Durban — Snake handler Jason Arnold found himself in a dangerous situation when he was called out to look for a black mamba in a shipping container. The snake had recently killed two dogs.
Arnold was called out to a truck yard in the Verulam area after a large grey snake was spotted in a shipping container.
He said it was a mamba. The callers said they lost two dogs to the snake. It seemed the dogs had seen the snake, attacked it and got bitten in the process.
“The container’s full of stuff, so gonna be a mission to find,” Arnold said.
“It’s not a nice environment to be in with such a big, dangerous snake in there.”
After placing his camera at an angle he thought could work, he looked for the snake.
After moving towards the far end of the container, Arnold said, “Oh, here he is…”, indicating he had found the snake.
While Arnold tried to clear a spot for himself, the snake started to move, but he was able to get his tongs around the snake and pulled it out.
“He’s in the blue, his eyes are a little bit milky which means he’s going to shed his skin and you can already see on the body, there are little bits of shed that have started to come off with him moving in between all of this stuff and scratching himself and the skin is pulling off prematurely,” Arnold explained.
He said it was about 2.3m and was a female.
Arnold said the snake was not fully grown. Black mambas can get up to about 3.5m; however, he had never seen one longer than 3.1m.
This snake was about average size.
Looking at his hands (with grease), Arnold said the snake must have been in the container for a long time.
Some of the men at the truck yard said they had two dogs which died and believed the snake could have been the culprit.
Arnold asked the men what the symptoms were and they said there was frothing.
Arnold said frothing was a typical symptom of a mamba bite.
“The dogs will froth and salivate and vomit and then they die.”
Arnold said that it is serious when a black mamba bites a human, and the victim needs to get to a competent medical facility quickly.
“You’re gonna start to experience quite alarming sort of symptoms quite early in the bite, probably within like 20, 30, 40 minutes. It usually takes somewhere between two hours and six hours to kill an adult, but long before it actually kills you, you’re gonna be vomiting, you’re gonna have difficulty breathing and you’re gonna feel like your body is paralysed. You’re battling to talk, battling to breathe, battling to walk. So it causes general paralysis but particularly paralyses your diaphragm, and if your diaphragm is paralysed, you can’t breathe,” Arnold explained.
“They can put you on a ventilator if you get to the hospital and you’re having breathing difficulties. If they put you on a machine to help you breathe, that will keep you alive, but you need antivenom to counteract that venom.”
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