"We Have Rattlesnakes"

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All 30 or so species of rattlesnake are confined to the Americas. As a group, they're as emblematic of the New World as maize, and they fascinated the European colonists, who wrote about them far out of proportion to the danger they posed or their usefulness as a source of food and leather. The epicenter of the rattlesnake's range is the plains of north-central Mexico and the American Southwest. Arizona boasts 11 species. Texas has nine, of which the western diamondback is by far the largest and the most com­mon, an animal whose imagery and folklore are inseparable from the culture of West Texas.

One could argue that our squeamishness at the sight of a snake began in the Garden of Eden, but it may also be coded in our genes, suggests the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. In Africa, where our closest primate kin have multiple predators to fear, chimpanzees have been observed shadowing dangerous snakes at a safe distance, staring and hollering. On the North American continent, rattlesnakes are the most widely encountered of all the dangerous animals that remain. Though snakes rarely harm humans or domesticated animals, Americans nevertheless have a long history of organized efforts -- like the Sweetwater roundup -- to collect and eliminate rattlers.

In 1680, a Massachusetts hunter could earn two shillings a day killing rattlesnakes, and in 1740, Massachusetts chose one day each fall for a hunt called a rattlesnake bee, which took place in towns across the state. In 1810, hunters in Pennsylvania strapped dynamite to rattlesnakes and released them back into their dens; in Madison County, Iowa, in 1849, teams competed for the most snakes killed. Even in Vermont, a rattlesnake bounty was paid until 1972, when it was determined that the snakes had been virtually eliminated.

Though we rationalize the killing of rattlesnakes as a matter of safety, the facts suggest otherwise. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 12 people die each year from snakebite -- one or two in Texas -- compared with 3,300 from bee and wasp stings, 17 from dog maulings, 82 from lightning strikes, and more than 20 from re­calcitrant farm animals. Although the western diamondback is responsible for most fatal snakebites in the United States, the potential danger it poses is greatly exaggerated: neither the Rolling Plains Memorial Hospital in Sweetwater nor the Hendrick Medical Center in Abilene, the regional trauma center, has ever seen a fatal snakebite. Hendrick treats approximately 15 bite victims each year. In the past 20 years, only two people, both children, sustained snakebite injuries that were serious enough to warrant transfer to a larger facility in Dallas. Both made full recoveries.

Still, Mayor Wortham, whose paying job is executive director of the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium, adheres to the notion that snakes are a serious threat to people and to the well-being of the community: "There's a thousand people working in rattlesnake country [on wind turbines] on a 24-hour basis. Snakes need to be controlled." Jacque McCoy, of the chamber of commerce, agrees: "We have a rattlesnake problem. Something needs to be done with all those dens."

Sweetwater's inaugural roundup was held in 1958, after area ranchers and farm­ers complained of losing livestock to snakebite and the Board of City Development decided to try to purge Nolan County of western diamond­backs. This took place in spite of a study conducted two years earlier by the herpetologist Laurence Klauber, one of the world's foremost authori­ties on rattlesnakes and author of the 1,533-page volume Rattlesnakes: Their Habits, Life Histories, and Influence on Mankind. Klauber surveyed 254 county agents in Texas and asked them to rate livestock loss due to snakebite as serious, moderate, unimportant, or negligible. Of the 134 who responded, none listed snake damage as serious. More than half of the agents thought it negligible, and one claimed that rattlesnakes accounted for only one half of 1 percent of all livestock deaths.

Apparently, nobody paid much attention to Klauber's research. During the first Sweetwater roundup, ranchers incinerated thousands of diamondbacks in 55-gallon drums at an oil well outside of town. To ensure that the roundup would continue to thrive, Sweetwater's development board enlisted the help of the Jaycees. The following year, in 1959, the Jaycees sent representatives to Okeene, Oklahoma, home of the country's oldest roundup, to learn how to transform their event into a full-blown festival.

But the real turning point may have been 1980, the year John Tra­volta, then Hollywood's golden boy, appeared in the box-office hit Urban Cowboy wearing snakeskin boots. The demand for rattlesnake products soared, and roundup boosters had new reason to keep the spectacle alive. Nobody can say how many snakes were brought in over the ensuing years; snakes are not recorded as individual animals, but rather tallied by the weight of the total catch. In 1982, approximately 18,000 pounds of diamondbacks, double the previous record, were brought to Sweetwater, and over the next six years the roundup aver­aged more than 12,000 pounds per year.

All told, nearly 300,000 pounds of western diamondbacks have been weighed, measured, and killed at the Sweetwater Roundup. The Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife reports that those snakes now come not only from Nolan and Taylor counties, but from more than 20 counties across the state, and even from Oklahoma. Serious hunters no longer go afield on roundup morning and return in the afternoon to weigh their catch. They hunt months in advance, storing snakes in wooden crates -- tangles of serpents crammed together in basements, usually with no food or water.

No one knows how many diamondbacks still live in West Texas. Hunters believe they're inexhaustible, that they're everywhere in a commodious and vacant terrain. "Look around you," a Jaycee tells me. "There are miles and miles of nothing but miles." Although the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, a group of about 2,000 scientists who specialize in the biology and conservation of fish, amphibians, and reptiles, urges an end to the roundups, it is equivocal about whether these events permanently deplete snake populations. But there may be another reason to protect rattlesnakes: they eat rodents. During the occasional wet year, the plains are vibrant and rodents abound. A diamondback feeds about once every two weeks, consuming 15 to 20 mice and rats a year. In a land of little rain, too many rodents -- chal­lenging cattle for what meager vegetation grows naturally -- may be a greater threat than the occasional snake that bites a cow. Herpetologists have proposed that the recent spread of rodent-borne diseases such as Hantavirus could be connected to efforts to control rattlesnake popula­tions. Still, eight states continue to hold roundups. Texas, with eight, has the most, and Pennsylvania the most progressive -- a bag limit of one per day, and all snakes are released. If Sweetwater's education pit were to live up to its name, we might learn to marvel at these wondrous creatures: their legless gait, their lidless eyes, their hypodermic fangs, and their forked tongues that read messages we cannot possibly com­prehend. Instead, for $20, you can undo a snake yourself at the skinning pit, have your picture taken, and then contribute a bloody handprint, signed and dated, to the wallboard.