On a dead snake, to get his professional opinion of the procedure. It's not something we would want to do to a live animal, but we had this opportunity to learn some things from a patient we were unable to save.

I asked him to thoroughly take apart a dead black mamba so that we could learn more about the anatomy for the next time we had to perform surgery on a live patient. I asked him to remove the venom glands from the dead animal and to pay special attention to the head structures, since we get so many mambas in with head trauma. See the link below for some examples.

I'll eventually be posting a more complete account on the web page of what my vet thought of this "venomoid" operation, but here are some basic conclusions.

1. My vet was really not thrilled with the idea that anyone would want to do this to a live patient. Digging the venom gland out of an elapid's head meant going quite deep through a lot of delicate internal structures. It is not a trivial operation by any stretch of the imagination. He was willing to do it to a dead animal but he did not think it would be a good thing to do to a live animal.

2. The first "venom gland" my vet removed turned out to be a small muscle that was positioned right at the base of the fang. It looked a lot like gland tissue. Keep in mind that the person who made this mistake is an experienced reptile vet who has worked for Fish and Wildlife doing surgical implants on snakes for telemetry studies. Distinguishing that small muscle from the actual gland was difficult even for a veterinarian who had some previous experience doing oral surgery on elapids.

3. Given the reports of fully hot snakes running around with obvious scars from a venomoid operation, this makes me wonder if amateurs with much less skill than a veterinarian are actually removing the wrong piece. Obviously it is not too difficult to get that little muscle confused with the venom gland, given that an experienced reptile veterinarian did exactly that on his first attempt.

Makes ya wonder, doesn't it?
Mamba rescue

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