Snake Bros Keep Getting Bitten by Their Lethal Pets. Only Zoos Can Save Them | WIRED

CommentLoader-

Save StorySave this story

CommentLoader-

Save StorySave this story

The first thing Chris Gifford thought as he felt a fang sink into his skin was: I’m going to die. The second: I need to start a timer immediately.

That day in 2021, Gifford was cleaning the enclosures of the several dozen snakes he kept at his parents’ home in Raleigh, North Carolina. Nearly every snake in his possession was both venomous and native to distant corners of the world. Sharp-nosed vipers, eyelash vipers, forest cobras—every one of them beautiful, and many of them lethal.

So too was the 7-foot-long, electric-hued western green mamba that had just latched onto its enclosure’s swing door as Gifford attempted to pull it out with a hook. The snake then lunged off and bit into Gifford’s hand, unleashing a deadly neurotoxic venom into his body.

“I dropped the snake,” Gifford says. “I dropped the hook. I’m like, ‘Oh man, I’m probably dead.’ This is a very toxic, fast-acting venomous snake.”

Chris Gifford amassed an audience on social media for videos of him handling his exotic pet snakes, many of which are lethal.

Courtesy of Chris Gifford

As Gifford, then 21, hurried to re-hook the mamba and secure it, he felt his hand begin to tingle ominously. Gifford didn’t know precisely how long he had, but was certain that without help he would be dead in hours. His life would depend on a vital resource: antivenom, which was tucked securely away at the unlikeliest of places—a zoo and botanical garden hundreds of miles away.

That’s where the Antivenom Index, a little-known directory that for half a century has connected Americans bitten by venomous exotic pets with the zoos that can save them, comes in. Generally speaking, the best way to treat the most life-threatening snakebites is with antivenom made using venom of the same species. The process begins with extracting venom, often by milking drops of toxin from the fangs of a snake. The venom is then injected into an animal, like a horse or a sheep, to spur the development of antibodies. It's finally transformed into a substance that can halt the original venom’s effects in humans.

To make antivenom, snake venom is extracted from a cobra.

Photograph: Alex Bowie/Getty Images

Zoos that house deadly snakes stock the corresponding antivenom in case a keeper has an accident—and so it’s zoos that get the call when a civilian has a mishap of their own.

It was the Houston Zoo that provided antivenom to save a man bitten by his pet monocled cobra. A man bitten by an African pit viper received antivenom from the Virginia Aquarium and the National Zoo in Washington, DC, while another man bitten by a similar snake had a folder instructing doctors to call the Milwaukee County Zoo for antivenom in case he received a bite. A zoo in Seattle has provided antivenom in at least eight cases in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, including once for a puff adder bite in Portland. In one infamous case, a visitor to the National Zoo broke open an enclosure and stole two Gaboon vipers, one of which bit him soon after—for which he was treated with antivenom from zoos in Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia, as well as the recently robbed National Zoo.

The legality of venomous pet ownership varies widely by city, county, and state. But for those interested in taking it up, acquiring specimens has gotten steadily easier. Advances in snake husbandry mean that many once-rare species are now readily found in captive-bred populations. Snakes can be bought everywhere from reptile shows and breeders to online classifieds and pet stores, some of which ship venomous offerings around the country. Individual snakes rarely cost more than three figures.

And yet, snakebites are still rare in the United States: The National Poison Data System’s 2024 annual report listed a little north of 5,000 bites from venomous native species that year, with just 81 bites—of which at least 57 were venomous—from exotics.

But when the worst happens with an exotic snake, most hospitals are unprepared.

American medical facilities might be equipped with antivenom for native species like copperheads and cottonmouths, but they’re exceedingly unlikely to have the ability to treat bites from snakes whose natural ranges are farther afield. Venom from the most perilous exotics can take effect within minutes, in a nightmarish crescendo of symptoms depending on the snake and what kind of venom it possesses. Vomiting. Excruciating pain. Shock. Internal bleeding. Blistering. Organ shutdown. Paralysis. Suffocation. Death.

Once a patient arrives at an emergency room, hospitals contact their regional poison center, which in turn boots up the index, where zoos across the country voluntarily list which antivenoms they stock and in what quantity. And somewhere, whatever the hour, a keeper’s phone starts to ring.

Leslie Boyer, a medical toxinologist and professor emerita at the University of Arizona, spent two decades as the dir