Sweetwater Jaycees clean and skinned rattlesnakes during the rattlesnake roundup in 2015. (AP/Odessa American, Courtney Sacco)
Dennis Cumbie milks a snake at the roundup. (Nellie Doneva/The Abilene Reporter-News via AP)
The little city of Sweetwater, Texas, has 11,000 residents and one very big event each year. It features a pageant, food stands and contests, but the centerpiece is a bloody hunt: Thousands of Western diamond rattlesnakes are rounded up, milked of their venom and then beheaded and skinned in front of crowds at a county coliseum.
Sweetwater’s “World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup” ends Sunday, 59 years after the Junior Chamber of Commerce, or “Jaycees,” launched it as a way to ostensibly control the region’s abundant population of rattlers, which were accused of killing cattle and biting dozens of people each year.
These days, it draws more than 25,000 visitors, among them out-of-state snake hunting teams and foreign tourists who stop by to see the Wild West in action. Last year, 3,780 pounds of snakes were netted, and they were first thrown live in a pit — it looks something like an above-ground swimming pool — where a man in what must be very sturdy boots stood among them, stirring the pile of reptiles to keep them from suffocating each other. The 2014 Miss Texas joined him for a bit.
A reporter for the Midland Reporter-Telegram described the spectacle as “a spaghetti of writhing angry reptiles” that emanates “a strange dense smell with an evil vomit-like edge to it.” Then, he wrote, “denim-clad Jaycees lob off their heads, strip their skin and disembowel their gizzards. The snake’s tiny hearts are set aside into a gory pile, each one still beating out its own rhythm — a hundred little pebble-sized hearts still twitching with life.”
There are other events, including a Miss Snake Charmer contest, which nets the winner a scholarship. And the snakes, the Jaycees note, aren’t sacrificed for nothing: Their skin is sold, their meat is eaten — plates of fried snake are a highlight of the event — and their venom is purchased for research.
But while the Sweetwater roundup boasts of being the world’s biggest, it’s also one of a dying breed. Six states, five of them in the South, still host rattlesnake roundups, but the hunts have fallen out of fashion amid urbanization and complaints that they promote cruelty and a dysfunctional relationship with wildlife.
