Some comments are asking, "Is it common in India to handle snakes". Let me tell you, its not.
These people are called "Sarpa Mitra" (Snake's friend) who are trained how to handle snake and even first aid in case of snake bites. Many people from small rural village get the trainings because snakes coming to houses are common when the land gets dry and hot.
I have certain cousins who got this training because they work in the field. The training mainly includes how to identify types of snakes and how to rescue these snakes and put them back into the forest or wherever.
Note, they're called "Snake's friends" to sensitize the taboo around snakes, and the process is called "snake rescue" rather than "human rescue."
Our house itself has had quite a few snake encounters, more than 10 in the last couple of years though 8/10 times the snakes left on their own, so yeah, most of the time Indians do not need to handle snakes.
Snakes are extremely common in some parts of India. Where I grew up my father had given us basic lessons to distinguish the poisonous ones from non poisonous. We needed this knowledge countless number of times simply playing outside as children.
Unrelated but interesting - ‘sarpa’ and ‘serpent’ sounded too familiar to be coincidence so I looked it up. These two words go back to the Proto-Indo-European root ‘serp’ meaning ‘to crawl’. This became Sanskrit ‘sarpa’, vs Latin ‘serpens’ which eventually became English ‘serpent’ (with variations in other Latin-based modern languages).
Funny story - when I was a kid, a literal toddler, I caught a baby cobra that was passing through my rented house's drain. My mum was sleeping and I brought it to show her, safe to assume she was absolutely terrified of what I was holding in my hands. The locals came and unfortunately killed the baby cobra.
Since that day, my mum would tie my leg with a rope with hers which was long enough to let me play in the room while she slept.
I had numerous encounters with cobras and other venomous snakes growing up in India. Found a large snake in the bath room, found one in bedroom, one crawling next to me during dinner, a big family of snakes living in an abandoned home next to mine etc etc.
Here is the important part. They never harmed any humans. But, we killed most of them the moment we found them.
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u/Kaccha-Kela 4d ago
Some comments are asking, "Is it common in India to handle snakes". Let me tell you, its not.
These people are called "Sarpa Mitra" (Snake's friend) who are trained how to handle snake and even first aid in case of snake bites. Many people from small rural village get the trainings because snakes coming to houses are common when the land gets dry and hot.
I have certain cousins who got this training because they work in the field. The training mainly includes how to identify types of snakes and how to rescue these snakes and put them back into the forest or wherever.
Note, they're called "Snake's friends" to sensitize the taboo around snakes, and the process is called "snake rescue" rather than "human rescue."