Snake-catchers: India
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Urban snake-catchers
Chennai
When two cobras entered a government school in Mambakkam, Chen nai, Nishanth Ravi got a call for help. When the 25-year-old arrived, he found the snakes blocking the entrance of a classroom full of children.
“The snakes were more than 5.5ft and aggressive so it took all my skills to move them away so that the children could first get out and then I catch them,“ says Ravi, who gave up a prospective career in chemical engineering to focus on wildlife conservation. He, along with animal welfare activist Shravan Krishnan, work in tandem with the forest department to attend to snake rescue calls across the city .
Meet the new-age snake-catchers of India. While tribes like the Irulas have been rushing to the rescue for years, urbanites are now playing conservationist. With cities expanding, there is growing man-animal conflict.
Chennai, for instance, has the Guindy national park, Theosophical society grounds, Nanmangalam forests and also marshlands right inside the city limits. It is also home to the big four venomous snake species -spectacled cobra, common krait, Russell's viper and saw scaled viper -as well as non-venomous snakes like the common rat snake and wolf snake. “We have about 25 varieties of land snakes so calls for snake rescue are high,“ says Krishnan, who has done more than 2,000 snake rescues.
Snakes slithering into homes is common in Bengaluru and Mumbai. In the IT city, Mohan K, 41, along with his Quick Animal Rescue Team (QART) attends to calls from all 198 wards of Bengaluru. His team gets about 50 calls a day during summer when snakes l come out to bask in the sun, and during monsoons when they slither through t storm water drains reaching homes and offices.
“In the last two decades, I've rescued more than 25,000 snakes, including venomous ones like cobras, and Russell's vipers,“ says Mohan K, who learnt his skills from a snake catcher called Mohammad Aneez.
Devaraj KS (45), aka Snake Shivappa, hails from a village in Mandya district, Devaraj came to Bengaluru in 2000 to work as a construction labourer.“One day I saw a group of people trying to kill a cobra on the road in north Bengaluru. To save the snake, I opened a gunny bag and it slithered f into it. Though it was an accidental rescue, people started calling me whenever they found a snake,“ says Shivappa, who has rescued 15,380 snakes.
In Mumbai, people would rather kill a snake than pay for it to be ress cued. So, NGOs such as Resqink Association for f Wildlife Welfare, Sarpa Mitra and Reptile Rescue and Study Centre (RRSC) are offering the service for free. Volunteers are young male students, retirees or wildlife enthusiasts i with day jobs. There are also women like Gargi Vijayaraghavan, who has been rescuing snakes along with her father for a decade. Monsoon is the busiest season for these rescuers, who extract serpents from car engines, lift chambers, and air-condition ers.
It can be a tricky feat, so rescu ers usually question the callers about the colour, length and pat tern on the snake. “Callers also WhatsApp the photo of the snake so we can see if it is venomous or not,“ says Krishnan, the Chennai conservationist.
In Kerala, Vava Suresh is the state's most sought after snake catcher and conservationist.
Suresh, who is in his early 40s, has caught over 50,000 snakes and been bitten over 3,000 times. He has a stump for a middle finger on his left hand, his index finger resem bles a broken twig and the nerve on his right arm was severed by a cobra bite. The cobra also tore off a chunk of flesh from his palm, which had to be reconstructed by a plastic surgeon.
“I have been put on the ventila tor twice and been in the ICU eight times. Every time I end up in hos pital, my mother asks me to stop.
But this is my life, says Suresh who lives with an alarmingly high r. antibody count.
Experts stress the need for as piring young snake-catchers to take necessary precautions. Boriv i-based retiree Bharat Joshi of Sarpa Mitra, who has rescued 1,965 snakes in he last 30 years, says overconfidence can be fatal. He conducts workshops for snake catchers, asking them to wear gloves, and carry a head torch along with their hand torches on nocturnal rescue missions. “They should not be carrying the serpent back on the twowheeler in a bag but inside a box with an overhead mesh and side latches,“ says Joshi.
Ravi and Krishnan both learnt their skills from professional snake catchers and accompanied rescuers from the forest department on more than 100 rescue calls before venturing out on their own.
“When we go for rescues, if it is nonvenomous, we educate people and talk about the ecological advantage of having snakes around. Ideally, people should want to co-exist with snakes,“ says Krishnan.
