Village Gives King Cobras Their Camelot

There probably aren’t many things scarier than having a 13-foot-long king cobra chomp down on your shoe, fangs dripping venom that can kill a man in 20 minutes.

For Somchai Phimsaimol, it’s a routine hazard of performing in a stage show with cobras.

“I’ve been bitten 28 times,” Somchai said after two men pried the serpent off his foot. The sneaker was damp with poison, but he’d curled his toe back just enough to miss being punctured.

Last year, he wasn’t so lucky. A king cobra latched onto his finger, and the knuckle remains bent at a weird angle.

Somchai, 52, forgave the snake, as would most people in Ban Khok Sa-Nga, which is rapidly gaining fame as the “king cobra village” of Thailand.

Whenever paying visitors turn up at the otherwise ordinary village in the arid, poor northeast, Somchai or another of his neighbors puts on a show with a king cobra or two, dancing and playfully sparring with them on a stage about the size of a boxing ring.

Snake shows are common in Thailand, but these are special. Ban Khok Sa-Nga is home to the King Cobra Conservation Project, backed by the Wildlife Fund of Thailand, which is trying to preserve the fearsome serpents.

The goal is to get more people to view king cobras as valuable money-earners rather than dangers best killed and maybe stir-fried into a chili-laden local delicacy.

Rapid clearing of land for farming has brought king cobras to the brink of extinction in Thailand. Most Thais probably don’t mind. The reptiles inspire instinctive fear--one killed a few years ago measured 18 1/2 feet long.

Ban Khok Sa-Nga has always been a bit different. Rice cultivation is difficult here, so a few families long ago turned to supplementing their incomes by performing with snakes and taking them on traveling medicine shows.

The wildlife project has modernized and expanded that friendship.

Now, 70 of the village’s 120 families are involved with king cobras, keeping and breeding 80 full-grown serpents in wooden hutches at their homes. Offspring are kept or sold to other snake shows or introduced into the wild.

Newly captured king cobras are purchased from other people in the region for 1,000 baht ($25) a yard, spreading the idea that it’s more profitable to let the snakes live.

Proceeds from the shows, held on a stage built with money provided by the project, are shared equally among the cobra-keeping families. They average about $25 to $50 a month, a significant sum in a country where rural families earn about $600 a year from farming.

“I respect the snakes, because in this village we have extra money from breeding and raising them,” Somchai said. “It’s like a member of my family. I would cry if I couldn’t feed him, as if he was my child.”

When one dies--some live as long as 30 years--it gets a three-day funeral. The remains are buried deep in the forest, since local legend says the bones can poison soil.

One of the more unusual snake shows is given by Suphap Pothisuwang and a 10-year-old female cobra he calls Baby Disco.

Suphap, 36, puts the snake’s head inside his mouth--”she flicks her tongue onto my Adam’s apple”--and removes her, then stuffs her down his baggy trousers. She eventually slithers out the cuff.

The performers also box with the cobras. Keeping in an athlete’s crouch, the performer darts from side to side in front of the snake. He moves his hands and feet close to the cobra, trying to entice a strike, then quickly backs away when the snake hurls forward.

“When you box a cobra, you have to anticipate the move,” Suphap said. “They normally lunge to the left.”

Not everyone finds the shows an ideal way to preserve the species.

Dr. Montri Chiobamroongkiat, chief of quality control at the main Bangkok snake serum center, says the shows stress the snakes and shorten their lives. He also worries about the human performers.

The villagers of Ban Khok Sa-Nga say no one there has been killed by a snakebite because they all carry a root known as wan ngu, which is a folk herbal cure for snakebites in Thailand.

Health experts say that wan ngu is not always enough and that anyone getting a serious bite will need real serum made from snake venom. The villagers have just been lucky with their king cobras, Montri said.

“It’s the biggest poisonous snake in the world, so it has the most amount of poison,” he said. “When it bites, it hangs on, so more poison goes into the body than with any other snake.”