Snake Catcher In South Africa Goes Viral After Daring Capture Of Spitting Cobra

A snake wrangler in South Africa has gone viral after sharing footage of a daring capture of a riled up Ring-Necked Spitting Cobra, or Rinkhals Cobra.

The Ring-Necked Spitting Cobra is a distant relative of the King Cobra which is arguably the most famous snake species on earth. The Rinkhals Cobra (Hemachatus haemachatus), or Ring-Necked Spitting Cobra, is found widely throughout South Africa’s Western and Eastern Cape provinces.

These spitting cobras typically aim for the face when spitting venom at humans. The speed with which this snake pops out of a drain pipe and goes after a clip is blowing people away. Here are the two viral clips:

That first video has amassed 10 million views in 3 days. The second clip has 17.6 million views in just 3 days. It is wild to see numbers like that outside of YouTube.

Based on his feed, it appears as if calls to capture and relocate Rinkhals Cobras are relatively common for this snake wrangler. He has three more recent videos of capturing Ring-Necked Spitting Cobras and relocating them.

This video is perplexing. He knows there is a venomous cobra in the box. Yet he still chooses to use his hands to take the box apart while looking for the cobra:

Here is what a release looks like after the Ring-Necked Spitting Cobra is captured and removed:

This is a jarring reminder of how many cobra species there are. In total, there are more than 40 species of snake on earth that fall under the ‘cobra’ umbrella.

One of the characteristic defenses of the Rinkhals Cobra is ‘playing dead’. I’d say we’ve witnessed the opposite of that.

They birth between 20-35 live snakes at a time, grow between 3 to 3.5 feet long, and live between 20 and 35 years in the wild.