ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
11 !) 
A MODERN SNAKE FARM 
General view of the enclosure for serpents at Sao Paulo. 
of the New York Zoological Society toward 
securing definite and helpful measures in the 
preservation of human life. 
In British India there is an annual aver¬ 
age of over twenty thousand deaths among 
humans from the bites of poisonous snakes. 
There is a high mortality in Africa, but owing 
to the mixture of races and government, even 
approximate figures are not available. It is 
recorded that there are several thousand deaths 
from snake-bite each year in tropical America. 
In the United States, with a population of 
approximately 110,000,000, with venomous ser¬ 
pents occurring in nearly all of the States, and 
in some of them exceeding in abundance the 
countries where the death rate is high, we 
have an indicated number of fatalities from 
bites of venomous reptiles of not much over 
twenty per year. This is a higher figure than 
we previously estimated, but a number of 
widely placed queries have brought interesting 
answers. We are now systematically gathering 
figures from all the states. The probabilities 
are that the figures of this year will about 
double the estimate for 1922. 
Why is it that accidents in the United States 
are comparatively few while a number of areas 
are abundantly inhabited by venomous reptiles ? 
The reason for this is clear to the writer, who 
has hunted and noted the habits of venomous 
reptiles in various parts of the United States—- 
the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, the mountains, 
plains, swamps and deserts. 
The most generally distributed poisonous ser¬ 
pent in this country and the most abundant 
in the greater number of infested areas is 
the rattlesnake, which usually gives emphatic 
warning when approached. Another abundant 
type, though over more restricted areas, is the 
copperhead snake. This is not a particularly 
aggressive species, and seldom bites unless ac¬ 
tually stepped upon or approached to within 
eight or ten inches, which is about the limit 
of its strike. The water moccasin, abundant 
in the South, keeps to its favorite waterways 
and swamps, and while much respected, it is 
so seldom given to wandering that the most 
ignorant negroes know where to watch out 
for it, and moccasin bites are rarely recorded. 
Another poisonous serpent is the gaudy 
coral snake of the Southeast and the Arizona- 
Mexican boundary. This is a burrowing type, 
and accidents are seldom heard of except from 
venturesome people who try to handle these 
pretty reptiles. 
It is a fairly simple matter to recognize 
the North American venomous serpents. They 
are w r ell known among the country populations, 
