alarm clocks were never invented.
I would guess we'd all be a lot more mellow.
We get less done, sure, but we'd be more mellow
(46:50):
like our five day weekend. Remember that episode I do.
I think that kind of dovetails with that quite a bit,
just kind of doing what you do. There's your answer,
good one. I don't know about that. There's a good question.
Terrible answer. Uh, Sam Horne, you've been dropping hintsive late
about live shows overseas. Would love to see you in
(47:11):
the UK. We have loads of stuff you should now. Terrible,
Uh Sam. We're hoping to come to the UK this summer.
We're working on it hard, We're working on it it
may or may not pan out because planning shows overseas
is uh, you know, can be challenging. Yeah, you have
to take a citizenship test. Did you know that? I
didn't know that. It's weird. So we're trying and listen
(47:34):
up for updates on that front. Okay, let's see. Uh.
Just Riddell says, I listened to your color podcast Color
with a You, and Chuck mentioned he might have a
color deficiency. I'd like to hear a podcast about color
blindness and color of deficiencies. Please smile emoticon. I think
(47:55):
people are putting this in. It's typing it out when
you print it. It's got to be maybe what's the question?
Wasn't a questioned all of the Nope, okay and good one. Uh, Chuck, Well,
they say, Josh diego Leal, how's the property squatting coming along?
That was me, Um, I haven't heard anything from a
few years. Uh, and I have anything about hippie Rob.
(48:17):
I'm still squatting everybody. It's working out great. Uh And
as far as we know, UM, we don't own the
property yet, but we think the county might. And there's
really I don't think we're in any danger of losing
it anytime soon. It's not your next door neighbor, back
back neighbor, now behind neighbor, whatever. Nope. So yeah, the County.
(48:38):
I don't know if you'll ever be able to own
it then, even through adverse possession, maybe not. But I
don't think there's anything that can do with it. It's
such a small strip. So I think we're good. Are
they gonna start parking like a tar truck back there?
County Land? What about Hippie rob? Any updates there? John
should be Robb will forever live forever in the ether? Uh?
(48:58):
Claire Dalt Dolby to Alby, I'd say Dolby too. Normally, Uh,
if you could revisit an episode and do it differently,
slash better? Which one the sun? Not a bad idea,
and I would definitely like another track. Um. Every once
in a while, I can't think of him. I mean
(49:20):
we've done like eight hundred plus episodes. Every once in
a while I will leave here and I say it
every time I feel that way, I'll be like that
one just wasn't as good because it could have been.
And it's always something that's like really important, like the
topic is really important to me so I like overthink
it and it always pans out fine, but I can't.
(49:42):
I can't think of any that I would just like
to go back and get over again. Yeah, I thought
you just kind of let you know, even if I'm
a little disappointed, it is what it is. Yeah, that's
a philosophy, you know, I guess it is. Yeah, it's
a boring philosophy. Um, they and Floyd, are we ever
going to get a how Jerry works episode? Nope, Jerry
(50:06):
doesn't want people to know how she works. She operates
in stealth and secret. Yeah. The c I A and
she may or may not exist. Uh. Larry Tiffany says,
what evidence will we see if the flood epic of
Noah's Ark were indeed true? Well, Larry, we've got something
for you, buddy. It's a whole episode on Noah's Ark
in the flood. It was pretty pretty good one if
(50:27):
I remember correctly. I have no recollection. That's good. Okay,
how about one more each? Luke vis Ring, have you
ever been told the topic is off limits? No, we
have not. That we are very lucky and that we
are free to program our own content, and are all
the various bosses and company owners we've had over the years,
(50:50):
I've always steered clear of that, which were very thankful for. Yeah,
we self regulated. One more. Josh Robinson asks Johns and
Chuck why do you hate the nineties? Why do you
hate my childhood? I love the nineties. I'm yeah. I
think the nineties were like okay, and I just don't
think that they were. I don't think they produced that
(51:12):
much great stuff. Everything just had this kind of superficialness
to it. I felt like, well, I love the nineties.
The nineties was my twenties in my college. The beloved
very much to me, and things were great in the
nineties in a lot of ways. Are you nostalgizing right now? No,
I thought we had a band on that. No. I
(51:34):
love the nineties. Great, great music, great culture. See. I
think the music thing is where I have the issue.
I wouldn't say it was great great music. There is
some good music. I don't dispute that, but I think
there's a lot of really bad music. That's every generation,
not necessarily. I knew you were going to say that,
(51:54):
and I was prepared to respond, and it is as follows.
Look at the eighties, right, Okay, A lot of bad music,
a lot of great music, but there was a lot
more good listenable music, Like think of all the one
hit wonders in the eighties. There were a lot a
lot of singles that were pretty good and listenable even
(52:14):
at the time, not just in retrospect. In the nineties,
there was a lot a lot of stuff on the
radio was awful. Yeah, yeah, like Nirvana and stuff like that. No,
I mean again, there was some like good stuff, and
there were plenty of good bands, but for the most
part it felt like there was just a lot of
really bad stuff too. I'll go back to the spin
(52:35):
doctors again. I think that is the emblem of the nineties.
Spin doctors. They were huge for a little while, and
then I think that also carried into the early two
thousand's with with a lot of the terrible nous, too interesting,
and it's like there just seemed to be and I
know the eighties were super vapid, very shallow, but almost
(52:58):
to a cartoonist to the nineties were unaware of its superficiality.
It felt like like it was trying really hard to
not be superficial, but it was failing at it. I
think I reject the notion that a lot of one
hit wonders equals good not good better. I got three
(53:19):
words for you walking on sunshine. That was Katrine in
the way. So that was wrong with that? Well maybe
we just have different tastes maybe, so sorry, let's send
this now and don't it feel good? Yeah? Yes it does, chuck.
So that was Facebook Questions, Part one, Part one I
was sales. Never do that again. If you want to
(53:40):
get in touch of this, you can join us on
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. We're also
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more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
(54:00):
staff works dot com. H m hm
This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start
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to you Stuff you should know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
(00:26):
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.
