Snake Bros Keep Getting Bitten by Their Lethal Pets. Only Zoos Can Save Them

The first thing Chris Gifford thought as he felt a fang sink into his skin was: I’m going to die. The second: I need to start a timer immediately.

That day in 2021, Gifford was cleaning the enclosures of the several dozen snakes he kept at his parents’ home in Raleigh, North Carolina. Nearly every snake in his possession was both venomous and native to distant corners of the world. Sharp-nosed vipers, eyelash vipers, forest cobras—every one of them beautiful, and many of them lethal.

So too was the 7-foot-long, electric-hued western green mamba that had just latched onto its enclosure’s swing door as Gifford attempted to pull it out with a hook. The snake then lunged off and bit into Gifford’s hand, unleashing a deadly neurotoxic venom into his body.

“I dropped the snake,” Gifford says. “I dropped the hook. I’m like, ‘Oh man, I’m probably dead.’ This is a very toxic, fast-acting venomous snake.”

As Gifford, then 21, hurried to re-hook the mamba and secure it, he felt his hand begin to tingle ominously. Gifford didn’t know precisely how long he had, but was certain that without help he would be dead in hours. His life would depend on a vital resource: antivenom, which was tucked securely away at the unlikeliest of places—a zoo and botanical garden hundreds of miles away.

That’s where the Antivenom Index, a little-known directory that for half a century has connected Americans bitten by venomous exotic pets with the zoos that can save them, comes in. Generally speaking, the best way to treat the most life-threatening snakebites is with antivenom made using venom of the same species. The process begins with extracting venom, often by milking drops of toxin from the fangs of a snake. The venom is then injected into an animal, like a horse or a sheep, to spur the development of antibodies. It's finally transformed into a substance that can halt the original venom’s effects in humans.

Zoos that house deadly snakes stock the corresponding antivenom in case a keeper has an accident—and so it’s zoos that get the call when a civilian has a mishap of their own.

It was the Houston Zoo that provided antivenom to save a man bitten by his pet monocled cobra. A man bitten by an African pit viper received antivenom from the Virginia Aquarium and the National Zoo in Washington, DC, while another man bitten by a similar snake had a folder instructing doctors to call the Milwaukee County Zoo for antivenom in case he received a bite. A zoo in Seattle has provided antivenom in at least eight cases in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, including once for a puff adder bite in Portland. In one infamous case, a visitor to the National Zoo broke open an enclosure and stole two Gaboon vipers, one of which bit him soon after—for which he was treated with antivenom from zoos in Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia, as well as the recently robbed National Zoo.

The legality of venomous pet ownership varies widely by city, county, and state. But for those interested in taking it up, acquiring specimens has gotten steadily easier. Advances in snake husbandry mean that many once-rare species are now readily found in captive-bred populations. Snakes can be bought everywhere from reptile shows and breeders to online classifieds and pet stores, some of which ship venomous offerings around the country. Individual snakes rarely cost more than three figures.

And yet, snakebites are still rare in the United States: The National Poison Data System’s 2024 annual report listed a little north of 5,000 bites from venomous native species that year, with just 81 bites—of which at least 57 were venomous—from exotics.

But when the worst happens with an exotic snake, most hospitals are unprepared.

American medical facilities might be equipped with antivenom for native species like copperheads and cottonmouths, but they’re exceedingly unlikely to have the ability to treat bites from snakes whose natural ranges are farther afield. Venom from the most perilous exotics can take effect within minutes, in a nightmarish crescendo of symptoms depending on the snake and what kind of venom it possesses. Vomiting. Excruciating pain. Shock. Internal bleeding. Blistering. Organ shutdown. Paralysis. Suffocation. Death.

Once a patient arrives at an emergency room, hospitals contact their regional poison center, which in turn boots up the index, where zoos across the country voluntarily list which antivenoms they stock and in what quantity. And somewhere, whatever the hour, a keeper’s phone starts to ring.

Leslie Boyer, a medical toxinologist and professor emerita at the University of Arizona, spent two decades as the director of the Antivenom Index. After a rash of exotic bites in Oklahoma in the 1970s ended with a zoo providing antivenom, the idea emerged to approach zoos around the country one by one to ask what they had on hand and if they’d be willing to provide it to the public.

Early editions of the index were a tabbed notebook. “I still have some of the original versions of it,” Boyer says. “You would go through, laboriously, by hand, turning the pages, and it would say ‘see page 27,’ like one of those find-your-own-ending books, and then you would put in a phone call, because the last section in the Antivenom Index was the home phone numbers of zookeepers.”

