Smitten by Snakes

Romulus Whitaker was four years old and living in New York with his mother's family when neighbourhood kids killed a snake, terming it ‘poisonous'. Fascinated but afraid, Rom brought the dead snake to his mother, who said, "It's a harmless garter snake, Breezy, it wouldn't have hurt you." "I didn't kill it, Mummy. The other kids did," he replied. "Promise me you won't kill a snake," she said. He did, and thus began Rom's journey with reptiles, which ended in him kickstarting the concept of conserving the species in South India, eventually founding four major research and conservation institutions — the Chennai Snake Park, Madras Crocodile Bank, the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team (ANET), and the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station.

He recently published his autobiography, "Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n' Roll: My Early Years," co-authored by his wife, Janaki Lenin. In an interview with Asha Prakash, the 81-year-old who lives in Mysore recounts this journey, which he says was "hard, but fun."

In the 1950s and 1960s, when I was growing up in India and later the USA, hunting was something young men just did. In Wyoming University, for example, I had a friend whose entire family were hunters, to the extent they didn't have to buy meat from the supermarket. The colonists declared all tigers, leopards, lions, crocodiles — anything that could kill a human — as vermin and were shooting everything. There was no Wildlife Protection Act at the time, and the idea of conservation didn't exist until later in the 1960s.

Hunting is still an accepted practice in many countries, but then, it's more humane than how farm animals are treated and killed for meat today, or how snare traps cause animals to die slow, painful deaths. A hunter doesn't wound an animal; he wants to kill it instantly. Hunting brought me into the wild, and I could see the animals disappearing. Places that were wild and beautiful, full of wildlife, were not to be found anymore. India was behind the rest of the world in wildlife studies, and it was only in the mid-1970s that the Wildlife Institute of India was started. But now it's booming, which is great. But even today, we have only three or four per cent of the country which is protected for wildlife.

I wonder myself sometimes, but being an outsider or a white man in India helped, I guess. Also, I did my schooling in Kodaikanal, so I knew Tamil and I loved India. I started to learn my way around the bureaucracy – drinking endless cups of tea in govt offices and saying the right things to officers. I did it because of my passion for conservation and to teach people about snakes and crocodiles, but it was also a series of very lucky events.

I started the Madras Snake Park Trust (Chennai Snake Park) in 1969 on a shoestring budget way outside Madras, buying snakes from the Irulars for a couple of rupees each. It was popular, but we could hardly maintain it. One day, the chief conservator of forests visited us. He saw that visitors were finding it difficult to reach the park from the city and asked me if I wanted to shift it to the Guindy deer park. "We can give you half an acre of land on a twenty-five-year lease," he said. I think the rate was ₹250 a year. My jaw dropped, and that was the beginning. The World Wildlife Fund, which started in Bombay at that time, helped, and so did some industrialists, and slowly, the snake park became an entity. Crores of people have visited the park and have gone away with, hopefully, a more positive attitude towards snakes.

For that, the attitude towards snake bites must change first. Nearly 60,000 people, including children, are still killed by snakes every year in India, and most of these can be avoided if people take preventive measures; walk out at night with a torch or use boots in the fields. At the Madras Crocodile Bank, we have a snake bite mitigation programme, primarily educating people, including village doctors, because we think prevention is easier than cure. Antivenom is effective, but how do you get someone to the hospital in time if you're in a remote village and the bite happens at 2 am, and there's no transport to the nearest hospital two hours away?

In those days, I didn't have any other peer group of snake lovers other than the Irulas, who were snake catchers. I didn't like the fact that they were killing them for skins, of course. But they knew all about snakes, so I started learning a lot from them. They can find snakes where nobody else can. In a way to pay back, I helped them set up the Irula Snake Catchers Industrial Co-Operative Society. Instead of killing snakes, they would bring the snakes alive, extract the venom, and sell it to antivenom producers. This has worked since 1982. They produce enough venom for pharmaceutical companies to market several million vials of antivenom every year and save millions of lives in India. I don't think they have gotten the credit for that. Their skills and the skills of many tribal peoples in India are underrated and disappearing.

Taking a group of Irulas to Florida in 2017 was an extension of this project. The Irulas' fathers and grandfathers were the ones responsible for the near extinction of pythons in Tamil Nadu, and the Everglades National Park in Florida had a problem of overpopulation of these pythons. The University of Florida and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission invited us. There was a lot of news coverage, which was great, but we didn't really have enough time to make a dent or teach enough people the techniques we used.

When you show people how remarkable these animals are, it really changes their minds, and it's very gratifying to watch. That changes govt's minds as well because laws come in and new protected areas are established. For example, the long-snouted gharial (a species of crocodile) of the Chambal River was protected, thanks to govt efforts. That was a reason we set up the Madras Crocodile Bank, to start breeding them in captivity as part of the ‘Adopt a Reptile' programme to restock wild habitats, and that worked out beautifully. I love seeing the reactions of people to snakes; a kid touching a snake and saying, "Wow, it's not slimy, it's not bad, it's really nice." Their eyes open up, and a smile comes to their faces as they realise it's different from what their parents have told them.