A word to the wise: Do not live near a snake farm

I admit it: This post is not the ordinary fare you find at American Thinker. However, it’s just so…so…newsworthy, shocking, and chilling that I had to write about it.

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It turns out that Guangxi province in southern China, near the Vietnamese border, has been experiencing record-breaking rains, followed by the collapse of dams at local reservoirs. The whole area has suffered fairly epic flooding, especially in and around the Hengzhou area. As The Guardian reports, there’s been

…severe flooding in Guangxi, where two reservoirs experienced overtopping and breaches on Monday, leaving villages in several towns surrounded by flood waters. At least six people were killed, with at least 50,000 people evacuated. Six were still missing.

The death toll from devastating storms in parts of China rose to 38, after the state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday that a landslide in the central province of Gansu had killed 21 people. Thunderstorms and tornadoes killed at least 11 in the central province of Hubei, according to state media.

Normally, although this is tragic for people living in the flood zone, it would not be a matter of national import. Certain regions in China are prone to flooding, and locally made dams probably aren’t the most reliable in the world.

However, this flood story has a twist: snakes. Venomous snakes. Hundreds of venomous snakes.

It turns out that snake meat is a delicacy in the region, making the province an important center for commercial snake farms. This includes breeding venomous snakes, whose venom can be harvested for traditional medicine and whose meat is, again, a delicacy.

When the floodwaters hit, the breeding farms were hit, too, with the result that hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand, snakes, including venomous ones, were washed into the floodwaters. Moreover, it turns out that snakes can swim. And so, the viral footage began:

They look like horror-movie swans, all sinuous neck and no beautiful body, complete with snowy white or coal-black plumage.

The same Guardian article notes that, while the snakes haven’t yet wreaked the havoc a horror movie would demand, many have been bitten and at least one has died:

“Hundreds of snakes escaped all at once. I’ve seen five or six,” a snakebite victim in a local hospital told Beijing News. The villager said he was bitten by a cobra while clearing debris on the ground floor of his house at about 1pm on Tuesday.

A local doctor who treats snakebite patients told the paper he had treated several villagers since the typhoon hit the region.

Here in South Carolina, we have our fair share of local snakes, just as rattlers were an issue when I lived in California, so I’m not a stranger to being careful. Nevertheless, there’s something about a thousand snakes, many of them venomous, swimming through the flood waters, that truly is the stuff of nightmares, so much so that I felt it deserved to be acknowledged here.

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Image created using AI.