The little city of Sweetwater, Texas, has 11,000 residents and one very big event each year. It features a pageant, food stands and contests, but the centerpiece is a bloody hunt: Thousands of Western diamond rattlesnakes are rounded up, milked of their venom, beheaded and skinned in front of crowds at a county coliseum.
Sweetwater’s “World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup” ends Sunday, 59 years after the Junior Chamber of Commerce, or “Jaycees,” launched it as a way to ostensibly control the region’s abundant population of rattlers, which were killing cattle and biting dozens of people each year.
These days, it draws more than 25,000 visitors, among them out-of-state snake-hunting teams and foreign tourists who stop by to see the Wild West in action. Last year, 3,780 pounds of snakes were netted, and they were first thrown live in a pit — it looks something like an above-ground swimming pool — where a man in what must be very sturdy boots stood among them, stirring the pile of reptiles to keep them from suffocating one another. The 2014 Miss Texas joined him for a bit.
A reporter for the Midland Reporter-Telegram described the spectacle as “a spaghetti of writhing angry reptiles” that emanates “a strange dense smell with an evil vomit-like edge to it.” Then, he wrote, “denim-clad Jaycees lob off their heads, strip their skin and disembowel their gizzards. The snake’s tiny hearts are set aside into a gory pile, each one still beating out its own rhythm — a hundred little pebble-sized hearts still twitching with life.”
There are other events, including a Miss Snake Charmer contest, which nets the winner a scholarship. And the snakes, the Jaycees note, aren’t sacrificed for nothing: Their skin is sold, their meat is eaten — plates of fried snake are a highlight of the event — and their venom is purchased for research.
But while the Sweetwater roundup boasts of being the world’s biggest, it’s also one of a dying breed. Six states, five of them in the South, still host rattlesnake roundups, but the hunts have fallen out of fashion amid urbanization and complaints that they promote cruelty and a dysfunctional relationship with wildlife.
“At these events, it’s common to see snakes swollen and bloody from being restrained or thrown by handlers, dead and dying snakes, snakes too weak or stressed to defend themselves, unsanitary conditions, cruelty and dangers to the public,” Melissa Amarello, co-founder of the Tucson-based Advocates for Snake Preservation, said in a statement. “Rattlesnakes rattle when they are terrified, not angry or preparing to attack. … The sound of rattling at these roundups is in fact a thousand snakes screaming.”
Critics note that snakes aren’t really much of a menace. Each year, between 7,000 and 8,000 Americans are bit by venemous snakes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, and about six die. Four times more people were killed in lightning strikes in 2015.
David Steen, a wildlife biologist who specializes in amphibians and reptiles at Auburn University, said rattlesnake-bite victims include exterminators, drunk people and others who somehow mess with snakes.
“If you don’t do any of those things, the risks of getting bitten by a snake are really low. What does a snake have to gain by attacking you? It’s not going to try to eat you,” Steen said. “If we respect their place in the environment and also respect their space, then I think we can live alongside them with no problem at all.”
There’s no question, however, that the roundup is a crucial money-maker in a town where there’s not much else going on. An analysis found that last year’s event pumped $8.4 million into the local economy.
