I had my vet do a venomoid operation

MsTT · 05-12-04, 07:27 PM

On a dead snake, to get his professional opinion of the procedure. It's not something we would want to do to a live animal of course, but we had this opportunity to learn some things from a patient we were unable to save.

I asked him to thoroughly take apart the dead black mamba so that we could learn more about the anatomy for the next time we had to perform surgery on a live patient. I asked him to remove the venom glands from the dead animal and to pay special attention to the head structures, since we get so many mambas in with head trauma.

I'll be posting a more complete account of what my vet thought of this "venomoid" operation in terms of how painful and invasive it is, but here are some basic conclusions.

1. My vet was really not thrilled with the idea that anyone would want to do this to a live patient. Digging the venom gland out of an elapid's head meant going quite deep through a lot of delicate internal structures. It is not a trivial operation by any stretch of the imagination. He was willing to do it to a dead animal but he did not think it would be a good thing to do to a live animal.

2. The first "venom gland" my vet removed turned out to be a small muscle that was positioned right at the base of the fang. It looked a lot like gland tissue. Keep in mind that the person who made this mistake is an experienced reptile vet who has worked for Fish and Wildlife doing surgical implants on snakes for telemetry studies. Distinguishing that small muscle from the actual gland was difficult even for a veterinarian who had some previous experience doing oral surgery on elapids.

3. Given the reports of fully hot snakes running around with obvious scars from a venomoid operation, this makes me wonder if amateurs with much less skill than a veterinarian are actually removing the wrong piece. Obviously it is not too difficult to get that little muscle confused with the venom gland, given that an experienced reptile veterinarian did exactly that on his first attempt.

Makes ya wonder, doesn't it?

Scales Zoo · 05-12-04, 07:30 PM

Does make one wonder.

Good post all around.

Ryan

Cruciform · 05-12-04, 07:34 PM

Good post. It would be interesting to see video of these learning procedures.

MsTT · 05-12-04, 07:38 PM

I may at some point make some photos of the procedure available, but I really do NOT want to be teaching people in detail how to perform the venomoid operation. So what I post in public will be somewhat limited, and I'll save the rest of the evidence for private distribution.

I do want to make it clear that it is a nontrivial operation and that is is very easy to mess up and remove the wrong chunk.

Crotalus75 · 05-12-04, 08:39 PM

Hmmnn....it definitely does make one wonder even more about all of these "professionally done" surgeries that are always crammed in our face. Very interesting. Great post, TT!

Cruciform · 05-12-04, 08:49 PM

It sucks that we have to worry about learning the workings of animals because some cruel son of a bitch will take the same information and use it to maim them

And the more stuff I read on the BOI about some of the scumbags shipping venomous illegally or tricking legit dealers into selling to third parties so they can be butchered, it just makes me angry

At this rate snakes are going to get banned completely.

jungle_man86 · 05-12-04, 08:56 PM

good post

Gary O · 05-12-04, 10:03 PM

Good post MsTT! But the sad thing is that these "hackers" don't care. They never did o they would not be putting these snakes through this.

This was a very smart thing to do. Giving even more hard facts! Why this should never be done.

cobraman · 05-12-04, 10:33 PM

They would care if they were to be held accountable for someone's life that was bitten by the "venomoid" that has a bit of muscle tissue missing and intact venom glands.

KrokadilyanGuy3 · 05-12-04, 11:44 PM

Quote:

Distinguishing that small muscle from the actual gland was difficult even for a veterinarian who had some previous experience doing oral surgery on elapids.

Did any of these oral surgeries have any involvement with the actual glands themselves? I would somewhat assume a misidentification from someone who has never done this before. People who work on these procedures.
I would think they would want to do it properly, being they are being paid and they want their "clients" to come back, noone goes to the same mechanic if they only do piss-poor jobs, so I do think "Hackers" care.. About the animals? Probably not, but everyone seems to be after the dollar sign anyways, everyone has a method.
Also, I think they care because knowing they would be liable(Same as anyone who did a piss-poor job that endangered human life) if someone was actually evenomated. False advertisement is a crime and he would be risking human life, If I were a seller or a "hacker" I would want to know my work before I'd risk a lawsuit..
Being I do not know any actual "hackers" personally, I would think they would know how to do their "job". The vet didn't because maybe it was a new task for him. Working around and with are two different things..

Great post though, does make someone wonder. Pics would be great too.

MsTT · 05-13-04, 01:04 AM

Only one of the oral surgeries on a mamba was deep enough to involve an infected venom gland. A photo of that particular animal is on this page: http://www.snakegetters.com/demo/vet/index.html

If I recall correctly the infected tissue was removed, including one venom gland, but the patient died of massive septicaemia despite support antibiotics.

So yes, this vet has been poking around behind a mamba's fangs before. The last time his criteria was "remove necrotic tissue, preserve healthy tissue" and he was not necessarily looking for the venom gland per se.

All the other oral procedures we've done on venomous snakes have been much less invasive - a bit of suturing, general debrieding, etc. We don't go chopping into the healthy parts of a snake's mouth on purpose as that is contrary to the veterinary ethic of healing rather than harming.

KrokadilyanGuy3 · 05-13-04, 01:56 AM

Great site, thanks for the link.

dlucka · 05-13-04, 07:12 AM

Removing venom gland is not easy to do and with no damage to the snake or not too much is harder. I did it on a dead snake too and i have to brake true muscle that would take a lot of time to get fine just to be sure i remove the good thing.

That make me say, if your not ready for hot snake don't rush on a venomoid you can have some surprise.

MsTT · 05-13-04, 10:27 AM

Couple of clarifications - sorry, I was tired and made some errors in the initial post. The attempt that my vet made at "venomoid" surgery on a dead patient was initially with a Mexican jumping viper, and that was the dissection I actually saw where the muscle was removed instead of the venom gland. I was not at the clinic during the black mamba dissection and I got feedback from the vet afterward.

The feedback was pretty much the same on the elapid. Venom glands are buried way down deep and are both hard to get to without cutting through a lot of tissue and easy to mistake for other tissue that isn't venom gland.

I think it is a good idea to do "learning necropsies". If we can't save a life at least we can learn something that will help the living. The more intimately familiar my vet is with elapid and viperid anatomy, the better off my live patients are. So I'll probably be making more reports of this nature as rescue operations continue.

Donations of freshly dead (not frozen) venomous snakes will be cheerfully accepted towards this goal.

Gary O · 05-13-04, 03:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by cobraman
They would care if they were to be held accountable for someone's life that was bitten by the "venomoid" that has a bit of muscle tissue missing and intact venom glands.

You are right. I hope it doesn't come to that though. I hope a stop is put to Venomoids before we hear this story in the news