Snake Catchers Glad to Assist : Animals: After exterminators and animal control officers refused to help, one now-satisfied customer turned to a little band of reptile lovers.

Who you gonna call when you hear something writhing in your attic? Snake Busters, of course.

Snake Busters are four young men who love reptiles, snakes in particular, even poisonous ones. Their newspaper ad reads: “Snake Busters--Free Snake Removal--Please Do Not Kill Them--Call Us.”

“The main reason for our group is we like snakes, and we don’t want to see them killed,” said Fred Farzanegan, 23, a senior majoring in computer science at North Carolina State University.

“I do this because I don’t like seeing snakes killed, which is very common in the South,” he said. “We release the poisonous snakes too.

“We do not kill them because they are not really dangerous if they are away from people. We’ve picked up 10 poisonous snakes in the past year.”

The Snake Busters, who went into business in 1986, don’t charge anything for the service, but they won’t turn down expense money.

Some of the snakes they catch are kept as pets; some are given to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science and to researchers at North Carolina State University. Others are released in the wild, usually in a national park.

“I’d rather not say where we release them. Some sickos call every once in a while wanting to kill snakes,” Farzanegan said. “One guy wanted to give me $15 for a python so he could make a pair of boots out of it.”

“There’s a big demand for people to remove snakes,” said Alvin Braswell, curator of Lower Vertebrates at the Museum of Natural Science.

Poisonous snakes found in North Carolina are the copperhead, cottonmouth, diamondback rattlesnake, timber rattlesnake, pygmy rattlesnake and coral snake. Copperhead bites account for twice as many snake bites as all the rest of the poisonous snakes combined.

“I’ve never been bitten by any snake--poisonous or nonpoisonous. I’m either lucky or good,” Farzanegan said.

According to one happy client, Snake Busters--Farzanegan, Dave Griggs, Eric Abbott and Phil Lingle--are good.

Steve Harmon runs a small plumbing business out of his newly rented house in Durham. He and his wife kept hearing a noise in the attic. He figured that it was a snake and then he found a snake skin.

“Three exterminators refused to come out, and the Durham County animal people came out but refused to go into the attic because of no insurance coverage,” Harmon said.

“So we called Snake Busters. I heard about them from a friend who’s in the heating business who heard about Snake Busters from another guy in Creedmoor.”

“Within seven minutes of pulling into the driveway, he was in the attic and found the snake,” Harmon said. “He grabbed it by the tail, then around the head. He took it out alive. It was quick, efficient.”

Farzanegan said that particular reptile turned out to be a black rat snake. The outcome of a call he responded to last year was somewhat different.

“It was a call from a woman. She was going berserk. She offered money. She swore it was a copperhead,” Farzanegan said. “Well, it turned out to be a caterpillar. Yeah, a caterpillar. That was pretty funny.

Farzanegan’s interest in snakes began years ago. “When I was a kid, I had a couple of pet snakes. . . . I was 7 or 8 years old when I got my first snake.

“It was a garter snake. . . . It got away in the house. That was the last snake I could keep for a while,” he said. “My parents weren’t too happy with it.”