I started a spinoff thread to discuss the poison vs. venom issue so we don’t have to derail this one any further.
Worsening allergic reactions happen, but snake venom doesn’t kill that way.
At the very least it demonstrates “survival of the fittest”: if you get bitten and don’t die, then it’s proven that you are one of the people who can survive snakebites of that magnitude. Now whether you can survive even harsher ones, or get unlucky some time with a similar sized bite, I can’t say. I do believe, but am not 100% sure, that you can build up resistance to organic poisons like the ones in snakebites. But don’t take my word on it, I only read it in Wikipedia, plus it doesn’t last a lifetime, only a couple months or a year IIRC.
What I do know is that snake bites are not poisonous like an allergic reaction from bees. So getting bit repeatedly would not make the further bites worse. Unless of course you also happen to be allergic to snakes, but I don’t know how common that is.
I have zero experience handling poisonous snakes but based on my experience with non poisonous ones, I wonder if the ones that get handled in church services are just tamed and don’t feel threatened enough to bite.
Do snake handling churches ever use water mocassins? They seem to be a pretty cranky species.
I don’t know, but they are pretty rare, as are rattlers, in my area. I see a lot of blacksnakes and garter snakes, and I’ve seen a couple of copperheads, but I’ve never seen a rattler, and only 1 water moccasin, ever.
I’m pretty sure some changes would have to occur for this sect to work in a place like Africa. Try this stuff with an unmilked black mamba and your parishioners will all be dead soon.
I actually grew up in the Appalachians in Virginia and that’s in the “wheel house” for snake handlers. Generally speaking you see them a good bit on the WV/VA border region in the mountainous counties, with some in the western portion of North Carolina and northeast portion of Tennessee and some parts of eastern Kentucky. I’ve heard of scattered ones elsewhere but the parts of TN/KY/VA/WV/NC that are “deeply Appalachian” in culture are where you see a lot of this.
It was a lot bigger when I was a kid, but even then I’d say probably fewer than 400 churches total in the whole country. As some of the news articles said, you could easily identify snake handling churches because they have some generic church name such as “Grundy Church of Christ With Signs Following” or “Etzel Church of Jesus Christ Reborn With Signs Following.” Basically the “With Signs Following” phrase is almost exclusively associated with the Pentecostal style churches that practice snake handling.
Anyway, as to the snakes–because there is absolutely no hierarchy or published rules or standards with snakehandling the practice varies considerably from one congregation to the next. I’ve been in snake handling churches a dozen times or so when I was younger and I’ve seen everything from small one room churches where a few deacons round up snakes from the surrounding woods and keep them in a bag for a day or so before services to ones where they have huge storage areas filled with aquariums and snakes, some of them bought from reputable sources, to everything in between.
Some will exclusively use snakes that have been somewhat acclimated to human touch, but some literally take snakes that just a few days or even hours before were slithering in the wild. FWIW, the ideology for a lot of these groups would be incompatible with keeping the snakes and acclimating them to human touch (although again, some congregations do that), because the whole point of this is basically “proof in your faith in God” by putting yourself in extreme danger. By being faithful you are “invulnerable from any harm” so there is no risk, only those without faith have anything to worry about.
Traditionally anyone bit and especially anyone who dies would be thought of as lacking in faith and probably a deep sinner who does all kinds of bad things that no one knew about. But I guess over the years enough well known preachers got bit and killed that the philosophy changed to accommodate the idea that sometimes god will take someone out with a snake bite as some form of “spiritual reward” or something vague like that. (Most likely Wolford’s congregation will view his death as a form of spiritual mission work or something, and won’t view it as evidence he was not appropriately devout.)
So, Martin Hyde, would seeking medical treatment be seen as weak or faithless?
Not only can you build up partial immunity to snake venom, but that’s basically how antivenins work, except that you get a horse or other large animal to do the hard work of building up immunity for you. You expose the horse to the venom, the horse produces chemicals to fight the venom, and then you harvest and purify those chemicals.
And another complication of snakebites is that the traditional “cure” of a whole bunch of hard alcohol will significantly worsen the outcomes.
Snort
Gotta wonder if that doesn’t fit in, somehow, in some perverse way, to the snake-handlers’ church.
Those Fundamentalist-types usually frown on likker. But if it’s MEDICINE…
And if you take the MEDICINE and you DIE, well that’s God’s will.
