How Hongkongers can lose their fear of snakes, one selfie at a time
Organised safaris allow people to see and handle Hong Kong’s snakes, helping them overcome their fear and dispelling many long-held myths about the animals and their behaviour
It took about two hours of scrambling around in the undergrowth late one evening on a moonlit hillside in Hong Kong for mother-of-two Tara Smyth to overcome her phobia of snakes and make her a goodwill ambassador for the reptiles.
“I’m certainly not as scared of them as I was,” says the 46-year-old Scout leader, after joining a “snake safari” organised by long-time snake catchers William Sargent and Dave Willott.
“I do a lot of hiking, and on some of my hikes I would see three or four snakes, and I would go home a gibbering wreck thinking, ‘Oh my God that was awful’,” Smyth says. “They never stopped me going out, but when I saw them in the bush they would make me leap a mile, and the rest of my hike would be ruined because I’d be petrified of coming across another one.”
Sargent and Willott organised three HK$250-a-head safaris between June and September in the countryside around Tai Mo Shan, to promote knowledge of snakes and help people conquer their innate repulsion of the reptiles.
The response was immediate, with all 12 places on each trip snapped up within hours of them being announced. Participants saw 10, seven, and 15 snakes, respectively on the trips, where the organisers catch mostly non-venomous snakes and safely pass them around the group – even allowing them to take snake selfies.
