When I heard that these guys are expert snake handlers, I had to get a closer look. So recently we went to a local snake park, where they both work part-time, and they showed me a six-foot banded Egyptian cobra. That’s Washington on the right in the top photo, and on the left is Bigstone (his given name – don’t ask me why, but I’d say it’s an appropriate one).
Both guys grew up catching snakes around Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. (“I always had a passion for creepy-crawly creatures,” Bigstone says.) Both there and in Cape Town, they have a reputation as someone to call if you have a problem snake on your property. They catch everything from harmless mole and garden snakes to highly venomous puff adders and Cape cobras.
Bigstone even trapped a black mamba in someone’s home in Harare, where it had hidden itself in the ceiling. He’s been bitten several times, including a dry bite (in which no venom is injected) by an Egyptian cobra. His closest call was with a spitting cobra. He was teaching a friend how to catch snakes and the friend approached too aggressively and agitated the cobra.
“That was not good,” he recalls matter-of-factly. “The moment I grabbed its tail, it quickly turned around and before I could put my goggles on, it spit into my eye. When I opened my eye, I had a scraping and itching feeling. It was like taking some small stones and putting them into the eye.”
Fortunately he got to a hospital in time and was treated, with no permanent damage to the eye. He harbors no ill feelings toward any snake, because he knows they’re just acting on the instincts God gave them.
“A snake is not out to run after people and try to hurt them,” Bigstone says. “When I catch and release a snake to another place, I’m preserving it from being killed. Because when someone sees a snake, the first thing that usually comes to mind is to kill it. Do we want them to become like the dinosaurs, where we only see them in movies? They are part of the environment. They have an important role to play in the ecosystem.”
Both guys rely on their faith when working with these animals. “I know it’s God who gives me the strength to work with snakes,” Washington says. “I know He is with me. I can walk into the bush and see a snake. Most people cannot even see them, but I can see because I know how to watch out for them and where to find them. But it’s not me, it’s God who gives me that ability.”
“Anything that I do, it’s God first,” adds Bigstone. “So if I meet a snake, I say, ‘God first.’ I’ll pray, ‘Lord help me. I don’t want to kill this snake. You don’t want me to kill it. And you don’t want it to kill me. So if you want me to catch it and put it somewhere it can’t hurt anybody else, help me. Calm my temper and calm its temper.’”
Neither Washington nor Bigstone is one of those backwoods fanatics who intentionally handles venomous snakes to prove the words of Jesus, “In my name … they will pick up snakes with their hands.” But Bigstone does identify with that teaching from Mark 16:17-18.
“I like that,” he says. “I know it’s true, that if I handle the snake properly and not roughly, it will not bite me. I know God is protecting me.”
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