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Inspirational Talks

The Unloved

By January 16, 2025No Comments

I wasn’t here last Sunday. Instead, I was in Atlanta, putting snakes into bags, then into buckets. You may have just said a little “what?” to yourself, but it gets better. My “final exam” snake that day was a grumpy Eastern Diamond Rattlesnake named Roger, who was making it very clear with all the rattling and striking, that he did not want to go in the bucket. I passed my exam, sorry Roger, and headed home with a certificate in basic venomous snake handling techniques. I have pictures to prove it.

I should back up a bit, because you’re probably wondering about my intentions, and possibly my sanity. My mother did. Roger, along with several other venomous snakes of various species, resides at The Amphibian Foundation, an organization dedicated to conservation-focused research on frogs and salamanders in the Southeast. They do a lot of public outreach and, through a partnership with The Rattlesnake Conservancy, began to do what they could to educate locals on the snakes in their area. They also set up a venom lab in their facility, where they milk snake venom for medical research. The Rattlesnake Conservancy created the handling program I attended to teach the lab technicians how to work with the snakes and to teach us ordinary people how to safely remove venomous snakes from places where the proximity to humans and pets created a bite risk. They wanted there to be people to call for help rather than doing what humans typically do in the face of any wild being they think is a threat.

You’ve probably heard the exact opposite, but the only good snake is a living snake.

In Atlanta, copperheads most often get into trouble, because suburban yards provide lovely habitat for them. Here, our shy timber rattlesnakes tend to stay away from humans, but not always. I haven’t seen any formal studies yet, but there is anecdotal evidence that things are changing. The surge in outdoor tourism puts more people on the hiking trails. Even in the protected Adirondacks, there is too much logging, destroying their forest habitat, and climate change changes everything. More frequent heatwaves and droughts are going to send everyone, including the snakes, towards the lakes, right to where the people are. New York also has copperhead populations which are likely to expand north as the average temperatures increase.

All this was to explain why I spent last weekend putting snakes into buckets. You see, if I can contain a venomous snake, I can get him out of harm’s way, or get him help if he’s injured. There needs to be more of us who are willing to, and who can, save the snakes.

When I got into wildlife rehabilitation and decided to specialize in turtles, I ended up learning a lot about reptiles. And I also learned a lot about what humans think about reptiles. Maybe not you, but for many, even the big-on-nature people, reptiles are unloved. According to a 2022 report in the journal, Nature, reptiles are the least likely to be included in global conservation efforts, despite 21% of their species being threatened with extinction. That puts them at about the same risk as mammals, behind amphibians who are disappearing so fast, places like The Amphibian Foundation have some captive colonies that may be the last of their kind, and well ahead of birds at 13%. And yet, birds and mammal conservation gets the most PR.

And that brings me to why I’m telling you about my snake adventure in a Sunday morning service. If you’ve heard me speak before, you won’t be surprised I have a spiritual connection to this. But I wonder if you do. Our UU seventh principle calls on us to have “respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence of which we are a part.” I’ve always thought that didn’t go far enough. I know not everyone in this congregation was happy when Article 2 passed, but I was glad to see what they did with interdependence: “We honor the interdependent web of all existence. With reverence for the great web of life and with humility, we acknowledge our place in it.” And there’s a bit about not being so exploitive. That’s better, but there was one piece at the core of this new article that I think was even more important: “Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values. We are accountable to one another for doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of Love.”

The spiritual discipline of love.

That “spiritual discipline” thing is so important, because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but loving everyone is not so easy right now. I’ve found that it’s during times like these, marked by division and discord, that love must become a practice. And maybe it’s too much to ask when just loving all our fellow humans is challenging enough, but that great web of life is full of strange and scary beings who you can practice loving. They are the unloved, and unless we acknowledge their strands in the interdependent web they will be gone, threads of life unraveling until it all falls apart. So, I’m going to share some things about a few of the unloved among us, yes, eventually getting back to the snakes. I don’t expect you to immediately love them all. But maybe there is space in your spiritual practice of love for one of them. And maybe something I share will be interesting, maybe fascinating, maybe even wonderful, and you will find yourself feeling a bit deeper into the web, interdependent, interconnected.

