Why am I so scared of snakes?
Of all the animals people say they cannot stand, this is the one where the fear has real numbers behind it. That still leaves a question for the many people who have never met a snake outside a zoo.
What people say when you ask them
People who dislike snakes rarely mention the bite first. They talk about how the animal is.
- It has no legs, and moves in a way nothing else does.
- You do not see it until you are almost on top of it.
- The tongue, flicking in and out.
- It is cold, silent and gives nothing away.
Then there is the word itself. In English a snake is a person who smiles at you and then does you harm.
What snakes are actually like
- The flicking tongue is not a threat. It is how a snake smells. The tongue gathers chemicals from the air and the ground and carries them to an organ in the roof of the mouth. Because it is forked, it samples two places at once.Source: The Conversation, “Why do snakes flick their tongues?”
- There are a great many of them. The Reptile Database lists more than 4,200 kinds of snake, and the count has gone up almost every year as new ones are described.Source: The Reptile Database, species numbers
- The fear is not silly. The World Health Organization estimates that snakebite kills between 81,000 and 138,000 people a year. If you live where dangerous snakes do, caution is simply sensible.Source: World Health Organization, snakebite envenoming
When it is not about danger
If you have never been anywhere near a dangerous snake and the dislike is still strong, it may be carrying something else. This is an idea to test against your own life, and you are free to decide it does not apply.
Start with the word you would use. If it is “sneaky”, look at hiding. A snake is the thing in the grass, and people who cannot bear that often have a history with it: someone who said one thing and did another, or things of their own that have gone unsaid for a long time. Secrets kept to keep the peace are still secrets, and they tend to make us sharp about secrecy in others.
The other thing a snake does is shed. It leaves a whole skin behind and carries on. Some people who dislike snakes are in the middle of a change they have not finished. Others are angry with someone who started again and seemed to walk away clean.
A snake is also all body, with no face to read. For some people the unease sits close to their own body and its appetites, which they were taught to keep quiet about.
Three questions to ask yourself
- If you had to describe a snake in one word, what is the word? Who else have you used it about?
- What are you holding back at the moment that someone close to you does not know?
- Is there an older version of you that you left behind and would prefer nobody mentioned?
Questions people ask
Why are humans afraid of snakes?
Partly because, for most of our history, it paid to be. Snakebite still kills tens of thousands of people a year. Studies with six-month-old babies also show a stronger reaction to pictures of snakes than to pictures of fish, so some of the wariness seems to arrive before any teaching.
Is being scared of snakes a phobia?
Usually not. Being wary of snakes is ordinary. If the fear stops you walking in the countryside, or a picture is enough to set off panic, that is a phobia, and it is worth talking to a doctor or a therapist about. It is a common one, and help exists.
What can a strong dislike of snakes say about me?
Nothing for certain. It can be a pointer towards how you feel about secrecy, about being deceived, or about change that leaves the old self behind. The useful part is the word you reach for when you describe the snake, and where else in your life that word turns up.