And my hair is now a fourth character. Laughed at
my hair. Everybody, Well, if my beard can be the
fourth character, your hair could be the fifth. Oh really, yeah,
we need Actually, Jerry's got great hair. She does have
nice hair, stylish salt and pepper, Amy Goodman level tasteful
(00:51):
salt and pepper. I'm not sure what that means, Amy
Goodman from Democracy Now, it's very tasteful salt and pepper hair.
Maybe that's the thing. It is clearly between Jerry and
Amy Goodman. It's the thing that beats shoe polish black. Yeah,
you know, like trickling down your forehead. Yeah, but what
(01:13):
makes you happy? You know? Well, sure, if you don't,
whatever makes you feel good, Yeah, I should, Uh, I
should get some of that beer. Blackener and coming into
my beard and come in with like that jet black
Beard and Clyde Drexeler will show up at your house,
urge you one. But isn't he in the ads? Yeah? Really?
(01:34):
Former Portland Trailblazer are great. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's
Clyde Drexeler. Wow, I think I'm gonna have to check
this out. It's him. And who was the one? I
think Keith Hernandez. I was gonna say the one that
Kramer spit on or that got spit that spit on Kramer.
I think it's Keith Hernandez and Clyde Drexeler. And then
just for men commercial, well there's our freed package. Are
(01:58):
just for men coming our way now, which we should
say thanks again again to Crown Royal. Man, you say
you like Crown Royal, they send you something, you say,
you drank it, and they send you more. I know,
it's pretty awesome. I'm brushing my teeth with this stuff now.
My lifestyle is improved for the better. Pretty neat. Thank
you dudes. Uh So, I was just discussing before we
(02:21):
record it. I said, it's going to be hard to
record a show on snake handling, and I'm talking about
the religious aspect of it without sort of like I
fear for their safety. And I want to say you
people are crazy. A lot of people do, but um,
we have a long standing tradition of like to each
(02:41):
their own. I just you know, I hate seeing people
die from doing something completely preventable. Yeah, you definitely do.
But handling rattlesnakes and kissing them on the face. From
from what I've seen of this or from what I've researched,
I've not actually seen somebody handle snakes in person. Um,
but from what I've researched, the people who handle snakes
(03:03):
are doing it through total and complete faith. And uh,
there's even if you did judge them, I think it
kind of rolls off their back quite a bit. So
it's not so much judgment. It's just like, no, it's not.
I'm telling you this is what is it my opinion,
(03:24):
and I'm judging your opinion. Oh that's what you meant
by its judgment? No, Okay, now it's not judgment. I
just I hate see people get hurt, Nina, uh and die.
Have you ever seen somebody handle snakes? You had a
religious upbringing, Well, yeah, this is rare though. This is Yeah,
it is Appalachian foothills stuffy, I know, but I mean
(03:45):
like Atlanta. We're in Georgia. I didn't know if you
ever took like a field trip or something like there.
You know that's you have no idea how church works
that there are a lot of field trips. No, I
got you. In fact, you don't go to other churches.
You're not supposed to do that. Oh really, yeah, he
stay at your own church. You don't go and field
(04:06):
trips to other churches? Are there like inner faith banquets
and stuff like that. Yeah, we had a field day right,
all the churches in the county. No, I suppose other
churches get together with as suppose to. Some gett together
with other churches. But that wasn't my experience. Typically frowned
on in New York. You just keep it in the house.
Although we would go to the big youth conferences, all
(04:29):
sorts of youth groups together. That's the field trip. Yeah,
I'll just kids thrown in the big gymnasiums, struggling to
fight their hormonal urges, going you believe what? So, No,
I've never done it. I didn't ask if you've done it,
I need. I've never witnessed it. I've never been anywhere
near it. Okay, although I I have a strange feeling, Chuck,
(04:50):
that it's possible we've both been near it just from
living in Georgia all these years without knowing it. Because yeah,
people who handle snakes um religious. It's actually called um
holiness serpent handling. Is that correct? Uh? Yeah, they say
serpent instead of snake. Yeah, and it has to be
a venomous snake to be considered a serpent. But for
(05:13):
holiness serpent handling um. Until two thousand and fourteen, it was.
They kept a pretty tight lid on it for many,
many decades. Who the the handlers, Yeah, the people who, um,
who practice this as part of their religious beliefs. Yeah,
and I think still even most of them are pretty
media shy. You'll see the occasional interview when someone dies,
(05:36):
they'll go knocking on the doors and they'll give an
interview to explain like why they do what they do.
But of course there was a TV show which really,
I mean, you know, you're clearly not media show if
you're doing a reality show. No, it's it was called
Snake Salvation and sorry not two fourteen, but two thirteen
it was on nat g O and it was all
about snake handling for religious reasons, and um, one of
(05:59):
the main eyes on the show ended up dying. He
didn't die on the show, but he died the next
year from a rattlesnake bite after it went off the air. Yeah,
it was only on for one season. But his name
was Pasty pastor Jamie Coots, and he and another guy
UM named I believe Steven Amblen are They are holiness
(06:19):
serpent handlers who believe in kind of bringing it out
of the shadows and into the Christian mainstream. Good luck. Yeah,
if you're if you're at all interested in that concept,
you should read even unto Death. It was in the
Chettanooga Free Press. It's a pretty good examination of that
whole movement and those guys in particular. I guess we
(06:40):
should talk a little bit about other kinds of snake
handling first though, Yeah, because when you see snake hangler,
I'm sure when people saw this the title of this episode,
they just assumed we were talking strictly about um religious
snake handling. Now like other people handle snakes as well,
non religious things. Yeah, they're called herpetologists or some of
(07:03):
them are. These are actually people who study snakes and
amphibians reptiles, and we talked about them on our Snake
Show and I think we dispelled a lot of rumors,
uh not rumors, but myths on the Snake Show, which
come into play when handling snakes, namely that they aren't
out to kill you. Um, but we'll get to that later.
(07:24):
But people display snakes, well, there's a few different categories
of people who handle snakes. There's people who display them
Like you drive through Florida, you might see like a
snake and gator farm where they do snake shows. And
there's a really famous guy we'll talk about a little
more in depth named Bill Host who is like the
man when it comes to that boy, let's see yea uh.
