Vegas Viper Stunt: Don't Try This at Home

LAS VEGAS (Jan. 20) -- The legal release from Animal Planet made it all sound just so darn terrifying, but here we are anyway surrounded inside a glass box by dozens of venomous snakes and outside by dozens of probably equally terrifying Vegas tourists.

"I acknowledge," reads the thing I signed, "that my presence around these animals and my participation in the Program INVOLVES INHERENTLY EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, HIGH-RISK ACTIVITIES WHICH MAY RESULT IN MY DISFIGUREMENT, DISMEMBERMENT, ILLNESS, SERIOUS INJURY, EMOTIONAL TRAUMA, PROPERTY LOSS AND/OR POSSIBLE DEATH and no amount of planning and preparation can eliminate the risks inherent or otherwise in these activities."

Emphasis theirs.

Meh. Have you seen some of the free-range lounge lizards native to these parts?

The box is roomy enough, a sparsely furnished 320 square feet including a private toilet and shower area, and I'm only in it for 45 minutes. Herpetologist Donald Schultz, star of Animal Planet's "Wild Recon" series, plans to live here for 10 days, filming a special two-hour Feb. 9 episode alliteratively named "Venom in Vegas" documenting his extended stay in this peek-a-boo room across the Boulevard from Caesars Palace.

As the stunt proceeds, the Animal Planet gang plan to add about five new snakes a day, the most highly anticipated being the aggressive black mambas joining the party near the end of the saga. Passers-by can ask questions at appointed times and watch as Schultz milks the venom for pharmaceutical researchers to use to develop cures. With journalists -- I am the first with the guts to come inside -- he holds forth about the plight of Third World snakebite victims while also hoping all the publicity scares up some ratings.

My spouse, I would learn later because I'm without use of my hands to check my phone thanks to the super-duper protective gear Animal Planet forced on me even after I signed that release, watches on the 24/7 webcam and texts me to ask: "Do you really have to hold the snake? Really!!?"

Well, of course I do. Besides, the one Schultz has let loose upon me is a cute little rufous beaked snake and they "have a venom but they don't usually bite." It's slim and pointy-headed, and if you haven't heard of it, that may be because, as housesnakes.net reports, it's "one of the five underrated African snakes." Maybe all this will help.

I'm disappointed, though. I've freaked out my editors, my family and my Twitter following by heading into The Box, and now I must sit in this chair behind an imaginary line in 21st-century chain mail while Schultz -- in casual attire! -- gets to drag a 4-foot gaboon viper out from under his bed for a little extreme show-and-tell.

"These snakes have the longest fangs in the world, 2 1/2 inches, and its venom can kill you very, very quickly," Schultz explains, petting it with his bare hands as he kneels on the floor pointing out brown camouflage scales designed to blend in with trees. "This is obviously not something to try at home."

In fact, the big problem that Schultz is trying to raise awareness of is the fact that these critters routinely sneak into the homes of the poor across Africa and Asia and kill more than 125,000 people a year. Those folks could be saved, Schultz argues, if researchers could develop more anti-venom serums and if wealthy nations provided it to local medics. In Sri Lanka alone, he says, 1,000 people die preventable deaths each year from snakebites.

Of course, I'm not just here to learn about snakes. I learn a few strange tidbits about Schultz, the single, clean-cut 31-year-old South Afrikaaner who started freaking out his ophidiophobic -- look it up -- mom with his sinuous friends as a tween.

He's an odd fellow for this line of work, really. He's a TV star and columnist for a magazine called Scales and Tails who is avoiding eye contact with the crowds when he's not addressing them because he claims to be shy. He's a herpetologist who is severely allergic not just to snake venom but also the anti-venom serum, but "we've got doctors on hand to deal with that, too, if there's a need." He admits to arachnophobia but insists he "respects" spiders.

As seen on the webcam, Schultz spends a lot of his Vegas time on his Macbook editing footage from another show and watching what Web viewers are saying about his voluntary public captivity. When he's in bed, he'll be making his way through the DVDs of the first season of "Lost" or, eerily appropriately, a memoir about the late Animal Planet star Steve Irwin written by his widow.

So far, he's not been privy to any unusual Sin City shenanigans. Nobody's flashed him or flung anything at the box or even seemed all that drunk, but Schultz notes that the weekend has yet to come and, anyway, he seems buoyed a bit by the energy of the gawkers.

"I like the fact that people are in Vegas having fun," he says. "I don't want to bring them down by saying, 'Oh the world is so screwed and snake bites are a big problem.' But I do want to try to get a message across. If people come by and look because they think, oh what that guy is doing is crazy, that's great. If they take something away from it, even better."

While the idea of living with a gaggle of snakes -- there'll be 100 by the end of this -- sounds fearsome and gross, most of the time the critters keep to themselves in the bushes or under the furniture. This, too, is part of Schultz's lesson, that they won't attack unless provoked: "All they want to do is to be warm, to eat and to reproduce."

In that case, then, throw in a box of Trojans and a yard-long margarita shaped like the Eiffel Tower and these critters will fit in perfectly in Vegas.