Helping Hands in snake safety

[WRITER: Marcel van Driel ]

This is a first in, hopefully, a long series of articles about anything to do with snakes and snake safety in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Helping Hands in Snake Safety (HHiSS) is a snake awareness NGO, established in 2020 in Zambia. Our goal is to keep both snakes and people safe and that is quite a task! The general attitude in Zambia and Zimbabwe is to kill any snake on sight. But apart from that action being illegal, it also puts the one killing the snake in potential harms way.

Snakes are not aggressive creatures. They want to be left alone and do what they do: eat and mate. There is no hidden agenda. Unfortunately, a lot of people in our countries think there is a firm belief that snakes are out to get us. “Kill it before it kills you”. The reality is that none of them do, they only bite out of self-defence. This is best explained by considering how they function. First of all, snakes can’t bite off pieces of prey. They swallow their prey whole, and humans are too large to swallow for any snake in Africa including the Southern African Python. We are not in any way on a snake’s menu! Another factor is that snakes can’t regulate their body temperatures; they are cold-blooded animals. This means that for any snake to be able to be active, it needs to bask in the sun or lie on any warm surface. Energy is a very precious commodity, so why would they want to waste that energy on something they can’t eat? The simple reality is that snakes only bite us when they feel threatened.

But there is another, maybe more compelling reason not to harm snakes. Snakes fulfil a crucial role in pest control. The absence of snakes would mean an increase of pests that eat our crops and damage our property. Without snakes we would have no food left, apart from what we can forage in the wild. And we have long since forgotten to truly survive on what nature provides us.

In subsequent issues of Travel & Leisure Zambia & Zimbabwe magazine, we will provide you with more information about snakes and snakebite (treatment). In the September 2021 issue we will start by providing you with an overview of the snake species, both harmful and harmless that can be found in Zambia.

[PHOTO: Mike Perry ]

Helping Hands in Snake Safety www.hhiss.com