S8 Ep115: DIY Snake Catching Classes Emerge Jeremy Zakis Due to a massive snake population boom and a forthcoming shortage of retiring professionals, a new industry offering DIY snake wrangling training has emerged in Australia. Courses, like one run by Dr. Christi
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
Jeremy Zakis
Due to a massive snake population boom and a forthcoming shortage of retiring professionals, a new industry offering DIY snake wrangling training has emerged in Australia. Courses, like one run by Dr. Christina Zenck in Queensland, teach people to safely handle dangerous species, such as brown snakes, using specialized snare poles. This training is crucial because killing protected snakes is illegal.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm in southern New England where it's cold and getting colder. |
| 0:06.5 | We've had frost on and off for a couple of weeks now. The ground is still soft enough to plant the bulbs. |
| 0:14.2 | I've got maybe 200 left of the lilies and about 75 left of the alium and I would say about 200 left of the daffodils. I'm not in bad |
| 0:25.1 | shape, but I've got only so many days until the snow flies seriously in the ground freezes. |
| 0:30.5 | On the other side of the world, already in springtime and enjoying summer heat waves and humidity is Jeremy Zakis in New South Wales. |
| 0:42.3 | And Jeremy tells me it's very humid, rains on and off, it's summertime, grass grows fast, and then, Jeremy, do it yourself snake catching. What's happened? |
| 0:56.4 | Well, John, it seems that apparently with the onslaught and massive explosive population boom of snakes we have in Australia, |
| 1:02.5 | there are now a lot of services out there that will actually teach you how to wrangle your own |
| 1:07.4 | snakes. And the latest of these is in the Lockyer Valley in Queensland, |
| 1:15.3 | which is just outside of Brisbane, in one of the, I guess you could say the hot spots for some of the most dangerous snakes that we've seen have a population boom in the last couple of |
| 1:19.3 | years. And there in the Lockyer Valley, a lady by the name of Dr. Christina Zedernick is teaching |
| 1:25.3 | people how to become snake wranglers. |
| 1:27.9 | So for a fee, you can go out to the middle of the bush and learn how to catch |
| 1:32.1 | typhans, Great Eastern Brown snakes, Red Valley Black snakes, and of course, your garden |
| 1:36.9 | variety pythons, which is very good when you're in Queensland, because of course, that's |
| 1:41.3 | what you're most likely to see pretty much on any given day. |
| 1:44.0 | But I think the most interesting part of this whole thing, John, is that this is a new industry |
| 1:48.4 | that's really popped up in the last few years because now we have so many snakes out there |
| 1:53.2 | and there are so few snake catches to deal with them. |
| 1:56.3 | People are being encouraged now to basically take this on as a profession. |
| 2:01.9 | And also another real competing problem with this is the fact that most of the snake catchers that are out there |
| 2:06.1 | have been around for a very long time, which also means they're now coming up to retirement. So |
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