DESERT SUN (Palm Springs, California) 19 September 13 Expert at Joshua Tree gives lowdown on snakes (Lynn Lieu)
Photo: Venom extraction from an eastern diamonback rattlesnake. (Ray Morgan)
Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller “Jaws” is often cited as the first blockbuster, but it also helped fuel an irrational fear of sharks. The Discovery Channel launched Shark Week in 1987 with the aim of educating people about these ocean predators, but it took years to catch on with viewers as populations were decimated.
Much of the sharks’ plight can be reflected in that of venomous snakes. With the ability to bite and some cases kill, they are viewed as animal to fear.
For Ray Morgan, photographer and now filmmaker, it is the perception of this reptile that he believes needs rescuing.
“I’ve been working with reptiles one type or another since I was about 7, so it’s been kind of a lifelong fascination,” said Morgan. “What triggered the project was a real strong dissatisfaction with what passes for nature and science programming today like on National Geographic but especially on Animal Planet. The quality of program has just gone down the toilet — it’s just abysmal.”
Morgan’s documentary, “The Venom Interviews,” was released last year. On Friday, he comes to Joshua Tree National Park to discuss everything snakes as part of the Desert Institutes’ Black Rock Lecture Series.
“I wanted to capture the real information about the people who work with the animals. ‘The Venom Interviews’ is really focused on the professions and the professional people that work with the animals,” Morgan said. “The story that comes out of it is the biography of this group of people. The story arc is their life. It became a very interesting thing. The message is primarily that you don’t have to make stuff up to make it interesting.”
The common thread, Morgan found, was that everyone in the profession had a profound love of the animal. Their stories were about how to respect, study, benefit from and live mutually with snakes. Throughout the documentary Morgan visits various venom labs and finds that in a well-ran lab, serious injuries and casualties can be avoided; that snakes, when handled correctly, are nothing to fear.
“There was an event where a friend of mine, who runs that lab, had an accident while working and was bit in the face by a big eastern diamondback rattlesnake, and that’s a potentially pretty horrific injury but there’s a lot more interesting things about the story,” he said. “What makes that story interesting is the fact that he came out of that with no permanent injuries. The coordination that venom lab has with the local ER team is such that the accidents that they have, which are usually potentially life-threatening injuries, they all come out of it with fantastic results. The work they do is really interesting but if you look at the Animal Planet version of that it’s nothing more than, ‘Wow this guy got bit in the face by a rattlesnake.’ ”
For years, snakes have been researched and studied for the health benefits of what most people fear: their venom. It is used to produce antivenin, blood pressure and diabetes medication, and cancer-preventing treatments. But, according to Morgan, the fear of snakes has lead to population decimation similar to that of sharks.
“This essentially goes back to the rattlesnake roundups,” he said. “ In Texas and Oklahoma and various parts of the south there are still rattlesnake roundups where ... they are subjected to forms of inhumane behavior.”
Snakes have their mouths sewn shut and are starved and in most cases decapitated. The treatment and fear of snakes, Morgan believes, is only perpetuated by programming that doesn’t paint the whole picture of snakes and celebrates the irresponsible handling of the animals.
“In the cases with these animals it’s sensationalist drama, it’s driven by fear,” he said. “It’s driven by misinformation and what really jumped out at me is the fact that you can get rid of all that you can get rid of the stuntman hosts and the haunted house music and the fictitious information and it’s still a really interesting story.”
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