CHANDIGARH: The snake rescue season is in full swing but experienced personnel dealing with reptiles keep a watchful eye when encountered at close quarters by a deviant character of the highlyvenomous Spectacled cobra.
Were the bites not so toxic and potent, such feisty cobras may well have been labelled “pseudo-cobras” as they just don’t raise their hoods in classic fashion to stand halferect or hiss loudly like pressure cookers nearly done with the dinner’s potatoes!
It’s not that such cobras can’t inflate their hoods, it’s just that their tactics to escape or confront a human are different. What such deviant specimens do instead is that they keep their hood deflated, stick low to the ground like a prowling submarine, maintain a menacing silence, display quicksilver movements, and are more than ready to bite hard and take repeated jabs.
On certain occasions when cornered by the rescuer, the ‘Cobra Don’ can resort to an offensive-defence tactic by chasing the rescuer, a very rare phenomenon in serpents. When faced with such slippery customers, snake rescuers work doubly hard to avoid bites and bag the cobra quickly as it does not present the standard immobile position caused by inflation of the ribs leads to hissing and the hood flaring out.
Award-winning snake expert, Nikhil Sanger, has dealt with thousands of reptiles. He estimates that such tricky cobras are encountered in 10% of the cobras he rescues.
“I caught one such cobra of 5.5 feet recently. The cobra was black and silvery, and shone as if boot polish had been applied to it. It took me three dangerous attempts to rescue it from a house compound as it twice escaped my snake hook. This one was fast like a Rat snake, silent and made repeated bids to bite me. It just would not enter the snake bag I had positioned for its entry and capture. Even after I finally managed to capture it and place it in the enclosure at my home pending release in the jungle, the cobra maintained a menacing look and did not hiss once or inflate its hood,” Sanger, who was bitten by a cobra in 2014 and was hospitalised for three days in a near-death encounter, told TOI.
When cobras inflate hoods, they do not prefer to bite but resort to hissing to warn humans or predators like mongooses.
Tricity’s snake rescue veteran Salim Khan says cobras displaying such aggressive behaviour are not normally encountered. “Most of the time, when I confront a cobra, it stands half-up and inflates the hood. But people entertain myths about cobras. After seeing African hissing cobras on Discovery Channel, people believe that Indian cobras, too, will spit venom at them when they hiss. But this is not true. The cobra is, in fact, being good to humans and is just warning them to keep away so that the reptile does not have to resort to a bite. There are even occasions when a cobra will bite a human when cornered or trod upon but will not inject venom — this is known as a dry bite,” Khan told TOI.
Jabalpur-based Vivek Sharma couples snake rescues with extensive field research on the behaviour of serpents.
