World's Largest Rattlesnake Roundup

Festival Location: Sweetwater, TX, USA

Festival State: Texan Festivals

Festival Type: Bizarre Festivals

By: © Nelson Taylor 2009

Hate snakes? "Well, this ain't no place you'd be interested in," says Laverl Stephens, world-renowned snake handler. Like every 2nd weekend in March, this year Laverl will be showing off his technique to about 30,000 fang-fearing folks at the World's Largest Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater. Since 1958, local Jaycees (town do-gooders) have organized ranchers and farmers into thinning out their pesky population of Western Diamondback rattlesnakes. Why? They present a threat to livestock. "You see," Laverl says, "that old rattlesnake, he'll coil on up there to sleep. And that old cow -- they get a little curious sometimes -- will go on up there and stick they nose right on down and the snake will hit him and they head'll swell on up real big and they'll suffocate."

Since its inception, over 225,000 pounds of the restless rattlers have been rounded. "The way you do it is you get yourself one of them weed sprayers and fill it with gas, and you spray the fumes down in those dens. Then you just trap'm up in a bag and bring'm to us. We take live snakes only." Although the biggest snake in the roundup's history was just over fifteen lbs. and pushing six feet in length, the average weight borders 2 singles. They are expecting somewhere in the ballpark of three tons total this year. That's a lot of hissing honeys, which, bottom line, translates into a lot of cold hard cash for the town of Sweetwater.

Before the event, the Jaycees take bids from buyers for the skins, the meat and the venom. The skins are used to make boots, rock star digs and everything in between. The meat is considered a delicacy both at home and abroad (meaning Oklahoma). And the venom is used for medicinal purposes. Having accepted their green, the Jaycees pay everyone who hauls in a sack of slitherers an average of about $4 per pound. "One year a while back," Laverl says, "the price got up to $8.50 a pound. Everybody was out hunting. There was grandmas and grandpas doing it. People was having to guard their snakes so nobody else stole'm." Talk about getting snaked. The weekend is packed with all sorts of family events. There's the Miss Snake Charmer contest, rattlesnake dances, snake handling demonstrations, guided snake hunts, plus a host of other things you'd find at your everyday ordinary backyard rattlesnake slaughter fest, including lessons in skinning and grilling and, of course, snake milking (the process of extracting the venom from the snake). A lesson in milking: hand gripped snug behind the head of the snake, you hang its fangs over the lip of a glass jar and squeeze the venom sacks, which are right behind its eyes. "Usually with them big snakes," Laverl says, "you have to use both hands on the head, so you throw the other end between your legs and hold on."

As you can imagine, no reptile decimating carnival of such colossal proportions is without its opponents. "Some of them protesters come every year," says Laverl. "One guy even dresses up like a grim reaper." While the Jaycees stand firm on the notion that they aren't doing anything to destroy the species, John "Jo Herp" Hollister, a well-known Texas snake scholar, says "Killing large quantities of any species upsets the balance which nature has spent eons creating." Because of the decrease in the snake populations, Hollister says, "people are bringing in snakes from hundreds of miles away, often from other states."

T. Dean McInturff, President of the West Texas Herpetological Society, calls roundups "circus sideshows" and "public butcherings." His beef is consistent with Hollister's. The primary reason is that rattlesnakes are endangered in fifteen states. Also, spraying gasoline into dens kills many other species of animals and makes the dens uninhabitable for many years, not to mention that their venom milking is a bogus front. Hollister says, "I have seen them milking three or four different species into the same container, which is left out at room temperature for hours. No respectable lab would buy that."

McInturff puts the whole shebang into perspective. "How would the public react to a Puppy Roundup, where the dogs are gassed from their dog houses, stacked in trash cans and at the end of three days beheaded and skinned? And what if little snarling puppy heads encased in glass were sold to people who enjoyed eating savory, gasoline-tainted fried puppy meat?" Mmm.....finger lickin' Fido.