Gavin Smith – ACT Snake Removals and also the lead of the Canberra Snake Tracking Project, which is a research study on Eastern Brown Snakes speaks about all on offer at the Field Day Reptile Shows.
“We are doing snake education shows where we bring some live venomous snakes with us and show the audience these animals and talk through their behaviours, ecology and biology and try and make people look at them slightly differently.
“We will be at the Murrumbateman Field Days all day Saturday and all day Sunday and we have a 3x3m special customised snake pit which enables us to demonstrate these animals and we will bring a variety of different species.
“Each species we bring we will talk about the species and its behaviour and its ecology, where it lives and what habitats it likes, what it eats, what kinds of threats it faces and what its life looks like essentially.
“What we are trying to do is raise awareness of snakes as there is a lot of fear in the community, particularly in that region where you have quite a lot of brown snakes around and red bellied black snakes. There’s a lot of mis-understanding in the community about what these animals are and what they might look like.
“From our research base and all the work we do in looking after these animals and rescuing them from people’s yards and garages, houses and schools etc, is give the community more of a sense of what these animals do and how they are going to react to different situations you put them in, so when you disturb one outside your garage or the dog gets hold of one and also give people lots of safety advise about what to do in the case of a snake bite if a dog has been bitten or a human has been bitten, how to live safely with them.
“What we are really committed to is people generating more of an appreciation for these animals and valuing them more as they are really important ecological figures.
“The talks are a bit about entertainment of course, but they are also very much geared towards education and hoping people leave more informed about snakes and less feared of them and more respectful of them.
“For the shows, which are about 20-25 minutes in length, they will be mainly all venomous snakes that we have, but we will have some pythons that we will bring around when we are not doing shows just so the crowd can interact with them a little bit and kids can touch a snake and get that contact with an animal and feel what they are like.
“We believe that that contact helps them begin to break down some barriers between humans and snakes because there’s an awful lot of fear and methodology about how we think about snakes.
There’s actually lots of things about snakes that are similar to us humans. “A lot of what we think about snakes is cultural conditioning rather than actually understanding their biology and ecology. We kind of do that in a very constructive way and we know there’s a lot of people in the community that don’t like snakes and are very scared of them. We work very gently to try and help those people feel a little bit more comfortable when they do have that encounter.
“The most common question I get asked at these kinds of events is “they are aggressive aren’t they. They will chase you?”. That is really one of the biggest myths out there.
“These animals are extremely timid, very shy, very tolerant of humans when they are given a bit of room and we demonstrate that in the pit with the animals we use to show how they will interact with us when we are in their personal space. What we will show is just how much those animals want to disappear and find refuge and the crowd gets to see that time and time again so they get to realise that when they see a snake they don’t have to panic, it’s just a snake, it belongs in that landscape and they can interact with it in the correct fashion so the snake feels it’s life is not in danger and it’s not threatened and it can take off and disappear.
“So the question Eastern Brown snakes are bad and they will chase you and I always say no, that’s not actually true. They are defensive when they are threatened but they are keen to retreat and to see another day and that means not having a fight with a human or a dog or a cat.
“We have been collaborating with Geoff Coombes (Living With Wildlife), who is the license holder. We first met Geoff in 2017 and he is one of Australia’s leading snake people and researchers and intellectuals. He’s really incredible and has been working with these animals for fifty years and has learnt so much about them and he is kind of a mentor figure to us, and we have been operating as a snake handling service since 2017, but the Canberra Snake Tracking Project started in 2022, which has been tracking Eastern Brown snake movements across the urban fold.
“We have been doing shows since 2020 in collaboration with the Canberra Reptile Zoo and Geoff Coombes Living With Wildlife and these shows are very successful and the crowds leave very entertained, but also informed and that is what we are really committed to, that information sharing.
Do you find that some people, even though they are quite aged, would have a long held belief or fear against snakes and that can be broken on the day by attending a show?
“Definitely. Absolutely. I’ve had a number of people contact me after the show, shows I’ve done all over the community in different parts of the Canberra region and surrounds saying the shows are incredibly powerful and they were terrified of snakes but they have confronted their fear, turned up and watched and listened and seen with their own eyes how the snake reacts and how it moves and what it does and that has really transformed their thinking about snakes.
“That in combination with following various Facebook pages and social media accounts, they are posting lots of really good, informative content that is based on the science, the evidence and work done with these animals day in, day out, and when you put those things together it is quite powerful.
“People can have their views changed, not everybody of course, some people have deeply entrenched views about snakes and there’s nothing that I can say or do that is going to change that and I accept that, but there’s a lot of people in the grey area that are undecided and if you give them the right information and a bit of compassion, they can often change their views on these animals and for me, that is the most important thing I can do. If we can look after these animals better in the future it also means that people are going to be safer and less frightened of snakes, which I think is such a great thing for our society.
“In terms of snake removals, it does fluctuate a bit, but last season we worked with 301 snakes and that is from August right through until June. Every now and again we get a call in June where a snake gets displaced with winter burrow or whatever. Generally snake season is mid-August until late April, but that does change depending on the weather and the climate (El Niño or La Niña), so there’s lots of different factors that you can’t say with definitive answers.
