Animal welfare charity ACRES (Animal Concerns, Research & Education Society) runs an increasingly busy 24-hour wildlife rescue operation. Urbanisation means more encounters between people and animals.
Some animals, like cobras, have adapted pretty well to modern city life in Singapore. They’re shy and will always slither away at the sight or smell of people. But as their forest home dwindles, so they follow their prey of frogs, rats and small lizards to where people are, particularly those whose homes are near forested areas. ACRES receives about a call a day about a cobra. Last week, they received three in one day.
The cobra in this video, filmed by ACRES rescue officer Shaun Spykerman with a camera attached to his grabber, was found hiding under a basketball stand in front of an old colonial house in Kent Ridge Park.
Spykerman and rescue team mate Joseph Lin took approximately one minute to catch the metre-long equatorial spitting cobra, which put up a short but nonetheless epic show of resistance.
These snakes are fast and agile, and will spit venom at an attacker’s eyes to defend themselves, but only after warning off the danger with a series of loud hisses.
The rescue team’s efforts to catch the snake weren’t helped by poor visibility. The animal was tucked right underneath the basketball stand and out of reach of the grabbers, and as soon as the officers tilted the stand back, it bolted.
The snake was taken below the head by the grabber, but not with a good grip and too far down the body. But after violent protestations from the snake, a bit of teamwork secured the rest of the body, and the animal was deposited expertly into a barrell, and then put back somewhere it could quietly resume its business of keeping the rat population down.
In a Facebook post responding to some criticism of how the snake was caught, Spykerman wrote:
Yes. Not the ideal way to grab the snake. We do try our best to tape rubber to our grabbers in order to decrease the discomfort factor. However, not all the time are we able to grab the snake in the most comfortable spot as they are fast moving animals.
In this case, it was a little hard to see under the basketball stand, and I was only able to quickly grab the snake by the tip of the grabber. Had to wait for my partner to safely put down the basketball stand and use the other grabber to pick up the rest of the body.
ACRES does not wish to hurt any animal in the process of removal. The snake was safely released in the forest.
