Snake Charming

I take any excuse to examine human emotions- I suppose any writer does in their own way.

I visited an outdoor conservation centre recently run by a charming couple with boundless patience. She was partially deaf, ran the kitchen and ticket booth single handed and answered any questions from the visitors whilst he was profoundly deaf since birth and looked after the animals. Between the Meercats, Otters, maned wolves, llamas, a single grey wolf, two red pandas and a very noisy kookaburra, we spent a good hour walking round and when I met him feeding the desert foxes it wasn’t hard to notice how he communicated and, being trained a little in BSL a conversation ensued.

When the snake handling came he brought out a gentle natured 6′ boa and a corn snake and having struck up a friendship already, he offered me first “drape” of the boa.

With three stone of snake around my neck and a corn snake around my arm (trying to find its way into every pocket, crevice and shadow) the questions followed and having a little layman’s knowledge about snakes, I helped translate his answers until I was answering them myself. Ten minutes in I saw him walking away to feed other enclosures and he signed back at me “are you ok with them?”

Looks like I was on my own at that point…

I spent an hour with the many families essentially running the snake handling session on my own and the results were amazing! Many ran the range of fear from outright terror and “don’t bring that near me” to “always wanted to touch but too afraid to try”.

My day job involves talking people through fears of a different sort so this was like a busman’s holiday in a sense. I’d seen a program on someone getting over their fear of spiders a few years ago and I’m no stranger to my own fears (a disastrous attempt to learn Scuba Diving set my fear of water back to worse than it was before I’d begun) but I was able to work with people in a simple step approach that gained results pretty quickly.

“How close can you stand?” got them closer than they thought.

“would you like to touch him?” slowly got hands extended, then the wonder at the smoothness of the skin, the warmth of the scales and the gentleness of the boa as it happily coiled around my shoulders and arms.

“Would you like to support his weight?” had even the most nervous holding part of his body with my help or the help of friends, and that led to the next question…

“How about we put him on you for a bit?”

I never said “tell me the moment you want him off” because I believe if you give someone an “out” they will take it when fear is involved. They “had” an out anyway, but they didn’t know it. I was watching every face and body language intently. A lifetime of stammering and a working life with criminal courts has given me a pretty good sense of how to read body language, and the moment anyone’s body, face, even their eyes betrayed either uncontrollable fear or a lack of total control I moved in with a “would you like me to take him now?”

And guess what? Some of them said “no”, controlled their fear, and felt empowered sufficiently to retain the snakes.

I had a lot of “I never would have believed I could have done that!” from a number of people, a lot of thanks, a lot of conversation, and an awful lot of laughter.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: the couple running the place gave me the best gifts of all: I made two friends (and got a mug of tea into the bargain!)