(07:44):
And then there are um, there are people. There are
snake milkers. Of course, there's veterinarians who care for your snakes. Yeah,
which I mean they have to handle snakes. Um. There's
also rescuing recovery people who come gets a snake in
my basement, right, a guy will show up and um,
most likely he's professionally trained at the very least you
(08:07):
would hope that he has a tremendous amount of experience
in handling snakes. Yeah, and they will show up and
you'll say how much does it cost to get the
snake out of my basement? And they'll say how much
you got? I'd like to see your last three bank
account statement please. Um. And in those cases they will
probably you'll probably see what's called an extension tool. Um.
If you've ever seen those tongs or those long uh,
(08:30):
they call it a snake cook sort of a just
a long metal not a prode because they're not product.
Senior adults use it to grab cans off of the
high shelves in their homes. Yeah, it's like that sort of.
I haven't seen them that actually flex and grab. Yeah. Okay,
(08:52):
if you got some money, you're gonna spend it on that.
The ones i've seen are just have a flat uh
you know, it's a long pole and then it has
like an L shaped uh you know, at a right
angle flat piece coming off that they pin the snake with. Um.
I've read this thing about handling snakes safely for like
just normal people or people who are starting out in
(09:13):
the rescue and recovery business. Um. And you can use
just about anything. The key is extension. You want to
put distance between you and the snake. And I want
to say, as a legal disclaimer, I'm not at all
advising anybody to handle a snake. But what I read
was that you want to put as much distance as possible.
(09:34):
So if you have a garden tool and a long one,
use that. But you also would want to use let's
say you have a hope, you would want to turn
your hole upside down and use these, just the wooden
end to manipulate the snake, because you don't want to
hurt the snake. I just want to get rid of it. Right.
I relocated a snake from my backyard a couple of
(09:55):
years ago. What did you use? Use my hands? Oh
my god, it wasn't big. It was, but it wasn't small.
So how did you describe this interaction? Um, I was
cutting the grass and I saw the snake. It was
about a foot long. Did you positively identify it as
non lethal or non venomous? Yeah? It was pretty Yeah,
(10:16):
it was definitely not well. Actually, it had the markings
where it could have been a copper head. It wasn't
just just like a green snake. Right, So he took
a shot of whiskey and approached it. I approached it,
and I did use an implement to um pin it,
but I can't remember what I used. It was something,
you know, blunt and soft. It wasn't you know, an accent,
(10:38):
you know head because like you said, it was you dropping.
What did I use it was? I can't remember. Let's
just say like a wooden paddle. It might have been
a piece of wood actually. And then I did like
I saw on the TV shows. I grabbed it behind
the you know, right behind its head, got a good
(10:59):
hold bit and picked it up and it wrapped around
my wrist and I went and then I ran across
the street like pee wee Herman through it in the wood.
Didn't throw it. I've laid it down in the woods,
into the wood, and it was great. I think it
was a successful catch and release. It sounds like it
you weren't bitten, Yeah, and I don't. I don't. I'm
(11:23):
sure I didn't hurt the snake. Good. Yeah, that sounds
pretty successful. What I was reading in this one UM
article was that you most snakes if you just approached
them calmly. Um, And I guess smoothly is a good
way to put it. Sure, don't lunge at the snake, right,
and also don't be like, oh my god, oh we're
(11:44):
go ahead, right, just kind of come out the snake
and pick it up like it's just a stick in
your yard. It's probably not going to strike you, supposedly
according to this website of which I have no affiliation whatsoever. Yeah,
and I'm not my story. Please do not take that
as that was probably pretty dumb for me to do that. Yeah,
you know, and even if it's non I didn't want it.
(12:07):
I don't want to get bitten by a snake. I
don't care if it's venomous or not. One of my
biggest fears is seeing a snake attach its mouth to
my body. It frightens me. Well, I have to say, also,
this site put pretty plainly, do not ever touch a
snake that you haven't positively identified as non venomous, because yeah,
(12:29):
I mean, if you you could have easily been bitten
and lost your hand or whatever it was. Well, now
I could have getten the hospital pretty quickly. Yeah, I mean,
if you're you know, anti vennon works apparently of the
time if it's gotten to in a timely manner. Yes,
and for the pedants out there, we will say anti
(12:49):
venom and anti venom because both are acceptable. Yes, they
are alright, So chuck, let's take a break right here.
Huh it sounds good. Okay, did I say how how
(13:17):
far a snake can strike? No? Do you know? Uh?
But this is what I've got from the same the
same place that said just go smoothly and casually to
a snake, introduce yourself. Uh. It says that any snake
greater than four ft can typically strike about one third
to one half the distance of its body length. That's
a good rule of thumb. Yeah. Um, A snake between
(13:39):
one and three ft can strike about one half to
two thirds its body length, and then a snake underfoot
can usually strike about its whole body length. Okay, I
would take all those numbers and double them. That's probably
a good idea, just to be safe. Yeah. Of course,
I'm the guy who you know picked up maybe a
copper head, right man, that's scary stuff. You do the
(14:00):
same thing. You don't want to pay a guy? Um? Uh,
you probably I would do with this With this site,
what this site was saying was made a lot of
sense to me. Is like take a take a garbage can,
tip it over on its side, take a shovel, use
the wooden end of it, the handle it and just
kind of get it into the can, turn it over,
put like something on top of the can and then
(14:22):
call somebody. Or you could take the candy, um like
the woods or something that That's probably what I should
have done. In retrospect, I was feeling brave, like those
shots of whiskey, Like I watched enough Nature TV. All right,
I know how this is done. Um. So the last
thing that I think we didn't mention is snake milkers,
(14:43):
which snake venom is very valuable. Um one gram. What
you do is you freeze dry it into a powder.
After you get the liquid, and you sell it to
research labs. Big money, Yeah, one graham. A freeze dried
venom from an exotic snake is can go up to
five grand, but it might take a hundred milkings to
(15:04):
get that much. So do the math. Yeah, is it
worth it? Especially if you love hanging out with snakes
and it's a legit job. You can make you know,
bucks a month or more as a snake milker easily
depending on how many snakes you have that's right. Um.
So there are a lot of people that handle snakes,
(15:26):
but all of them, well, I should say all of
the people who professionally handle snakes have a rule of thumb,
which is don't get hurt, don't be stupid, because there
are two ways that snakes can typically get you. Venomous
snakes obviously inject venom, and that's why people milk snakes
is to get that venom so that they can create
anti venom um so that your life can be saved
(15:50):
if you end up getting bit by a snake, right, um,
and venom is pretty nasty stuff. I think we did
one on like what's the most poisonous animal in the world?
