*Note: I’ve been writing for years but only started blogging and publishing within the last two. I’ve decided to go back through some of my old journals and occasionally publish a piece from one of them.  I’ll reference them at the end of the article as archives.  

I was reading an article on deadly snakes last night that I found very interesting.  Herpetologists are often divided in deciding which snake is the deadliest. For instance, do you rank them by the potency of their venom? Do you take into consideration the likelihood for human encounters, the aggressiveness of the snake, the availability of medical resources, etc.? Or do you simply go by which snake is actually responsible for the most human deaths? The latter is the criteria chosen by the author who published the article I read. 

This author also pointed out the different approaches and levels of respect that people take towards snakes, such as the juxtaposition of the Texas Rattlesnake Round-up in Sweetwater versus Festival of Snakes in Andhra Pradesh. He pointed out that the people in India display gratitude toward the serpents, primarily cobras, because they recognize the value of the snakes that eat the rodents that compete grain for grain with the farmers. He mentions also, there is a legend that a great cobra spread its hood to protect Buddha from the sun while he was meditating. 

However, the Indians in their respect for snakes draw the line at worshipping the “outlaw snake” – the snake that killed Gogol Vir, the patron of snakes, with a bite to the head. This same “outlaw snake” is alluded to in Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my favorite childhood story, as the “dusty brown snakeling.” The snake that is the killer of Gogol Vir?  The snake that the Indians won’t worship? The snake that has killed the most humans?  The “deadliest” snake in the world: the saw-scaled viper.

Besides the literary references, I found the article interesting because given thirty guesses at the deadliest snake in the world – and I know more than the average person about snakes – I would have never guessed the saw-scaled viper. I’ve heard very little about it and was shocked to learn it was responsible for more human deaths than cobras, mambas, puff adders, and other more notorious venomous slithering reptiles. The point is this: there are many factors to take into account when one is deciding what is dangerous or deadly, and the obvious offender is not always an accurate conclusion.  It is a point I find relevant with all that is going on in our world twenty-four years after I first pondered it.

Archives 1996 (And no, I’m not holding a saw-scaled viper. Such a picture does not exist!)