>>This paper has resulted in a mixed blessing at best. While one cannot dispute the physical evidence of the gland, it has also resulted in many TOTALY HARMLESS snakes being placed in doubt. While I respect the work that went into the paper, personally I don't find the value of the small percentage of snakes that this information suggests "possibly" could be harmful to balance the cost of the questions that now are posted about a large amount of snakes that over many years keeping have proved safe. It's a question of where do you draw the line. Under the right circumstances even a Kitten could kill a man. Sometimes pure science Can do more damage than good.



The paper presented new results of evolutionary research into the origin of venom. This is something scientists have been puzzling about for a prolonged period of time, so the new information was certainly of scientific interest. What exactly should we have done with it? Suppressed the data because it might inconvenience someone??? Sorry, it doesn't work that way.



The whole point of this is not to say that your king/garter/corn snake is dangerous - tens of thousands of people have kept them safely, so they clearly aren't.



However, the simple fact is that there is a large number of colubrids out there that may cause dangerous bites on very rare occasions. The problem with any of the venomous colubrids is that only a small minority of bites are actually symptomatic. That means that you need a very extensive history of husbandry of the species to be certain that you know the full envelope of the species' capacity. In other words, "I've been bitten twice and nothing happened" does not count for anything. For instance, there was a recent bite to a pet shop employee by Coluber rhodorhachis that caused extensive neurotoxic symptoms - there is nothing whatsoever in the literature on this snake that suggests that it would be capable of causing anything more than swelling. There are other species out there like that, and that's we are urging caution with the *less well-known* colubrids, i.e., those not in amss husbandry: somewhere out there, there will be another boomslang, or another Rhabdophis (the cute Asian "garter snakes" that were popular as pets in the 70s, until a number of keepers came close to dying from bites due to massive hemorrhages), and with the current legislative climate, it will be vastly better for the herp hobby to take sensible precautions with poorly-known colubrids than to face headlines along the lines of "12 year-old killed by "harmless" pet snake" - no prizes for gessing what will happen to herpetoculture then.



Cheers,



Wolfgang
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