That sounds familiar yea, And we talked a lot about venom,
but it's worth revisiting. Basically, depending on the venom that
you're injected with, it can cause tissue damage wherever it's spread.
(16:11):
And by tissue damage, I mean just completely wipe out
your tissue. And if that is blood vessels, your blood
vessels bleed and you start bleeding internally. If it's a
your liver or your heart, those things start bleeding internally
and end up shutting down. You can have multi system,
multi organ failure, paralysis, respiratory um distress, all sorts of
(16:32):
horrible stuff. If it's on a limb or digit, you
might lose that even if you get the anti venom
time exactly because it's so thoroughly destroys the tissue right,
and it causes a lot of pain too. Like I
was reading about the Texas coral snake, it actually has
this um molecule that opens your the gates to your
(16:54):
pain receptors and just hold them open so that you're
just feeling excruciated, eating unremitting pain. So it's bad stuff.
So you don't want to get bitten by a snake.
You also don't want to mess around with constrictors either,
because they will mess you up as well. Yeah uh
they will, I guess, wrap around you and then suffocates you,
(17:17):
break your back, stop your heart. It's big enough. Sure,
bad news, bad news. So snakes can be dangerous, is
the point. Yes, but again, not to feed into that
anti snake. I'm not trying to start a whacking. No. Um.
So getting back to the milkers, Oh yes, sorry, they
(17:40):
are what's called free handlers. They don't use you would
think like they should just wear anti snake gloves. Um,
but you need to really feel the snake. Um. I
read an interview with the guy that milks snakes for
living and he's like, no, you gotta feel with your skin.
The snakes are really fast, and you know, you have
(18:01):
to react and adjust to every little movement they make.
And even wearing a glove, even a thin glove, I
think club wouldn't help anyway, but a chain mail glove
or kevlar glove would not. You wouldn't be able to
feel what's going on anyway. Incidentally, like crush the snake's head.
They're not exactly made of kevlar themselves. That's true. So
when you're milking a snake, when you're free handling it,
(18:23):
you basically want to hold it the way you did
behind the head, right where the jaws meet, using your
thumb and fore finger. Yes, that is correct, and that
does two things. That keeps the head um from turning
on you. And um, it puts your fingers on the
in your thumb on those venom glands, which is what
(18:44):
they you know, they just kind of massage it. Uh.
You can also use electric stimulus electrical stimulation, but the
traditional way is to just just get a little squeeze
and it'll milk those little glands. Right, But first before
you start squeezing, you want to basically we take the
fangs the front. Yeah, you're not like spraying her on
the room into your hand. You put their fangs through
(19:09):
a membrane on that's pulled over a jar, and then
the venom just pumps out of the fangs into the jar. Yeah.
It's really neat looking. It is looking. It is man agreed. Uh.
And they recommend that if you are milking, if you're
a professional milker, you should have a little buddy with you. Okay,
something goes wrong. It's not a solo job. Really, anytime
(19:31):
you're handling a snake, there should be more than one person. Um. Well,
you know I didn't. That should have called Emily outside,
but she wouldn't let me pick up the snake. I
had to keep it quiet. I think I walked up
to hers like, look at this. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken. Um.
And they say for constrictors, they have a little handy
(19:53):
chart as well for at least one person for every
five feet of snake, unless it's an anaconda or reticulated
python in case in that case, you want every three
feet of snake because those are very heavy snakes. Females
can get up to like two hundred pounds, which is
(20:15):
I saw the Jackass bit the other day again where um,
I think it might have been in a sequel where
they put it's a python or anaconda and one of
those uh pits of a little red balls that kids
jump in and they, you know, Johnny Knoxville and the
gang get in there, and this thing bites. This huge
(20:35):
thing bites Johnny Knoxville like two or three times. And
thing's got the head the size of a baseball, and
it sounds like a Jackass bit. Hey, hey to Lance Banks, Yeah,
speaking of Jackass. Yeah, he was one of the filmmakers
behind that, and we had dinner with him in Portland,
very pleasant dinner. So hello Lance, if you're out there listening. Um,
(20:58):
I can't believe that they did that in it was
it was And he kept getting back in, he kept
getting bit. He's bleeding and he keeps getting back in.
I don't know why this isn't ringing a bell. I'm
sure I've seen Jackass two a bunch of times. You know,
plus Chuck, you also want somebody around any time you're
handling a snake, whether it's a python or a venomu
snake or any snake really, because you want somebody to
(21:19):
call nine one one if something goes wrong. You want
somebody to be able to drive you to the hospital
something goes wrong, or um, if a python is trying
to get around you, they can keep the tail from
fully wrapping around. Um. There's a lot of stuff that
an extra person can do, and things go really horribly
awry when that doesn't happen. There was actually a very
(21:42):
famous case not too many years ago of the Venezuelan zookeeper.
I think it was Venezuela, wasn't it. Um? Who was
I think a grad student working as a zookeeper, and
he or she went into a into a I guess
a python's cage, a ten foot for me's python cage
(22:07):
alone during the night shift, and they found there, probably
just to get something or to give it some food,
just something. I'm sure it was something mundane and losing
your life over And they found the person the next
morning like half swallowed by the python. Oh my lord. Um,
which is so you always want somebody around? Yeah, Um, well,
(22:30):
should we get into the uh, the religious knack handling.
Yeah for sure. All right, well you said it, dude,
It's called holiness serpent handling. And we actually you might
think like, oh, they've done this for millennia um, or
at least since you know, the seventeen eighteen hundreds. No, nope,
(22:51):
we have a definitive start date nineteen ten in Tennessee
the Dolly Pond Church of God in birch Wood, there
was a pre your name George Hensley, and the legend
is that he was having a faith crisis and was
reading Mark from the Bible sixteen eighteen thou shalt take
(23:14):
up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it
shall not hurt them. Oh, that was a good Appalachian preacher. Um.
And so he supposedly turned in saw a snake there
and said, I'm gonna take this quite literally. The Bible
says to take up snakes, so I'm gonna pick it up.
