Rattlesnake Roundups, Texans, and Other Idiots

This entry was posted by harry s truman on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 8:00 pm.

Billy Brown, a Philadelphia naturalist, discusses a recent New York Times article that glorifies idiots Texans who participate in “brutal” rattlesnake roundups:

Every now and then, usually at a party, someone mentions a news story they heard about crazy people in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, maybe even Pennsylvania who catch lots of rattlesnakes and then throw big festivals.

They mean this in only the nicest way, but few topics set me off like the rattlesnake roundups. At this point in the conversation I take a deep breath and kindly explain that the roundups are brutal, savage, events in which thousands of rattlers are yanked out of burrows–many flushed out of burrows with gasoline, which kills all kinds of other small wildlife and pollutes the ground–then handled roughly and frequently injured as they’re dumped into huge heaps, tossed around in bagging contests, and then in the end get their heads chopped off.

Brown objects to how the NYT benignly–if not glowingly–profiles Eric Carl Timaeus, a “renowned” roundup participant, even though he advocates the gleeful, organized slaughter of wildlife.

Unlike many snake hunters, [Timaeus] does not use [gasoline] to flush out dens.

Oh, that’s nice of him.

[And] he harvests only the longest, heaviest males. “He catches the biggest snakes every year,” said David Sager, the chief handler for the roundup. “He’s always real selective about the snakes, makes sure they’re healthy. He babies them.”

After all, where’s the fun in euthanizing sick animals? By Texas logic, I guess it makes more sense to remove healthy animals from an already-persecuted population. Let them sick’uns help to weaken that there gene pool.

The NYT makes the Sweetwater roundup seem like quaint Americana (as opposed to what it really is: classic American ignorant, neglectful, purposeless persecution of wildlife):

Founded in 1958 by ranchers bent on extermination, the rattlesnake roundup at first received scant attention from the civic boosters of Sweetwater, who preferred to cast their mix of rail connections, low tax rates and willing labor as “The Go-Gettin’-est Industrial City in West Texas.”