Before I get into who is more local, though, I want to bring attention to a Western New Yorker who may be getting a bit of love this year. The eastern hellbender salamander, commonly known by less than loving nicknames like snot otter, lasagna lizard, and mud devil, is North America’s largest salamander. They aren’t pretty. These amphibians are mud-colored, with small beady eyes and loose, slimy skin. They are usually over a foot long and can get up to two and a half feet. If you were thinking they sound like the mudpuppies in the Hudson, double their size and make them wrinkly.

Hellbenders are believed to have been given that name by European settlers who thought they looked like a creature from hell, bent on returning. And the settlers treated them as such. Until the 1900s, these poor misunderstood beings were beheaded by fishermen just for being there and even on the menu at high-society clubs where taste-testing everything aquatic was a thing. Then the industrial revolution happened, and the hellbenders almost disappeared. They require clean water in their habitats, and industrial pollution was killing them. They are so dependent on a pristine ecosystem that they are now considered an indicator species for habitat degradation. It’s taken some work, including on the part of the Seneca Nation who has a pre-colonial relationship with the snot otters, but the population of hellbenders in Western New York is making a comeback. And in December they were proposed for federal endangered species status, which we can all open our hearts and hope they get.

I mentioned that I worked with turtles in the wildlife rehabilitation setting and you might have pictured the cute painted turtles who line up on logs to bask in the summer and wondered why they would be on the unloved list. It’s what most people think, to be honest, but when I say, “Look at this snapping turtle I’m taking care of,” those same people might take a step backwards. I get that they seem scary. I mean, they look like dinosaurs and rumor has it that they can bite your fingers off. I want to tell you a secret about snapping turtles, though. Every turtle rehabilitator I know who starts taking snapping turtles ends up loving them. They are incredibly intelligent, are calm in rehab, and will take food daintily from tongs. Snapping turtles learn what we humans are about so fast, maybe that’s the scary thing. Most painted turtles never stop seeing me as a threat even after months in care. When I approach a snapping turtle’s tank, she’ll walk right over and look me in the eye.

It’s hard for me to understand why they are so unloved. I mean, yeah, the snapping is scary. But what you need to understand is that, unless you’re a fish who happens to swim by, that snap is purely defensive. When snappers are in water, they have little to be afraid of but are naturally shy. They are amazing swimmers, so fast that you might swim right up to one and he would be gone before you knew he was there. Sometimes they get curious and will check out boats, especially if you might throw some bait fish their way, because they will figure that out, but generally they hide. But when they get onto land to go to a nesting spot or migrate between ponds, they are awkward beasts. They have to lift the weight of their shell, which is bone, and walk on limbs better used for swimming, across terrain with no hiding spots. They are incredibly vulnerable. And they don’t have the turtle anatomy that lets them tuck their heads into their shells. In fact, the bottom shell, the plastron, is so reduced for ease of swimming it provides little protection. All they can do when approached by the big land predators, and yes that means you and your dog, is try to scare them off. For the most part, wild land animals take the hint. Humans and domestic dogs are a bit thick, and the most likely to get bit because they don’t heed the warning.

Can a snapping turtle bite your finger off? Probably not. I got bit one time by a snapper I was examining for injuries and it barely broke the skin. Their bite force is less than yours. Should you be cautious around them? Of course, by respecting their request to be left alone. And are they dinosaurs? I don’t ever insult turtles by calling them dinosaurs, since they were around in the Triassic period before the dinosaurs showed up and survived all the mass extinction events that eliminated the dinosaurs and others. In fact, common snapping turtles, as they exist today, were present in North America 65 million years ago, while dinosaurs were still walking around. If anything, the dinosaurs stole their look. Here’s the thing, though. They’re disappearing now. New York honored snapping turtles by making them the state reptile, but they are also the only reptile that has a hunting season. They’re losing habitat, have terrible road mortality figures, and nobody is studying their population declines to see if hunting them is sustainable. They may be unloved right into extinction while nobody’s watching.

