In his Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Venomous Snakes, Lenny Flank, Jr. speaks truth to crazy.
Providing information on how to keep venomous snakes in captivity—by definition, an extremely dangerous and life-threatening activity—is a contentious thing. Even among those crazy few who think that keeping venomous snakes should be legal, even among those who keep such snakes themselves, there is a line of thought that says, don’t tell anyone how it’s done. Because you might encourage the wrong people to do it. They’ll read your book or website, buy a bunch of deadly snakes, and get themselves—or worse, some innocent bystander—killed.
Lenny Flank, on the other hand, takes the other view: that providing good, practical information gives young and stupid snake keepers a cold, hard reality check: this is what you’re in for, this is what you have to do. If the result dissuades people from buying a venomous snake, well, so much the better. If not, well—Flank points out that you can’t learn venomous snake keeping from a book anyway, not safely anyway (inasmuch as anything about this sort of thing can be called “safe”) and that venomous snake keepers need to learn directly from a mentor.
Mentorship is how the “old guard” of hot snake keepers trained new keepers; it’s also how they controlled the supply of venomous snakes. That control over supply, however, is long since gone—any idiot can buy a snake of incredible deadliness. If the snakes are out there for all to see, then the information should be too.
There once was a website that covered all of this material, maintained by an acquaintance of mine, but it went offline years ago. I found it fascinating, not because I had any desire to keep venomous snakes, but because the procedures themselves were fascinating in a voyeuristic sense. Flank, one of the better writers of herpetocultural books, covers these procedures in this slim (and not very professionally produced; probably self-published) volume. The care of venomous snakes differs from non-venomous snake care in three basic ways: housing (everything must be escape proof), handling (under no circumstances should you ever have to physically touch the snake), and what to do when—not if—something goes wrong. Flank’s advice seems sound, from what I can remember about the subject. And his entertaining chapter classifying venomous snakes into six temperamental types—from “ankle biters” to “mad dogs”—seems straight out of Newt Scamander.
But his most important piece of advice is not to get into this mad nonsense in the first place—and that’s something with which I wholeheartedly agree.