Yangon Zoo’s veteran cobra charmer Sein Tin has been bitten more than 20 times by poisonous snakes, including once on the head. But even he knows when to take a break.
His Sunday afternoon show at the zoo has been put on hold because the hot weather makes the cobras very uninterested in responding to his commands and he “can’t control” them, he said in an interview over the weekend.
Standing beside the reptile exhibit at the zoo around the same time that he’d usually be performing on Sunday, Tin said the last public snake charming was on May 2, and that he would wait until September to resume the popular attraction. The breaks are routine around this time of year.
Tin, a heavily-tattooed 60-year-old, has been getting up close and personal with cobras for some 30 years, he said, and he still drinks their venom in an attempt to develop a resistance to it.
As he gets older, however, Tin is training newer recruits for the “next generation,” including a woman to preside over the Sunday show as well as his “assistant,” a younger brother.
There was no official performance on Sunday, but whether for the practice or to oblige a gathering crowd, Tin ordered his brother into the cobra exhibit to engage with one of the highly venomous snakes.
As smart phones were pulled out and pictures snapped, Tin’s brother got the attention of a cobra by putting his hand up as if he were waving hello. The snake rose up, not very pleased to be bothered in the middle of sunbathing, and with hood fully spread lunged repeatedly at the brother to gasps and shrieks from the crowd.
He climbed out after a few minutes. No one was bitten, somehow.
Photo: Cobra spreads hood at Yangon Zoo on May 10, 2015/Coconuts Media