And he picked it up and the snake didn't bite him,
(23:34):
and he said, well, there goes my crisis of faith.
And apparently George Hensley didn't start out a preacher. He
started out an alcoholic who had trouble keeping work. And
once this happened to him, he found his religious calling
and became a preacher in the Pentecostal tradition, and he
actually helped establish this separate group that's kind of within
(23:58):
the Pentecostal religion. Um. But the Church of God of
Signs Following is essentially the sect that he helped found. Yeah.
These are subsets of subsets and subsets of Christianity. Yeah.
And so Hensley's whole philosophy was you read the Bible plainly,
is how he put it, which means, if it says
you pick up snakes, you pick up snakes. It's God's
(24:20):
command to you. If it says you can drink only
any deadly thing and it will not harm you, you're
supposed to do that. Um. All churches are independent, so
you decide whether women can wear pants or not at
your church. Um. And it was about as simple as that,
and it actually took off and became very popular throughout Appalachia.
(24:40):
From the nineteen tents till about the nineteen forties, there
was I think thousands of people who went to these
um Church of God with Signs Following churches. Yeah. And Hensley,
for his own records said that He survived more than
four hundred bytes until nineteen fifty five. He was in
Florida and abandoned. I don't know if it was abandoned,
(25:02):
but it was a blacksmith shop and he was doing
a demonstration and I guess holding a little uh religious
service and um he got bitten and refused treatment because
that's part of the deal is they leave it up
to you. Like Coots us on an interview with him,
and he said, if someone gets bitten, I call the paramedics,
(25:24):
have them come down. And then I say, well, now
you have a choice. You can either too has God
commands and refuse treatment and He'll heal you if you
should be healed, and if it's your time to die,
it's your time to die. Or you can say i'd
like treatment please. UM. But in the tradition of you know,
a true believer, Hensley said no, I don't want treatment.
(25:47):
And he died the next morning. But he survived a
bunch of other bites. Like he said, yeah, he says,
although I lived by the snake, died by the snake
is probably a pretty good UM motto. Do people think
that um holding a serpent? Handlers are either worship the
snakes because they do keep them in in cages on
(26:08):
the altar during services UM or that they UM they're
doing this as a as a show of faith to
basically show, look at how how how much I believe
in God. Apparently this is definitively not the case that
when UM holding a serpent, handlers pick up snakes and
(26:29):
this still goes on. Like there are still churches throughout
Appalachia apparently from Ohio to Florida, UM, where hundreds, if
not a few thousand people uh do this go to
these services. UM when they do it. They don't do
it at every service necessarily, but when they do do it,
it's because they believe they have just been commanded by
(26:51):
God to show their obedience to God by picking up
a serpent and handling it. And when they do it,
it's apparently they just enter into um immediate religious ecstasy. Yeah,
it's like they kind of jump up and down and
maybe speaking tongues and sort of a trance like state. Uh.
I guess we haven't even really described it. I assume
(27:13):
most people have seen this at some point. Look up
a YouTube video. UM, they're not holding the snake by
the back of the head and they are literally just
sometimes there are five and six snakes and they're just
holding them and they're kissing them on the face, they're
rubbing them on their face. They wear them like crowns.
They'll throw them over their shoulders. Um, yeah, they're they're.
(27:34):
The big difference between religious snake handlers and professional snake
handlers is that religious snake handlers go to zero zero
degree to establish any kind of safety precautions. Right, that's
entirely uh an athetical to the point. Yeah, they don't
have anti venom shots standing by in a medical kit.
No they don't. That's one. There's a hundred things that
(27:57):
are different. But sure, I know what you mean. And
so this whole thing was very popular, um among the
Appalachians for a good twenty thirty years, and then the
forties there was a rash of people who died after
being bitten, and all of a sudden, the outside world
started to look in and say, what are you guys doing?
(28:18):
And the authorities were like, we don't think you should
be able to do that. I started to try to
pass laws, but none of them. There actually are laws
that and indirectly prevent people from doing this, And there's
actually some that directly prevent them, I guess in every
Appalachian state except for West Virginia, but they're very rarely
(28:38):
enforced because of religious liberties, right, yeah, religious freedoms. Um.
There have been some raids, uh, notably actually Coots Place.
Coots Place sounds like a sitcom, hanging with Mr Coots.
Coots Church was rated as a part of a series
of stings in two thousand eight under the code names
(28:59):
twice really you're kidding me. Um. In one church they
confiscated snakes and may to arrest and then it Coots
Um Church. I think they got about seventy five snakes
and arrested a few others, including him. But UM, I
don't think they stay in jail very long. UM, I
(29:21):
can't imagine what the penalty is. Well, the grand juries
typically refused to indict them. They might be charged with him,
they might be hauled to jail, but they there. There's
no indictment that's handed down, so they don't go to trial.
But they confiscate the snakes at least yeah, usually because um,
in Tennessee, for example, it's illegal to keep venomous snakes,
and the snakes that they're using are very venomous. They're
(29:44):
deadly cotton mouths, rattlesnakes, um, all sorts of very deadly
venomous snakes. So they're breaking the law just by having
the snakes. But again, um, they're typically left alone as
far as the courts are concerned. And the reason why
you're saying at the beginning of this episode that it's
hard to not just be like stop. Um, I think
(30:07):
the reason why I don't have that much trouble with
this I came to see it differently after doing research
on it. There they have more a's involved with this stuff.
So moray eels more. No, I thought they handled those
two because never require like an aquarium and nobody wants that. Um.
(30:29):
They they have just kind of rules around the whole
thing where you don't go handle a serpent unless you
feel like you have been commanded by God to go
do that right then and you're you're imbued with the
Holy Spirit which is protecting you right then, there's no
pressure whatsoever to go do that. There's actually um discouragement
(30:49):
to do it for any kind of show of faith
or anything like that. Um. And then children are are
banned from doing it. They're not allowed to handle the snakes. Yeah,
in the same way that, like, you're free to walk
into traffic if you want. I find it even less
harmful than that, because you're endangering the other driver's life.
(31:10):
If your hand you're walking into traffic, somebody might steer
into somebody else to get around you. This is you
and a snake. Yeah, I do have issues with how
the snakes are treated. Well, that's one of my other
big problems. So let's we'll we'll get into that. We
gotta take a break. Okay, Chuck, we're back. What's the problem.