In 2006, Boyer and Steven Seifert, then a medical toxicologist at the University of Nebraska, partnered to bring the index online, where it remains today. Now, nearly 90 zoological organizations list their wares.

Gifford, the North Carolina man, had been comparatively lucky, as only one of his mamba’s fangs had pierced his skin. By the time he reached a nearby hospital, Gifford's hand was swelling and creeping paralysis was causing his eyelids to droop. The Antivenom Index was activated, and South Carolina’s Riverbanks Zoo, about 200 miles to the southwest, had the antivenom he needed. Just 30 minutes after the mamba’s bite, Gifford was struggling to breathe as the paralysis started to affect his diaphragm.

“It feels like you’re drowning,” he says.

Keepers at the Riverbanks Zoo packed 10 vials of antivenom on ice and sent them on a helicopter. Just as Gifford’s timer hit the six-hour mark, the hospital began administering the first of the vials. “Almost immediately, I could feel myself breathing,” Gifford says. He left the hospital some two days later.

If you’re bitten by a venomous snake in the northeastern United States, odds are good that you’ll be treated with vials of antivenom nestled in a refrigerator in the back room of the Bronx Zoo’s reptile house. The zoo collaborates with the nearby Jacobi Medical Center, whose dedicated snakebite response team makes it a rarity among US hospitals.

Inside the refrigerator are boxes, bins, and bags of the delicate glass vials that are often the difference between life and death. Shelves are lined with jars full of antivenom for Indian species and the North American coral snake, and lavender cartons with images of a poised king cobra. In all, the Bronx Zoo stocks 25 different antivenom varieties, many of which are polyvalent, meaning applicable to multiple species.

The refrigerator is surrounded by empty coolers awaiting a future emergency. Four times a year, the zoo runs a full-scale drill with its herpetology staff, in which a keeper simulates the moments after a bite by hitting an alarm. From there, the team races to join the keeper and get the right antivenom into a cooler. A recent drill concluded with a real-life police car ride to Jacobi and the faux-administration of the antivenom. The “bitten” keeper was at Jacobi in just 10 minutes, with antivenom “running” in 20.

“The primary purpose for us keeping antivenom here is for the safety of our staff,” says Kevin Torregrosa, the zoo’s curator of herpetology. Indeed, a staffer’s bite a century ago is what helped establish the zoo as an antivenom pioneer. In 1916, a rattlesnake bit a Bronx Zoo reptile keeper, who was saved by a fluke—a Brazilian scientist happened to be in New York on a lecture tour with samples of rattlesnake antivenom from his São Paulo lab. Thus began the first partnership in the US between a zoo and an antivenom manufacturer.

But it’s been decades since anyone on the Bronx Zoo staff has suffered a bite—“knock on wood,” says Torregrosa. In that time, the zoo’s antivenom has only gone elsewhere, often to people bitten by their pets. The same is true for zoos nationally: A 2014 paper coauthored by Boyer and Seifert and the University of New Mexico’s Brandon Warrick found that 70 percent of the exotic bites reported in the US between 2005 and 2011 happened in a private residence.

In a locked back room the size of a walk-in closet, illuminated enclosures line the walls floor to ceiling, many holding a lethal creature. The snakes here come with, if not illustrious, at least rich pedigrees. In the case of a small, ruby-brown saw-scaled viper, it slithered its way onto a cargo ship in its native India, only to be unpacked in a New Jersey warehouse by flummoxed workers who assumed it was a harmless python and narrowly avoided a bite.

These snakes, unlike their selfie-hardened comrades on display outside, are very, very interested in visitors. They rear up, flicking their tongues in and out: When someone walks in here, they often come bearing mice. A silky juvenile king cobra whips around its tank in a peekaboo pantomime, looking from this angle and that with a speed that provokes both wonder and a faint primordial horror. Nearby, a white-lipped island pit viper rests in a braid of lovely teal coils above a separated pair of Aruba Island rattlesnakes that are being geared up—hopefully—to mate. Suddenly, the king cobra springs forward at the glass and strikes, the previously hidden flaps of its hood flaring out. “He’s giving a show!” Torregrosa says.

Some of the snakes in this room used to be pets. A Taiwan mountain pit viper landed here after biting its owner, who was treated at Jacobi Medical Center. But the snake’s owner lived in New York state, where private ownership of venomous species is illegal, prompting an investigation and ultimately the confiscation of the viper as well as what turned out to be a collection of about 150 venomous snakes, all of which were transferred to the Bronx Zoo.

Torregrosa is in touch with the other keepers and zoos active with the Antivenom Index, which has turned out to be a solid indicator of trends in the venomous pet trade. “Usually I can tell what’s getting popular by the calls we’re getting,” he says.

