OF WILD ANIMALS 195 



moccasins, with never a bite. In America only about two 

 persons per year are bitten by wild rattlesnakes. 



Our snakes, and all but a very few of the other poison- 

 snake species of the world, know that it pays to keep the peace. 

 Now, what if all snakes were as foolishly aggressive as the 

 hooded and spectacled cobras of India? Let us see. 



Those cobra species are man-haters. They love to attack 

 and do damage. They go out of their way to bite people. 

 They crawl into huts and bungalows, especially during the 

 monsoon rains, and they infest thatch roofs. But are they 

 wise, and retiring, like the house-haunting gopher snake of 

 the South? 



By no means. The cobra goes around with a chip on his 

 shoulder. In India they kill from 17,000 to 18,000 people 

 annually! And in return, about 117,000 cobras are killed 

 annually. It is a mighty fortunate thing for humanity on 

 the frontier that the other serpents of the world know that it is 

 a good thing to behave themselves, and not bite unnecessarily. 



Fighting Its Own Kind. The Indian cobra, (Naia trip- 

 udians), is an exception to the rule of serpents that forbids 

 fighting in the family. While cobras in captivity usually do 

 live together in a state of vicious and fully-armed neutrality, 

 sometimes they do fight. One of our cobras once attacked 

 a cage-mate two-thirds the size of itself, vanquished it, seized 

 it by the head and swallowed two-thirds of it before the tragedy 

 was discovered. The assailant was compelled to disgorge his 

 prey, but the victim was very dead. 



The poison venom of the cobra, rattlesnake, bushmaster and 

 puff adder is a great handicap on the social standing of the 

 entire serpent family. Mankind in general abhors snakes, both 

 in general and particular. The snake not actually known to 

 be venomous usually is suspected of being so. It is only the 

 strongest mental constitution that can permit a snake to go 

 unkilled when the killing opportunity offers. It is just as natural 

 for the lay brother to kill a chicken snake because it looks like 