(31:47):
What's your beef? Well, over the years, let's get into
some numbers, um and and about a hundred years, they
estimate about a hundred people have died from doing it.
And if you look at the numbers and the number
of people handling snakes, it's, uh, you think there'd be
a lot more people dying from snake bites. Pretty pretty surprising,
(32:10):
especially considering that most of them do refuse medical treatment
after being bitten. They still recover. Correct, that is unusual,
It's remarkable, it is uh. MPR did a story on
this in two thousand thirteen, and some snake experts herpetologist
started coming out of the woodwork, specifically the Kentucky reptiles,
who has been sort of investigating this on their own
(32:32):
for years, and they said, you know what, there's a
lot of things going on here. Um that it's sort
of a rigging of the stacking of the deck. Stacking
of the deck and the humans favor for one, these
snakes are mistreated, which is one reason I have a
problem with it. By all accounts from their investigations, they
saw crowded cages, they were dirty, there was no fecal
(32:56):
matter in the cage, which looked like they weren't being fed. Uh.
They asked Coots about that, and he said, well, I,
um my, my my rat connection went away. Rat hook
my my mouse and rat hook up disappeared on me.
And he says, besides, they won't eat. Uh, they won't
(33:16):
eat anyway, I think was his quote, which I don't
understand what that means, because snakes eat, they want to eat.
That sounds like something someone says when they're like pulling
their collar away from them. Uh. And he said is.
They asked him how long is snakes lived and he said,
on average three or four months. The reptile Zoo in
Kentucky said snake should lived into it's twenty years. Oh wow,
(33:38):
he said they live on average three or four months. Yeah,
they're being mistreated. So because of this mistreatment these hungry snakes,
there's a lot of things that happen once you have
a hungry snake, and one is they are less likely
to strike if they're unhealthy. What else, when they do strike,
they're less likely to inject venom, So it's gonna be
it's likelier to be a dry strike, yeah, I think,
(34:01):
or dry strikes, but that's just under normal circumstances. Really,
if it's if it's a malnourished and less fed or
um underwatered snake, it's probably even higher higher incidents of
dry strikes than that. The venom apparently isn't as potent
if it's an unhealthy snake. Um. In two thousand thirteen,
(34:24):
they rated a church in Tennessee. I think that's Andrew
Hamblin's like you were talking about. Yeah, I think I
may have said as his first name incorrectly before, but yeah,
that's who I was talking about. Uh, And they confiscated
fifty three snakes that most of them died within months.
They were all unhealthy and so Basically, you've got these
malnourished snakes that you know, even when they do get bitten,
(34:47):
they're maybe even not getting any venom or less potent venom. Right,
So it's yeah, it's rigged in a certain way. Plus,
Also this article points out um it was a Julia
Layton joint. She points out that it's also possible that
those of us here on the outside, and maybe even
the holiness serpent handlers, overestimate just how aggressive snakes actually
(35:08):
are by nature. Yeah, like you were saying, if you're
handling them gently, right, they're not gonna strike you. If
they especially if they don't feel threatened. If there's like, oh,
that's just a religious person, right and they're in they're
in the throes of religious ecstasy. I'll just ride it out.
I've been wanting to be gently shaped for a while,
so let's see where this goes. Plus, a lot of
(35:31):
these snakes are raised in captivity, and snake experts will
tell you if you raise a snake in captivity, it's
less likely to strike at you because they don't fear
you as they should. Right. Plus, snakes don't typically speaking
from an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn't make any sense for
a snake to be like, yeah, I'm gonna strike you
(35:51):
thing that is way bigger than I am that I
don't prey upon. Naturally, I'm going to deliver all of
my venom because the venom they need it to actually eat,
they need it for prey, right, And the snake wouldn't
know this, but natural selection would have figured it out
by now that if a snake is striking something like
a hippo that's coming at it and delivers all of
(36:11):
its venom um, that hippo is still going to stomp
the snake before the venom actually has any effect on it. Yeah,
and you've lost all your venom, and you know you
can regenerate it, but you know it's not like immediate, right,
So it doesn't in a in an evolutionary natural selection standpoint,
it doesn't really make sense for a snake to strike
(36:32):
and deliver a full venom fight correct, right. Yeah, So
you have all this stuff together, and suddenly the mystery
of snake handling still is. It becomes a little clear.
It makes a little more sense how people are surviving,
but it's still remarkable that they aren't. They that more
people don't die, considering how often these snakes are handled. Yeah,
(36:56):
and if you if you look at interviews with Coots
on the YouTube, he'll he'll pick up his uh chunk
of rotted finger that he keeps and show you. He'll say,
look this. You know, my wife had to cut it
off at the mid knuckle with rose pruners. That was
a different guy. That was Bill Host. Well, no Coots,
(37:18):
it happened to him too. Oh really rose pruners again. Yeah,
like he literally held up his finger and showed it
to the lady on CNN. She was like, yeah, like
you kept that thing. Yeah, well, Bill Host's wife cut
his off with rose pruners. I think digits falling off
as the snake handler is pretty common. I don't think
it's like, no, that was that one guy. Um, so yeah,
I don't know. I mean, there you go. I'm against
(37:39):
it because they're mistreating snakes. Yeah, I have that. That's
my issue with it too. And so it's other than that.
I'm like, if you want to do it, it's your thing. Yeah,
it's just one of those rare instances where you are
it's again aside from the treatment of the snake, you're
not harming anybody, but yourself. Yeah, there's almost no other
(38:00):
instance that's just like that. You know what I mean, Right,
I guess I'm getting to be a libertarian. So let's
talk about Bill host Man, because that guy deserves maybe
even his own podcast one day. Yeah, this dude is
something else. Um, well, where do you start with him?
He was well as a kid, he had a dream.