One year, call after call came in for antivenom for those otherworldly white-lipped island pit vipers. More recently, requests have been coming for help treating bites from Gaboon vipers, a large species found in sub-Saharan Africa whose popularity stems both from its almost comically stout shape and the unusual way it moves, spurning the typical rhythmic back-and-forth for a caterpillar-esque wave to propel itself along. In one recent case, the zoo sent 10 vials of antivenom on a helicopter to Philadelphia, where it reached a patient bitten by a monocled cobra just in time. The king cobra is another favorite of the pet trade, in part because of the species’ massive size: An adult can grow to be 18 feet long. All are highly deadly.

Social media creators loom large in the world of venomous keeping. Run a search for a venomous species on YouTube, and you’re likely to come across a de facto influencer with a following in the hundreds of thousands. Many of the most visible figures are also the most controversial, for their enthusiastic embrace of a practice known as “free handling”: holding and otherwise engaging with venomous species without the use of traditional tools like hooks.

“I strongly recommend against any type of free handling with venomous snakes, which is a big thing right now,” Torregrosa says. At the Bronx Zoo, keepers minimize contact with the most dangerous snakes, which are trained to move to different sides of their enclosures that can be sealed while the other is cleaned. But mostly, Torregrosa doesn’t watch the videos. “I would probably get pretty on edge doing it.”

“You get a lot more views for holding a rattlesnake by your face than for when you’re handling one safely,” says Torregrosa. “As far as I know, most of those guys have taken bites.”

Every bite is different. But there are some commonalities among those who tend to receive them. Victims are predominantly male: That same 2014 paper analyzing US exotic bite data found that 79 percent of bite recipients were men, with an average victim age of 33.

“Since I’ve been here, I don’t remember supplying antivenom for a single female patient,” Torregrosa says. “And there are female reptile keepers. There are lots of them. But the bites definitely tend to be men.”

The Miami-Dade fire Department is the rare non-zoo that provides antivenom to the public, courtesy of what the department says is the largest antivenom bank for public use in the country. It’s administered by the three-person Venom Response Unit—affectionately known across Florida as “Venom One.”

The unit doesn’t just deal with snakes: Venom One takes all animal calls for the county, so the team gets its fair share of reports of trapped cats and ducklings in storm drains. But snakebites take precedence.

“The duck or cat will wait,” says Christopher Pecori, a lieutenant with the unit.

Along with his colleagues, Pecori, who spent two decades as an emergency room physician’s assistant before joining Venom One, has raced antivenom to multiple creators based in the Southeast, many of whom now pepper their videos with mentions of the unit by name. Tyler Nolan, a tattoo artist with nearly 900,000 YouTube subscribers who regularly publishes videos in which he engages in free handling, routinely references Venom One’s assistance after his 2016 run-in with a king cobra, whose bite resulted in two months in the hospital and the amputation of an index finger. Indeed, Venom One has become so entrenched that some of the calls to the unit’s emergency phone line don’t come from poison control or a medical facility—they come directly from a snake owner who’s just been bitten.

Pecori was on the receiving end of a call one night in 2024 about a man in South Carolina who had just been bitten by an inland taipan, a snake native to the Australian bush whose venom is widely considered the deadliest on the planet. The taipan’s bite is so dangerous and fast-acting that when a man in Florida was bitten by one hours after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, a Lear jet carrying antivenom from the San Diego Zoo was one of the few planes granted permission to fly by the FAA. By the time the antivenom reached him, he had begun to bleed from his eyes.

Antivenom for exotic species is rare, in part because it's classified by the FDA as an investigational drug, requiring that organizations pass a stringent licensing process to acquire and keep it. Antivenom also tends to be produced in regions where a given snake is found in the wild, meaning that zoos and antivenom banks have to wrangle with organizations across the globe that have their own protocols and export requirements.

In the case of the king cobra, only a few manufacturers in the world produce antivenom, one being the Red Cross in Thailand. Orders for some antivenoms, like the one to treat the inland taipan’s bite, can take at least a month to fulfill, introducing a risk of shortages when insufficient antivenom can be found locally. In 2024, Pecori was able to get that antivenom to a patient in six hours, racing from his bunk at a firehouse to the antivenom bank and finally to a courier, who got it on the next available flight out of the Miami airport. The man recovered, and last year his home city of Florence, South Carolina, banned the ownership of venomous snakes in response. Raleigh, North Carolina, passed a similar ban on what the city council deemed “inherently dangerous” exotic animals, following the discovery of a venomous zebra cobra loose in Chris Gifford’s neighborhood later the same year as his mamba bite. In fact, it was another of Gifford’s pets, who’d escaped months prior to his own bite. Gifford assumed the snake had died.

