One flipped a flat rock and yelled, ‘SNAKE!’ We crowded around, and they pounded it to death with stones, screaming, ‘Kill it, it’s poisonous!’

Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll | A Memoir

[By the Founder of Chennai’s Famous Snake Park & Crocodile Park Trust]

Rom a.k.a Romulus Whitaker

Well, I’ve just finished reading his inspiring memoir titled, Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: My Early Years that he had co-authored with Janaki Lenin, and published by HarperCollins this year [2024].

Just giving us all, excerpts from his book, before we get to know more about him towards the end of this post. 

So here goes -

Mummy started me fishing when I was about four years old. She rigged a long straight stick with a length of string and a bent pin. I collected worms by turning over rocks in the yard and kept them in a jelly jar half full of soil.

I dropped the bait into the water and waited.

A sharp tug startled me. With a swirl, a fish almost took the stick out of my hand. I hauled with all my strength and flipped a struggling yellow perch on to the grassy bank next to the log. 

Before it could wriggle back into the stream, I dove on it, and the spines on its dorsal fin pierced my hands. Wiping the drops of blood on my shorts and ignoring the pain, I carried the fish home.

Hooking that fish set me on a lifelong obsession, which included catching barramundi in New Guinea, mahseer in the Himalayas, largemouth bass in the Everglades and channel catfish in the Mississippi River, to name a few.

My friends had small fishing rods, which were much better than my home-made one. One let me borrow a hook, which made fishing easier. I coaxed Mummy into buying me a proper fishing rod. This was when a decisive incident set me on my course as a snake missionary.

We rolled over rocks to find earthworms, what my buddies called ‘angleworms’, for fish bait.

One flipped a flat rock and yelled, ‘SNAKE!’ We crowded around, and they pounded it to death with stones, screaming, ‘Kill it, it’s poisonous!’ I didn’t stop them, nor did I join in.

Not having seen one before, I was fascinated but afraid.

After the boys stepped back, I squatted near the battered creature and examined it. I carried it home on the end of a stick against their advice. Mummy and Gail were in the kitchen when I walked in.

‘The poor thing!’ Gail exclaimed. ‘It’s a harmless garter snake, Breezy,’ Mummy said.

‘It wouldn’t have hurt you.’ ‘I didn’t kill it, Mummy. The other kids did.’

‘Promise me you won’t kill a snake,’ she said. I readily did.

Perhaps this was when I became fixated on the reptiles and vowed to be their champion. After that episode, I took to turning over every stone—not for earthworms but for snakes. When I found one, I took it home alive in the jelly jar.

‘It’s a milksnake,’ Mummy said.

She took a photograph of a four-year-old me holding it, recording the event for posterity. As cold spring merged into warm summer, I caught gorgeously patterned milksnakes that the village kids called checkered adders, tiny delicate ring-necked snakes, Dekay’s snakes, sleek and fast ribbon snakes, and garter snakes.

I tried different handling techniques, eventually learning to move one hand over the other as the snake slithered. The excited ones shat and musked on my hands, and each species had a distinctive odour. For instance, garter snakes stank worse than skunks, but milksnakes weren’t so bad.

I also got bitten a lot, making the local boys react, ‘You’re gonna die. You’re a goner. Just wait and see! A checkered adder bite’ll kill you in an hour.’

Mummy bought Snakes of the World by Raymond L. Ditmars, who later became one of my heroes. Of course, I couldn’t read it by myself.

She read aloud the chapter titled ‘The New World Harmless Snakes’ several times.

Before long, I had memorized their names and every detail about these creatures’ habits and temperaments.

Mummy helped me convert an old aquarium into a terrarium in which to keep snakes as pets. To feed them, I caught grasshoppers and small frogs in the fields.

Another time, I found a shed snakeskin under a rock. Back at home, I examined it with my plastic magnifying glass. The skin was inside out. ‘Mummy, snakes shed their skins the way we take our socks off,’ I announced my discovery.

The eye of the snake was covered by a single rounded lens of skin. Everything about them was so wonderfully different. I made out faint long lines down the back. A garter snake.

As her parents had encouraged Violet, Ma reinforced my curiosity. Everyone expected I’d outgrow snakes. As a teenager, I became enamoured of motorbikes, but my interest in snakes didn’t wane.

As long as I can remember, snakes have been the focus of my fascination and love.

I was so lucky to grow up in the northern New York countryside, where harmless snakes were common. The wilds of the Kodaikanal hills in south India, nurtured that love to an obsession during my schoolboy years.

Many conservation pioneers started their careers as ardent hunters, a phenomenon captured in the 1978 book The Penitent Butchers by Richard Fitter and Sir Peter Scott.

As a high school student, I killed and skinned birds for a museum collection, which put me on the fringes of scientific research.

For a year after I graduated, what people call a ‘gap year’ these days, I shot spotted deer and blackbuck to eat, stalked a marauding leopard and guarded crops from elephants. In Wyoming, I spent more time hunting and fishing than getting a college education.

You may wonder how a boy who grew up loving snakes could exploit them. It’s for that reason this is not a memoir, but an autobiography.

If I were to cleave to the single track of how I am viewed—a reptile conservationist, educator and researcher—a lot of back story would be missing. In an autobiography, authors are caught between extolling their virtues and achievements, and camouflaging their raging egos.

It would be dishonest to chronicle the awards and applause, and airbrush my bloodthirsty past off the record. The simple thing to do would be to leave out these inconvenient parts as they are not acceptable activities for a conservationist today.

That way I’d escape the criticism that’s sure to come. By revealing my bloody hands and early love of destruction, whether it be of animal life or explosives, you, the reader, can see the real me with all the warts.

I make no apologies, since I don’t view myself as a conservationist— that’s a label others have bestowed upon me.

I’ve always done what I loved, whether fishing, hunting, catching snakes or championing the cause of habitat protection and protecting snakes,

writes Romulus Whitaker, the famous 81-year old herpetologist, and the man renowned for establishing the Madras Snake Park, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team, as well as for his work conserving India’s rainforests - the habitat of so many endangered species.

Interestingly, the idea of the park was conceived to rehabilitate the Irula tribe, who are known for their expertise in catching snakes. Well, the tribals of the Irula tribe went jobless after the government had announced a ban on snake trading.

It was Whitaker who helped the Irula tribe to get involved in extracting snake venom used for the production of antivenom drugs.