Actually, if you think about the general non herping newspaper reading public, to them "viper" just means some venomous snake.
The reporter is not necessarily someone with a great deal of education, it probably is the human interest story of the day that just barely beat out the largest peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever made story and wound up getting assigned to whatever intern was sitting around.
Oh well, even bottom feeders need to eat.
Unfortunately, this one vendor is probably the tip of the iceberg. Hope they catch whoever it was.
Karl

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• CA Press: Package turns out to hold deadly spitting cobra - W von Papineäu, Fri May 7 13:25:48 2004
• snake vendor in South Carolina jail time! - budman 1st, Fri May 7 15:08:16 2004
• Interesting how... - psilocybe, Fri May 7 15:41:05 2004
• RE: Interesting how... - kingcobrafan, Fri May 7 17:34:05 2004
• RE: Interesting how... - Buzztail1, Fri May 7 23:06:52 2004