~VOW
True, but that’s a very controlled, gradual process. The occasional, random exposure might not have much benefit. Should be easy enough to check for antibodies in the previously bitten, but I don’t know.
Yeah, it’s definitely not a matter of “one bite and then you’re good”.
Snake venoms are highly complex combinations of chemicals, a real witch’s brew of allergens, enzymes, and toxic proteins. There are two main classes of venoms: neurotoxins, affecting the central nervous system, and hemotoxins, causing tissue damage. Certain groups of snakes have venoms in which one or the other predominates. So, cobras and their relatives (like the New World coral snakes) have primarily neurotoxic venoms while pit vipers (rattlesnakes and water moccasins and copperheads) have primarily hemotoxic venom. But there is considerable overlap and virtually all snake venoms have both modes of action.
In addition there may be significant variations among members of separate populations within a species. The snake called Canebrake Rattler in the southern USA and Timber Rattler in northern parts of its range is a pit viper and has primarily hemotoxic venom. But certain populations of Canebrakes have developed venom which also contains significant neurotoxic activity, making bites from those individuals especially problematic. In many species there may sometimes be seasonal variations as well. That’s why antivenins are produced using small, incrementally increasing amounts of venom from multiple individual snakes. Monovalent antivenins are species specific for one kind of snake. Some antivenins are “polyvalent” meaning they are produced using a mixture of venoms to treat any of several species. Not every snake species has an antivenin produced for it; if you’re bitten by a rare or unusual species, you will be given antivenin from the closest related species because there is usually some amount of overlap in the types of toxins present across related species. Or perhaps not.
One of the old “Rescue” reality TV series had an episode showing a snake handler who was bitten by just such an unusual species. He was getting worse and worse, and the doctors worried that he was going to die. A colleague brought antivenin for a related snake species from his own personal supply to the hospital, but the doctors refused to use it because they feared either no positive effect, or even deleterious effects, since it was not labeled for this species of snake. Finally they were convinced, administered the antivenin, and the man recovered. It happened that both parties were friends of mine, so I had the back story as well as the TV version. Apparently the poor guy was teetering at death’s door when the doctors finally said, what the hell, it can’t get worse.
Being bitten by a venomous snake does not seem to confer even temporary immunity upon survivors. It is though theoretically possible to immunize oneself by the same method of incremental injection of sub-lethal doses which is used to produce commercial antivenin.
Bill Haast, mentioned upthread, had himself injected with venoms on a weekly basis throughout most of his life. While he had his old facility on US1 in Miami, his blood was used as treatment for coral snake bites because it had specific antibodies for that species, and for other neurotoxic species as well. Transfusions of Bill’s blood saved (or at least was credited with helping save) nearly two dozen lives. But his limited immunity to neurotoxins (and it was limited; bites by neurotoxic snakes still caused him problems, usually including hospitalization) came at a price. Bill became hyper-sensitive to hemotoxic venoms and was especially careful when handling vipers. He had a huge, nearly one acre “snake pit” at his Punta Gorda facility, with high concrete walls having concrete footings deep into the ground (a palliative to concerns of his neighbors) where he kept many mostly-native species. Walking around in it one day he pointed out a beautiful Florida diamond backed rattler under a palm frond and commented to me that “This snake would probably kill me.” This from a man who handled 15 foot king cobras with bare hands and aplomb.
Back in his Miami days Bill provided some of my first professional instruction in handling venomous snakes. It was quite a privilege when he allowed a 16 year old me to free-hand his cobras. I’ve worked with snakes and other reptiles ever since. A week from Friday (15 June) is the anniversary of his passing in 2011. He made it to 100 years old and his death wasn’t directly related to any of the nearly 200 venomous bites he had survived. Amazing guy; I miss him.
Gotta point out that one of the few venomous snakes Steve Irwin refused to handle was an Eastern Diamondback. He handled just about every kind of cobra, but left the ED alone. He commented that it’s venom was not as strong as many Australian snakes, but it had a much better ability to inject more venom much deeper.
And it’s not just the Mojave rattler that brings neurotoxins into the mix, the canebrake rattler of the Gulf Coast also does this.
Rattlesnakes are deadly snakes. They could easily kill us if they wanted to, but they happen to be quite shy. They retreat, warn, and give a usually sub lethal bite if threatened.