ST PETERSBURG TIMES (Florida) 23 October 07 A real charmer - Since he was a kid, Jim Mendenhall has loved snakes. Now he teaches that love to others. "They're cool," he says. (Erin Sullivan)
San Antonio, Fla.: When Jim Mendenhall was 7 years old, he found a pretty red and yellow snake in his Miami yard and picked it up and put it in his pocket. He played with that snake all day, until dinnertime, when his mom found out and freaked. It was a coral snake, and its venom could have surely killed little Jim, especially then, in 1949, when antivenin wasn't around to save his life.
But as much as his mom yelled, Mendenhall couldn't quit messing with snakes. He loved them and even now, more than a half-century later, he can't quite explain why, other than to use the same term he would have then.
"They're cool."
The love of snakes is one that is hard to pin down. They aren't cuddly. It is harder, if not impossible, for a person to see human traits in a snake, as they can in dogs, cats, horses or other animals. A snake bred in captivity, held since it was a teeny baby, still retains some of its wild instinct. No matter how much you love it or how well you take care of it, feeding it mice and rabbits, it can still turn on you.
"I've got a king cobra who wants to kill me every time I take him out of his cage," Mendenhall said, after being asked if snakes have personalities. "So, yes, he's got a heck of a personality."
Mendenhall, who did eight educational snake shows at this weekend's Rattlesnake Festival in San Antonio, doesn't believe in having snakes as pets, though he has a house on his Spring Hill land built just for the snakes he uses for educational shows.
He has about 100 snakes now. Mendenhall has become a refuge for unwanted or injured snakes. He got a diamondback rattlesnake after getting a call from deputies, who were called to a woman's house after she found the snake under her bed.
He also saves other animals: lizards and tortoises. He's taught himself how to do surgery on them. He once found an indigo snake that had been hit by a car, its innards outside of its body. He took it home, cleaned it up, sewed its ruptured organs and made some fake ribs from nylon and wired it to what remained of the snake's ribs. He rehabilitated it for a year and a half and then it was well enough to be released back into the wild, which he did.
The older Mendenhall gets, the more he believes snakes should be where they were meant to be: in the wild, being a vital part of the ecosystem, keeping the rodent population in check.
"They are here on Earth to do a good thing," he said.
Not only do they keep the rodent population down, their venom and saliva also is being used in important medicines for people, such as one for diabetes, Mendenhall said.
"The snake has been persecuted since the beginning of time," he said.
And that seems true. Many self-proclaimed animal lovers wouldn't think twice about taking a shovel to the head of a snake caught snoozing in a driveway. That makes Mendenhall sick.
"People need to just leave them alone," he said.
He uses his shows to try to tell people this. Behind him on tables are writhing pillowcases with snakes inside of them - an eerie sight, the pretty Grandma-type flowered cases bumping and moving.
He brings them out, one by one, to show people how to identify venomous snakes here in Florida from a distance. All except the coral snake have a black mask. The coral has red and yellow colors next to each other. If you're walking and you hear the rattle of a rattlesnake, stop and slowly, slowly walk backward from where you came.
He says that snakes do not want to harm you. It's just that we, as humans, have bulldozed their living spaces, so they are having to search farther for food, water and mates. We are in their territory.
As he talks about this in his show, about how we have got to protect our Earth and stop building 10,000-square-foot strip malls, people fidget in their seats or get dazed looks.
"As custodians of the environment, we have done a lousy job," he said. "Over 62 species of animal, insect or plant life goes extinct every hour of every day."
Silence.
Then Mendenhall brings out another pillowcase, a rose-colored one, and dumps it on a table.
A king cobra.
"Oooh," the audience said, leaning forward, bright-eyed again. And they clapped.
A real charmer