(38:22):
Two he was always obsessed with snakes, and he had
a dream to one day have a a snake house
open to the public where he could educate people. And
he was an educator. He wasn't He wasn't a religious
snake handler. We should point that out up front. He
was a self trained scientist. Yeah, for sure, that's a
good way to say it. Thank you. So little kid
(38:44):
has a dream and he grows up and makes that
dream of reality and really believed, like really believed in
his heart and and through experimentation, that snake venom could
be very beneficial to a human. Yeah, he was actually
um after the Miami Serpentarium, which is his famous place
that he opened, was in full swing by this By
(39:07):
the late seventies, he was in clinical trials using snake
venom to help cure things like Parkinson's in multiple sclerosis
with a doctor, and the FDA actually came in and
shut them down because they were they were basically doing
human experimentation that was unsanctioned, but they were seeing results
from what I understand, Yeah, apparently he was seeing results
(39:28):
with his polio work earlier when Jonah Saul invented the vaccine,
and he was like, man, I guess it's great that
it's cured, but I wish it could have been mean
the snakes. So this dude started self immunizing in He
injected one part cape cobra venom with one thousand parts
sailine solution into his forearm and started gradually increasing the
(39:53):
amount of venom he would inject into his own body,
and within a couple of decades he was injecting every
day a cocktail of thirty two different snakes and reptile's venom,
which is a process called methrid it mythrid itism. Yeah,
methrid it is methrid itism. Methrid Itse was this famous
um I can't remember. He was an ancient king and
(40:17):
he developed a tolerance to poison because he was so
afraid of being poisoned, So he would drink a little
bit and this is it's so now if anybody who
does it, it's it's methrid. It is ism and that's
what he was doing. So he actually did this for
such a long time that his blood itself became anti
venom and it actually saved twenty one people's lives. Yeah,
(40:40):
he would, he would draw pints of blood from his
body to keep on hand, and he literally several times
flew all around the world with his blood to give
it to people to save them. Yeah. And apparently, and
I think nine he was bit by a Pakistani pit
viper and he didn't have any anti venom and the
White Hot used back channels to get their hands on
(41:02):
some from Rondout and saved his life. Pretty pretty neat stuff,
uh he Um. He has this famous quote, I could
become a poster boy for the benefits of venom if
I live to be one hundred, I'll really make the point.
And he lived to be one hundred one years old
with snake venom pumping through his blood all day long. Yeah.
(41:22):
And there's a really neat um discussion about this guy
in a larger article called the Mathridityes of Fondue lock Um.
I can't remember the guy who wrote it. It's a
really great article tweeted out or something, um, but it
has some some stuff about Bell Hasten it. But it's
also about this other dude named Tim Freed who in
(41:43):
the article he takes four venomous snake bites in forty
eight hours, although the whole things about whether or not
he can live through five. But he's been doing the
same thing. Yeah. So the Serpentarium in Miami closed in
nineteen be four because and I saw that the accident
(42:03):
was in nineteen seventy seven, so I'm not sure why
it took seven years to uh to close. But a
six year old boy had crocodiles and other stuff right
at the place. Six year old boy fell into the
croc pit and was mauled, and it really, uh obviously
disturbed Bill because he wasn't a bad guy. He wasn't
you know. He tore him up and he shot this
(42:26):
crocodile nine times with the luger pistol um, and I
guess seven years later decided to close it. Apparently the
dad didn't blame Bill, which is remarkable for the accident.
I just thought was strange if he took safety precautions
(42:47):
and the kid went around him. Then yeah, maybe so
it's not that dude's fault either way. It's horrible and tragic. Yeah,
and he he ended up closing the serpentarium as a
result of it, although I did realized it was seven
years later too. But he kept his um milking operation going.
That's right, in his own self injection routine, and he did.
(43:09):
He flew to Venezuela once into the Amazon to deliver
some of his own blood to save a boy's life.
And he was made an honorary citizen in Venezuela as
a result. That is so cool, Yeah, pretty amazing. He
claims he had never been sick a day in his life,
didn't take never had the cold, never had the flu,
didn't take aspirin um. In this article that you sent,
(43:30):
says he was unusually youthful looking. I don't know. I
looked at pictures he I don't know if he looked
a hundred, but I don't know about unusually youthful looking, right,
Maybe so he had a glow about him, Yeah, glow
from venom. I'm gonna start shooting that stuff, I guess,
Oh yeah, No, I'm gonna stay away from it and
(43:51):
just be fascinated by the whole concept. Alrighty you anything else?
I got nothing else. I don't neither. If you want
to know more about snake handling, you can type those
words in the search bar how stuff works dot com.
And since I said that, it's time for oh, you
know what, it's time for Facebook questions. All right, So
(44:12):
what we do here, uhs when listener males have dried
up a little bit, we put it out to the
people on Facebook to send in questions and we'll answer
over the next two episodes as many as we can
that aren't dumb. And it's sort of a rapid fire
thing starting now. I'm like Billy on the Street. Who
(44:35):
Billy on the Street, Billie Eigner, No great TV show?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven't seen it, but
I'm aware of it. It's wonderful. Let's start with Griggs Dorkin,
good old Griggs Dorkins. Yes, he says, if you woke
up to find that you had replaced a character in
a movie, you know, well, what movie and character would
it be? And how would you handle the circumstances differently,
(44:58):
fans is a really good question. I feel like Josh
has probably had an answer to this for years for
the shining wink emoticon. You spell out wink emoticon or
did it just print out like that? I don't know.
I'm not sure, but no, he's spelled it out. I
had my answered easy, John Rambo, And what would you
(45:19):
do differently? Would you just immediately surrender? I would have
In the very beginning of First Blood when he drives
him across the bridge and says keep going that way,
I would have just kept going that way instead of
turning around and going back into down the end. Yeah,
John Rambo that would be a boring movie. Well, it
would be very short. Yeah, to be a short phone,
John Rambo. Hitchhiker, that's a good one. Yeah, what about you.
(45:41):
I'll have to think about that, all right. And hey, Storkin,
we'll see in Denver, buddy, all right, smile emoticon. This
from Jamie Whittaker. H Josh always refers to his favorite book. Josh,
you want to say it fo that's right, but I'm
usually driving and I never take it down. I can't remember,
so he says it's eighteen something. It's not right, Chuck,
(46:05):
what is your number one recommendation? Um? I don't know
if I have a favorite book, but I always recommend
the book middle Sex just because it's one of the
great books that I read. Jeffrey Eugenness, Yeah, I think
that's right. He wrote. Uh well, he's written a lot
of great books, but Middlesex is wonderful, so great, great
(46:27):
all around book. Yep, Okay, nice one, man. Uh, let's see.
