(Nobody gets hurt, baby or snake - the snake obviously has no fangs or venom.) It is indeed mundane and pointless; well, maybe not mundane - I have never seen anything like this before.
Poor snake!
“Goddamn it! Why isn’t this working?! This ALWAYS works!”
That’s kinda disturbing… there’s this… instinct in me that just shouts NO! every time the cobra strikes. If it was a full grown man it might be funny, but with a baby its just bizarre and wrong.
Meh. If there’s no venom or fangs, about the only thing that could happen is a snout-butt to the eye, and even then, I doubt the kid would sustain any real damage. The cobra’s in far more danger from the kid under these circumstances.
Still, teaching a kid to be unafraid of cobras is rather dangerous if he’s likely to run into the non-defanged ones, whether wild or captive.
Concurred; it’s like the inverse of Baby Albert.
Who knows? The kid’s parents could be herpetologists, just getting their baby used to the presence of snakes in his life. It’s tough to say that his parents wouldn’t later caution their son about the potential dangers of snakes. Hell, if more kids were conditioned with the idea that snakes aren’t necessarily bad while growing up, maybe we’d have fewer people that are so incredibly, ridiculously afraid of them.
This is a cobra. Not a Garter snake.
I was pretty disturbed by it and wondered why no one else in the video was freaking out when it struck at the kid. I did think it was interesting how the kid kept inching towards it, trying to play and then finally caught it with both hands. Just shows how curious kids can be when they have no idea.
It looked like the video ended right at the time the kid was about to freak out. Having the snake thrash and coil around you would probably be the scary event. I wonder if there is a way to find out what the adults in the background were saying.
Enjoy,
Steven
Yipe. Doesn’t strike me as a good idea. And where I’m from it’s a good idea to be scared of snakes.
I can’t think of a good reason why anyone should be deliberately desensitized to snakes – any more than one should be desensitized to sharks or wolves or rabid Baptist ministers. Taught to respect their existence, yes (the latter excepted), but not without a proper sense of distance and caution. To do otherwise is foolhardy.
Whoops–put post in the wrong thread. Edited out now.
Oooof, Jeez but that was disturbing. I was recoiling every time that snake hit, especially at the end when it was pelting the kid from point blank. Ugh, what’s the matter with those sick parents? That whole scene was just so wrong.
I can’t watch this video. I just can’t. I flinch and feel sick every time the snake attacks. I stopped watching after 30 seconds or so.
Total WAG, but I’m guessing it’s a family of professional snakehandlers. Who else would be likely to have a defanged, devenomed cobra hanging around the family hut? In that case, desensitizing the baby to the snakes AND desensitizing the family snakes to the baby are both very good ideas. Those voices weren’t far away, and someone was holding the camera - it wasn’t on a tripod. I don’t see any difference between this and a video of the family dog with the baby, except that we’re more used to seeing the family dog.
(I was more flinchy imagining the family jewels scraping along that plastic “bamboo” mat with no diaper on, actually. But it didn’t seem to bother the kid.)
Most of the replies to this thread strike me as pretty hysterical. The kid is in no danger, and as he grows up, his parents are going to say, “Hey, remember your pet cobra Schnookums? Be careful of wild cobras, because they have fangs, and they’re venomous. You don’t have to be afraid of wild cobras. You are intimately familiar with their behavior and habits, so just be careful.”
There. Problem solved, because there never was a problem to begin with.
I giggled nonstop. That poor, poor snake. How humiliating that must be.
It sounded like the background talk was Hindi - I’ve got several Hindi-speaking co-workers, I’m going to ask them for a report. I’ll get back to you guys later.
mischievous
Please do. I think it’s kind of incomprehensible to us why people would let their baby play with a cobra, but it might make perfect sense in a different culture.
I don’t know of too many herpetologists that are okay with the practice of removing a venomous snake’s venom glands and fangs.
Either way, I can’t see the video at work, but from what’s been described, I’m a bit weirded out.