I got the call about a spectacled cobra and started the drive over. It takes about 35 minutes to get there now. Halfway through, my phone rang again. Someone had already “caught” it.

That sounds like good news. It wasn’t.

By the time I arrived, the person who caught it was gone. From what I gathered, he works at one of the homes nearby and used a leaf picker, the long-handled tongs people use to clear garden waste, to grab the snake and drop it in a bag. He’d done this before, apparently. He was confident.

I took the cobra out to check on it. There was a visible injury. Chayant and I looked closer, and when the snake hissed, we could see its lungs pushing out through the body wall. That points to broken ribs, almost certainly from the grab.

Here is the part worth understanding. A leaf picker crushes. It applies pressure at a single point with no give, and a snake’s ribs are not built to take that. Roughly nine times out of ten, catching a snake this way is a death sentence. The animal looks fine when it goes in the bag and dies slowly over the following days from internal damage. We’ve watched it happen. A viper from the same community died this way despite medical care, after someone decided to handle it themselves.

So now this cobra is under observation. If it recovers, we release it. If not, it goes to PFA. Either way, an animal that was simply passing through is now injured because the rescue happened before the people trained to do it could arrive.

I want to be clear that this isn’t about anyone being a hero or a villain. The intent was probably good. The outcome was not. So a few plain facts about why we ask you to wait:

When we handle a snake, we do it knowing the risk and taking full responsibility for it. We’ve trained for this, including workshops with the Karnataka Forest Department. If something goes wrong, that’s on us. We chose it.

When an untrained person handles a protected species, the responsibility shifts to whoever allowed it. For the human, that’s straightforward. For the snake, it isn’t, because the snake can’t speak for itself. In practice, that means the injury to the animal goes unaccounted for.

It also gets complicated fast if the person gets bitten. Every snakebite has to be reported to the police. Best case scenario – a minimum 24 hours in hospital and a bill that starts around 30,000 rupees, before anything goes wrong. 

What we ask is simple. If you see a snake, keep your distance, keep an eye on where it is, and call. We will come. The few minutes you save by handling it yourself are not worth a broken-ribbed cobra dying in a bag, or a neighbour in a hospital bed. Worst case scenario, they don’t make it back alive. 

The video from this rescue is below. If you watch the second half closely, you can see the lungs I mentioned. It’s not dramatic footage. That snake was healthy an hour before someone helped.