Britpick - Venomous Snakes in Harry Potter's Britain

[ffutures]

Venomous snakes seem to be implausibly common in Britain in a lot of Harry Potter stories. I'm not talking about basilisks and other magical snakes, just non-magical species. And they are almost always presented as deadly dangerous.

The snag is that Britain isn't seriously dangerous snake country - we have four species (or rather three species with one additional subspecies), plus one snake-like legless lizard, and only the adder, Vipera berus, is venomous. And it's not exactly the most dangerous species on record:

'There have been a few incidents over the years, but for those who are in good health, you're not going to die from a bite. It will hurt and swell for a few days and you may have feelings of nausea and dizziness. Some who may be less fortunate may suffer an allergic reaction, but it generally isn't going to kill you.

'Children, the infirm and the elderly are most at risk.'

Fatalities from adder bites are exceptionally rare. The last in Britain occurred in 1975, when a five-year-old was bitten on the ankle in Scotland. Between 1950 and 1972 there was only one death caused by an adder bite across England and Wales.
(Source Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/should-we-be-scared-of-british-snakes.html )

The reason for the low mortality rate is simple - they're small snakes, weighing less than 100g, really not very aggressive, and their venom is evolved for killing amphibians, not mammals. By comparison, insect stings (wasps, bees, etc.) kill five people a year in the UK, so you're roughly 150 times more likely to be killed by an insect sting than a snake bite.

So if Harry or any other wizard really wanted to be scary, he should learn to talk to and control wasps, not snakes!

This message bought to you by a story I read recently that had a character attacked by an adder that jumped at her face! Snakes do NOT jump several feet off the ground, but that's another story...

Later - forgot to say that about a hundred people a year are bitten by adders, usually after accidentally stepping on them. So the death rate is about 1 per 3000 people bitten.

 

Comments

[julesjones]

I have seen precisely one slow worm and zero snakes during my time in mainland UK.

(Slow worm involved two people standing next to it going "Squee!" before gently encouraging it to move off the path before someone else came along and trod on it or went "Snake! Kill it!")

[ffutures]

I've done slightly better; a couple of slow worms, an adder, and a grass snake. I had to rescue the slow worm from a group of terrified African lab technicians - we were on an ecology training course in the country and nobody remembered to brief them on reptiles. Or about electrified cattle fences, unfortunately...

[eledonecirrhosa]

The only time I've ever seen an adder, it was hurtling away from the noisy people who had disturbed it (me and several other people on an archaeology field trip) as fast as it could go.

You can, of course, perfectly safely run barefoot through adder country for much of the year, due to them hibernating...

[ffutures]

You're right, of course - the one I saw was warming itself in the sun on a fairly cold day, otherwise it would have been well out of view.

I think the figure for adder bites per year is probably inflated by people who can't tell an adder from the other snake species, people who think they saw a snake but were actually stung by insects, etc.