Couple of clarifications - sorry, I was tired and made some errors in the initial post. The attempt that my vet made at "venomoid" surgery on a dead patient was initially with a Mexican jumping viper, and that was the dissection I actually saw where the muscle was removed instead of the venom gland. I was not at the clinic during the black mamba dissection and I got feedback from the vet afterward.

The feedback was pretty much the same on the elapid. Venom glands are buried way down deep and are both hard to get to without cutting through a lot of tissue and easy to mistake for other tissue that isn't venom gland.

I think it is a good idea to do "learning necropsies". If we can't save a life at least we can learn something that will help the living. The more intimately familiar my vet is with elapid and viperid anatomy, the better off my live patients are. So I'll probably be making more reports of this nature as rescue operations continue.

Donations of freshly dead (not frozen) venomous snakes will be cheerfully accepted towards this goal.

[ Show Entire Thread ]