Antivenom produced in the West is even more expensive. In the case of the North American coral snake, a single vial comes in at around $8,000, Pecori says, in part because it went through an FDA approval process; a typical treatment dose is five vials. Treatment for a standard bite with the polyvalent antivenom CroFab, which can be used to treat envenomations—the clinical term for a venomous bite—from many North American species, costs the department between $40,000 and $45,000. And supplies need to be replaced regularly: Antivenoms typically arrive with expiration dates just a few years away.

Zoos typically decline to charge hospitals for antivenom, worrying that this might endanger their FDA licensing—meaning that every deployment of the Antivenom Index marks a zoo donating thousands of dollars of its supply. Other organizations, like Venom One, charge medical facilities at cost; whatever bills the patient sees will be determined by their care provider and insurer, if they have one.

In recent years, some amateur keepers have begun the long and often expensive process of stocking their own antivenom. Just like zoos, they obtain a permit from the FDA that includes the sign-off of a local physician who will oversee the antivenom and its theoretical future use—a proposition many doctors are leery of agreeing to for solo hobbyists.

In May 2025, the director of the Kentucky Reptile Zoo helped to save his own life after a Jameson’s mamba bite by bringing along his own antivenom as he was rushed to the hospital. The two-person paramedic team that began administering that antivenom in the ambulance had to defend their actions in a hearing before the state EMS board in September. The case was ultimately dismissed.

Because even bites from native species are so rare, medical teams unaccustomed to the unusual traits of envenomation might recommend treatments like fasciotomy, an invasive surgical procedure meant to relieve pressure that venom experts say is rarely if ever medically necessary to treat snakebites. Gifford arrived at the hospital after his bite with a sheaf of care instructions he’d prepared ahead of time—and told medical staff that he did not consent to a fasciotomy. Medical facilities can be especially unprepared for the quirks of an exotic bite and the wide variety of venoms involved, and those who seek care for them often face worse outcomes.

Even if antivenom is swiftly administered, patients can suffer grievous long-term effects, including tissue damage and amputation. “They can take out your kidney function just because they’re breaking down so much protein, and it will obliterate your kidneys,” Pecori says. “I know people have gone on dialysis after being bitten by some of these.”

In 2017, Boyer retired from the University of Arizona, and the Antivenom Index needed a new institutional home. Last year it found its way to Ohio’s Toledo Zoo, which houses one of the country’s largest collections of reptiles (150 species), including more than 60 venomous ones. As a result, Toledo also has an unusually diverse bank of antivenom, and has responded to many an Antivenom Index call.

John Chastain, the zoo’s general curator, jokes that the emergency antivenom calls always seem to come in the middle of the night. “I usually sleep through a phone call or two and then eventually hear it,” he says.

Chastain has driven antivenom to hospitals himself and met helicopters on a University of Toledo helipad. On one occasion, he drove antivenom to a Cabela’s in Dundee, Michigan, to do the handoff. Sometimes the hospital or poison center summons highway patrol to get the precious cargo where it needs to go: Lights and sirens have a way of speeding things up.

In 2022, Chastain was summoned to the zoo in the wee hours to pull vials for an Indiana resident who’d been bitten by a saw-scaled viper. The bite, left untreated, would cause internal bleeding, hemorrhaging, and very likely death. Chastain tucked the antivenom between bags of frozen vegetables and handed it to a waiting police officer, who took off at a run for his squad car before ultimately passing the cooler off to another officer waiting at the Indiana state line—a sequence captured on body cam footage.

Boyer, who is now the chief scientific officer at the pharmaceutical company Ophirex, acknowledges that the Antivenom Index is an imperfect system. Zoos have plenty of reasons to be less than enthusiastic about providing antivenom this way. “I personally think we shouldn’t ask zoos to be the de facto pharmacopeia,” she says. “It’s a really strange way to manage a rare disease. The zoo is out thousands of dollars every time it helps a person in need, and you can bet that generates some unhappiness, probably more among the finance departments than among the reptile keepers.”

Nevertheless, zoos “share very generously,” she says. “I've never heard of a zoo saying no. When someone’s in need—nobody understands the danger of being bitten by a snake like a reptile handler.”

Boyer would like to see a national venom treatment program that would fund antivenom and take the burden off zoos. “But that’s never been a priority,” she says. “It’s a tradition of generosity and kindness by herpetologists that keeps citizen collectors of snakes protected,” she says. “It works, in its own funky way.”

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