Trey mclamb has a great question. How different would our
health be if we could sleep every day until we
wake up naturally? Is if alarm clocks were never invented.
I would guess we'd all be a lot more mellow.
We get less done, sure, but we'd be more mellow
(46:50):
like our five day weekend. Remember that episode I do.
I think that kind of dovetails with that quite a bit,
just kind of doing what you do. There's your answer,
good one. I don't know about that. There's a good question.
Terrible answer. Uh, Sam Horne, you've been dropping hintsive late
about live shows overseas. Would love to see you in
(47:11):
the UK. We have loads of stuff you should now. Terrible,
Uh Sam. We're hoping to come to the UK this summer.
We're working on it hard, We're working on it it
may or may not pan out because planning shows overseas
is uh, you know, can be challenging. Yeah, you have
to take a citizenship test. Did you know that? I
didn't know that. It's weird. So we're trying and listen
(47:34):
up for updates on that front. Okay, let's see. Uh.
Just Riddell says, I listened to your color podcast Color
with a You, and Chuck mentioned he might have a
color deficiency. I'd like to hear a podcast about color
blindness and color of deficiencies. Please smile emoticon. I think
(47:55):
people are putting this in. It's typing it out when
you print it. It's got to be maybe what's the question?
Wasn't a questioned all of the Nope, okay and good one. Uh, Chuck, Well,
they say, Josh diego Leal, how's the property squatting coming along?
That was me, Um, I haven't heard anything from a
few years. Uh, and I have anything about hippie Rob.
(48:17):
I'm still squatting everybody. It's working out great. Uh And
as far as we know, UM, we don't own the
property yet, but we think the county might. And there's
really I don't think we're in any danger of losing
it anytime soon. It's not your next door neighbor, back
back neighbor, now behind neighbor, whatever. Nope. So yeah, the County.
(48:38):
I don't know if you'll ever be able to own
it then, even through adverse possession, maybe not. But I
don't think there's anything that can do with it. It's
such a small strip. So I think we're good. Are
they gonna start parking like a tar truck back there?
County Land? What about Hippie rob? Any updates there? John
should be Robb will forever live forever in the ether? Uh?
(48:58):
Claire Dalt Dolby to Alby, I'd say Dolby too. Normally, Uh,
if you could revisit an episode and do it differently,
slash better? Which one the sun? Not a bad idea,
and I would definitely like another track. Um. Every once
in a while, I can't think of him. I mean
(49:20):
we've done like eight hundred plus episodes. Every once in
a while I will leave here and I say it
every time I feel that way, I'll be like that
one just wasn't as good because it could have been.
And it's always something that's like really important, like the
topic is really important to me so I like overthink
it and it always pans out fine, but I can't.
(49:42):
I can't think of any that I would just like
to go back and get over again. Yeah, I thought
you just kind of let you know, even if I'm
a little disappointed, it is what it is. Yeah, that's
a philosophy, you know, I guess it is. Yeah, it's
a boring philosophy. Um, they and Floyd, are we ever
going to get a how Jerry works episode? Nope, Jerry
(50:06):
doesn't want people to know how she works. She operates
in stealth and secret. Yeah. The c I A and
she may or may not exist. Uh. Larry Tiffany says,
what evidence will we see if the flood epic of
Noah's Ark were indeed true? Well, Larry, we've got something
for you, buddy. It's a whole episode on Noah's Ark
in the flood. It was pretty pretty good one if
(50:27):
I remember correctly. I have no recollection. That's good. Okay,
how about one more each? Luke vis Ring, have you
ever been told the topic is off limits? No, we
have not. That we are very lucky and that we
are free to program our own content, and are all
the various bosses and company owners we've had over the years,
(50:50):
I've always steered clear of that, which were very thankful for. Yeah,
we self regulated. One more. Josh Robinson asks Johns and
Chuck why do you hate the nineties? Why do you
hate my childhood? I love the nineties. I'm yeah. I
think the nineties were like okay, and I just don't
think that they were. I don't think they produced that
(51:12):
much great stuff. Everything just had this kind of superficialness
to it. I felt like, well, I love the nineties.
The nineties was my twenties in my college. The beloved
very much to me, and things were great in the
nineties in a lot of ways. Are you nostalgizing right now? No,
I thought we had a band on that. No. I
(51:34):
love the nineties. Great, great music, great culture. See. I
think the music thing is where I have the issue.
I wouldn't say it was great great music. There is
some good music. I don't dispute that, but I think
there's a lot of really bad music. That's every generation,
not necessarily. I knew you were going to say that,
(51:54):
and I was prepared to respond, and it is as follows.
Look at the eighties, right, Okay, A lot of bad music,
a lot of great music, but there was a lot
more good listenable music, Like think of all the one
hit wonders in the eighties. There were a lot a
lot of singles that were pretty good and listenable even
(52:14):
at the time, not just in retrospect. In the nineties,
there was a lot a lot of stuff on the
radio was awful. Yeah, yeah, like Nirvana and stuff like that. No,
I mean again, there was some like good stuff, and
there were plenty of good bands, but for the most
part it felt like there was just a lot of
really bad stuff too. I'll go back to the spin
(52:35):
doctors again. I think that is the emblem of the nineties.
Spin doctors. They were huge for a little while, and
then I think that also carried into the early two
thousand's with with a lot of the terrible nous, too interesting,
and it's like there just seemed to be and I
know the eighties were super vapid, very shallow, but almost
(52:58):
to a cartoonist to the nineties were unaware of its superficiality.
It felt like like it was trying really hard to
not be superficial, but it was failing at it. I
think I reject the notion that a lot of one
hit wonders equals good not good better. I got three
(53:19):
words for you walking on sunshine. That was Katrine in
the way. So that was wrong with that? Well maybe
we just have different tastes maybe, so sorry, let's send
this now and don't it feel good? Yeah? Yes it does, chuck.
So that was Facebook Questions, Part one, Part one I
was sales. Never do that again. If you want to
(53:40):
get in touch of this, you can join us on
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. We're also
on Twitter at s y s K podcast. You can
send us an email to Stuff Podcast that House, Stuffworks
dot com, and as always, join us at at Home
on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
(54:00):
staff works dot com. H m hm
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