Not that you think mammals aren’t among the unloved, I would like to bring your attention to the lowly Virgina opossum. North America’s only marsupial also has more teeth than any other mammal on this continent. They are known for getting into trash and for their hissing show of all those teeth, so they get called dirty and nasty. But opossums have a hard time out there while performing important ecosystem services. Like the snapping turtles, the teeth thing is really just to scare you off, because they really have no way to defend themselves. They are often prey to larger animals and get attached by dogs. And the trash? Well, that is their food of last resort. Opossums have complex omnivorous diets that include plants, insects, rodents, eggs or young birds, carrion, and snakes. Yes, snakes, which I will come back to. It is only because humans have reduced their natural food sources that they raid your garbage cans and grab your chickens. They’re just trying to survive. Yes, there is a moderate risk to horses due to disease transmission, but that risk is easily mitigated by securing barns and feed storage so they can’t get in. Chicken coops can be protected the same way, which will keep foxes, weasels, and other predators out as well. Really, if you don’t, you are just laying out a buffet for the wildlife. Opossums also have a very, very low risk of getting rabies, making them one of the safest mammals to share space with humans. And the moms are nature’s minivans, carrying their kids in their pouch and then on their backs until they are old enough to get by on their own.

But I mentioned they eat snakes. Opossums are basically immune to the venom of all the snakes in their range. That means they can also eat venomous snakes. They may have a hard time bringing down a rattlesnake, they are just too big, but copperheads are dinner. In fact, some people will attract opossums to their property to keep the snakes away. And since they will hunt rodents, they will take care of those, too, since the snakes aren’t around.

Would I rather have opossums than snakes in my yard? That is a very complicated question, because to answer it implies that I, a human, gets to decide how the ecosystem shakes out. Unfortunately, humans have been deciding that for a long time, and now everything is out of balance. We put other beings on the unloved list, and eventually on the extinction list.

Snakes are strange and scary, but also amazing. I could talk for an hour about how they move without legs, expanding on the story we heard earlier, which I won’t do now, just warning you if you ask later. Even though they were sometimes feared, snakes were also honored by ancient humans and show up in spiritual mythology and symbolism. For the Norse, mythological snakes were creative and destructive forces, life, death, and rebirth. For the Celts, snakes represented healing and wisdom, and were believed to be able to travel to the underworld because they disappeared underground in winter. The Greeks also believed snakes were healing. Asclepius, the god of medicine, had a rod with a snake wrapped around it, such an enduring symbol of medicine that it is still used today.

I could do a whole dissertation on the spiritual symbolism of snakes, but I had to content myself with reading some other papers, a frustrating endeavor because apparently many religious scholars don’t know the difference between poisonous and venomous, an important distinction that will either get your stomach pumped or an antivenom administered. Anyway, that reading confirmed what I already suspected. The Christian version of Genesis put snakes firmly on the unloved list. Even though the devil doesn’t even show until later in the Old Testament, that rather smart talking snake who asked Eve a legitimate question got associated with evil and Satan. And Christians kept perpetuating it. Think about what St. Patrick is famous for.

Snake hating is ingrained in American culture, so much so that it’s difficult to overcome. Rattlesnake roundups, where whole communities make a party out of going out and killing as many rattlesnakes as they can at once, are too common. There are even churches where holding a venomous snake without getting bit is supposed to be a sign that the Holy Spirit is saving you from the evil. There are people who will kill every snake because they just don’t like them. Many will even swerve to intentionally hit a snake in the road. I grew up with that, and probably would be the same if I didn’t have the opportunity to learn differently.

So, let’s practice snake love for a moment. Remember I told you about the venom lab at The Amphibian Foundation? Snake venom is being used to develop drugs to treat cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. There are also antibacterial components of the venom that could be the answer to drug-resistant bacteria. They’re also experimenting with venom extracts that may slow Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons. Sounds like that healing symbology needs to make a comeback.

And the web of life? Snakes are an essential thread. They are both predator and prey, keeping small animal populations, especially rodents, in control, while also feeding birds, mammals, and even other snakes and other reptiles. They even help reduce disease. Here in New York, mouse populations unchecked by natural predators, like snakes, have contributed to the spread of Lyme carrying ticks. Our timber rattlesnakes are, at least, protected as a threatened species in New York, but continued habitat loss and road mortality have stymied attempts to grow their numbers. They need some love.

We each have our own ways to practice love. My practice included spending last weekend putting snakes into buckets. It will include caring for snapping turtles and watching out for opossums. And cheering for the hellbenders on the other side of the state. I hope maybe you, too, will find space in your spiritual practice for the strange, the scary, the unloved in our sacred web of life, and let love take you deeper into understanding just how interconnected we are.