Herps in Society and Culture- Rattlesnake Roundup

Rattlesnake Roundups is bipartisan debate in which some people, if not most, believe that what they are doing is ok and where others know that it is wrong. Roundups are when hunters go out and find as many rattlesnakes as they can and then they bring it back to an arena and there the rattlesnakes are milked for their venom and then killed. The biggest rattlesnake roundup is the Sweetwater, Texas rattlesnake roundup where more than 5,000 pounds of snake is collected and killed. The roundups first started in 1959 when farmers first needed the rattlesnakes to be taken out of their farms, so they contracted hunters to remove them. Over the years the roundups have become popularized through media and have become an event in which parents bring their kids. They spend the day their buying rattlesnake skin boots, belts and other accessories while also watching how the snakes are milked, killed, and skinned they also have areas where you can skin your own snake. The hunters believe that they are doing the public a service by controlling the population and believe in the roundups because they cook or sell every part of the snake and because the milking is sent to facilities to find cures for diseases. The truth is that although the snakes were once overpopulated there has been a tremendous decrease in population and they may one day become endangered. Also, in the roundup video below, Herpetologist Carl Franklin states that although they believe the venom is used for research, it actually cannot be used because of the unsterile conditions in which the venom was extracted and so it must be tossed away. Also in the video they interviewed a worker and asked if he was scared of the snakes and his response was yes, because of fear and greed these roundups are supported by many people and will be a hard thing to regulate. Although I could not find the video, there was a show on natural geographic that depicted these roundups and many researches feared that through human selection the snakes would be selected to have quitter rattles. The researchers believed this because the hunters are going out and listening for their rattles so therefore you would expect that the snaked with the loudest rattles are going to be captured first thus selecting for quitter rattling since those will not be captured and will be able to copulate and transfer the genes for quitter rattling to their offspring. If the selection pressure is high enough then we can also suggest that the rattle itself may be selected against and soon we would have snakes without rattles. This means that not only are these rattlesnake roundups a problem for rattlesnake populations and inevitably the food chain in which they are a part of but also that this could be a danger to the human population because the rattlesnakes will give less warnings to when they might strike and this will increase number of people bitten per year. As the graph shows the number of bites has been increasing over the years as the fatalities have stayed relatively constant and this may be due in part by the roundups through the proposed mechanism. Hopefully this blog has informed readers about the potential problems that lie ahead if we continue the rattlesnake roundups and since it is a popular trend that has increased and crossed over into many states the problem itself may be far greater and growing much faster than we may have anticipated.

For more information and some short videos visit these sites:
http://www.kingsnake.com/roundup/ - information against sweetwater round up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkiA4Hhrjuo –video mentioned in text
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/places/culture-places/american-festivals-project/rattlesnake-roundup/ -roundup video
http://www.rattlesnakes.us/ -graph source originally from
Walter, F.G. Stolz, U. Shirazi, F. & Mcnally, J. Epidemiology of severe and fatal rattlesnake bites published in the American Association of Poison Control Centers Annual Reports. Clinical Toxicology 47, pp. 663-669 (2009)
http://www.durangotexas.com/eyesontexas/festivals/rattlesnake/rattlesnake.htm -Sweetwater roundup informational page
Pictures:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqC7RK90Tz0VhpSlzQyCivEFA6X1r6hnkwnDn2d9Crt3zyiZijmOyyWmtmRvnmWHYbhFUfq45ZY-6laG39A4AJQ0Xvbofo11S51CE-sDmc925-10wk4TSilfNtullMibXciR7zt9-Atuzg/s320/2009_03_13RattlesnakeRoundup+029.jpg
http://www.motofoto.cc/RattlesnakeRU.jpg