The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

Our snakes, and all but a very few of the other poison-snake species of the world, know that it pays to keep the peace. Now, what if all snakes were as foolishly aggressive as the hooded and spectacled cobras of India? Let us see. Those cobra species are man-haters. They love to attack and do damage. They go out of their way to bite people. They crawl into huts and bungalows, especially during the monsoon rains, and they infest thatch roofs. But are they wise, and retiring, like the house-haunting gopher snake of the South? By no means. The cobra goes around with a chip on his shoulder. In India they kill from 17,000 to 18,000 people annually! And in return, about 117,000 cobras are killed annually. It is a mighty fortunate thing for humanity on the frontier that the other serpents of the world know that it is a good thing to behave themselves, and not bite unnecessarily. Fighting Its Own Kind. The Indian cobra, (Naia tripudians), is an exception to the rule of serpents that forbids fighting in the family. While cobras in captivity usually do live together in a state of vicious and fully-armed neutrality, sometimes they do fight. One of our cobras once attacked a cage-mate two-thirds the size of itself, vanquished it, seized it by the head and swallowed two-thirds of it before the tragedy was discovered. The assailant was compelled to disgorge his prey, but the victim was very dead. The poison venom of the cobra, rattlesnake, bushmaster and puff adder is a great handicap on the social standing of the entire serpent family. Mankind in general abhors snakes, both in general and particular. The snake not actually known to be venomous usually is suspected of being so. It is only the strongest mental constitution that can permit a snake to go unkilled when the killing opportunity offers. It is just as natural for the lay brother to kill a chicken snake because it looks like a copperhead, or a hog-nosed blowing "viper" because it looks like a rattlesnake, as it is to shy at a gun that "may be loaded."