I'm John Batchew with Jeremy Zachus, this is the Friends of History Debating Society,

Snakes, Reptiles, much in the news in Australia, a fatality that we reported on a week or so ago.

All Australia is now paying attention. The snakes

respond to the wet weather. There has been wet for some time and that means lots of

snake eggs. Jeremy provides a photograph of an eastern brown hatching.

He prompts me by saying, isn't it adorable or some words to that effect.

I don't find anything about snakes hatching to be adorable.

Jeremy, where is this, this hatching?

This hatching was actually in New South Wales. It was done in an incubator which was actually in a natural reserve.

So it was actually done in a controlled environment by by national parks and wildlife ranges.

Now they are very, I guess in some ways adorable because at this point at this

point of the hatching in the photo there and to describe the photo is basically an egg with these little

great eastern brown snakes coming out of it and they all look very

benign and you know what if you look closely at the photo too you can see one of them looks like

he's almost smiling at the camera but at this point while they do have the venom in them,

their actual fangs haven't been grown yet.

So while they have enough venom there to actually kill an adult human

at that point in their life, they actually can't bite yet because the fangs are there but ironically that the story got a lot of I guess momentum this week because you know people are saying oh look how cute and adorable these little snakes are. I mean that's forgetting that they're growing to you know five

foot monsters that will literally come out and try and kill you at some point but

honestly John even our worst creatures here in Australia they'll try and

kill you but you know once they were babies and once they were cute.

Snake bites, it's on everybody's mind since the fatality.

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