By AMY CHOZICK, Published: March
15, 2013, New York Times
BALLIVOR, Ireland
— Legend has it that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland. The
economic crisis has brought some of them back.
During the Celtic Tiger boom, snakes
became a popular pet among the Irish nouveaux riches, status symbols in a
country famous for its lack of indigenous serpents. But after the bubble burst,
many snake owners could no longer afford the cost of food, heating and shelter,
or they left the country for work elsewhere. Some left their snakes behind or
turned them loose in the countryside, leading to some startling encounters.
A California king snake was found late
last year in a vacant store in Dublin, a 15-foot python turned up in a garden
in Mullingar, a corn snake was found in a trash bin in Clondalkin in South
Dublin, and an aggressive rat snake was kept in a shed in County Meath,
northwest of Dublin, an area dotted with sprawling houses built during the
boom.
“The recession is the thing that’s
absolutely causing this,” said Kevin Cunningham, a 37-year-old animal lover who
started the National Exotic Animal Sanctuary after he left his job at
a Dublin
nightclub. He has transformed an old single-room schoolhouse near Ballivor, a
hamlet in the Meath countryside, into a reptile sanctuary.
“It was about status,” Mr. Cunningham said
as he waved to a four-foot red iguana that was found under a sink in an
abandoned house in Dublin.
“During the boom, people treated these animals as conversation starters.”
Animals have always been abandoned in
greater numbers in times of famine, economichardship and mass emigration
in Ireland,
but in the past that usually meant farm animals. TheDublin Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was taking in five or six emaciated
horses a week as recently as 2010. Now, though, snakes are more common among
the foundlings, including a python named Basie that someone dropped by the side
of a road.
“In the Tiger economy,” said P. J. Doyle,
a reptile expert, “young people could pay 600 quid for a snake” and the
necessary equipment — about $700 to $1,000 during much of the boom. But these
days, he said, some owners “just drive up and throw them somewhere.”
Mr. Doyle, a hulking man with weathered
skin and a gap between his teeth, helped the cruelty prevention society brace
for an influx of reptiles around, of all dates, St. Patrick’s Day, when
the warmer spring weather means that the coldblooded snakes will be more active
and more likely to show themselves.
“We always get a bump in calls around
Paddy’s Day,” Gillian Bird, the education officer at the society, said as she
pet Carl, a green iguana from South America that she named after a colleague’s
boyfriend.
Irish legend holds that the country has no
native snakes because St. Patrick banished them in the fifth century. But
science says the country was snake-free long before Patrick’s time. When the
glaciers of the most recent ice age retreated from the British Isles more than
10,000 years ago, Ireland
was already separated from the rest of Europe
by open sea, an isolated ecosystem with a damp, chilly climate that is hostile
to almost all reptiles, other than a common lizard.
Most of the recent snake sightings have
occurred in the counties around Dublin,
where the newly prosperous congregated in the country’s boom years. The
government does not require owners to register pet reptiles, so there
are no official statistics on the total number of snakes present in the
country.
“If you buy a dog, you need a license, but
if you buy a snake, you don’t,” said Brendan Ryan, a director of the Irish Pest
Control Association.
Like the country’s housing boom and
subsequent bust, the snake influx can partly be traced to European integration.
In the years when Ireland stood somewhat apart from the broader European
economy, it had strict regulations on the types of plants and animals that
could be imported, but now Ireland’s standards match the more relaxed rules of
other member states of the European Union.
“We’ve got no regulation whatsoever
covering exotics,” said James Hennessy, zoo director and founder
of Reptile Village Conservation Zoo in County Kilkenny.
“Once it’s in Europe legally and coming from
other European states, you can pick up whatever you want.”
Reptile Village is often called
upon to rescue animals, including a crocodile that had been bought online and
then abandoned in a Dublin apartment and a
six-foot boa constrictor that had taken up residence under a skylight in an
attic in County Meath. “His name’s Sammy, and he’s
brilliant,” Mr. Hennessy said of the snake.
A spokesman for the Department of the
Environment said Ireland
adheres to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. But the
convention does not prohibit trade in venomous snakes, which, while still rare
here, can legally be bought in Ireland.
That presents a scary proposition in a country with almost no antivenin stocks.
“You have to ask yourself why it’s
permissible to have these animals in the country,” Mr. Ryan said.
Though a few loose rattlesnakes, cobras
and vipers have been reported, most of the released snakes are not venomous and
pose little or no hazard to humans. That does not always make them a welcome
sight, though. “We have it deep inbred in us that they’re evil and nasty and
tempted Eve and were led out of Ireland,”
said Mr. Cunningham, the animal sanctuary founder.
He said one six-foot snake ended up with him
recently after its owner lost his job and had to move in with his parents:
“Being a good Irish mother, she said, ‘Of course I’ll take you back home — but
I’m not taking your boa constrictor.’ ”