I had my vet do a venomoid operation

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?

Atleast some good can come from the black mamba is a good thing. Tanith please if you have pictures post them or e-mail me them im very curious to see them. The conclusions and fact of getting the correct gland is distrurbing and reinforces my opinions on voids being done by untrained vets. I still feel its only a matter of time before someone is bitten and dies from a void.

The day I took the mamba in for dissection I did not have my camera. But the dissected animal is preserved at the vet clinic. You can come down and see it in person if you want, and we can take photos to post.

I've asked my vet to preserve all the dead specimens so that we have anatomical references. It's valuable knowledge for when we operate on live patients.

Tanith ive been sick as hell all week long but if im feeling better by the weekend i would very much like to come up and see as I know Alison would. Ill call you if im better. And Thank you

No hurry, it's in the freezer at the clinic.

Hey Tanith I just thought of something , you may want to e-mail Hunter and BWsmith before they see this threads headline or both may end up in the hospital from heart Failure.

Erk. I just found out that the freezer the black mamba was stored in failed, and the specimen wasn't salvageable by the time they found out about it. Sorry.

No worries, more dead mambas will no doubt come along. In the meantime, there is a Mexican jumping viper in a working freezer that was given the same venomoid treatment by the vet after it died. So you can look at that one.

Originally posted by Mustangrde1
Hey Tanith I just thought of something , you may want to e-mail Hunter and BWsmith before they see this threads headline or both may end up in the hospital from heart Failure.

No kidding!! That's certainly what got my attention--void operation w/Tanith starting the thread...though I did wonder what kind of joke/gag she was starting this time...


Tanith, I'm glad you had this operation done. It's very scary that there are probably a LOT of voids out there with their glands still intact....

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.

Tanith. Many members might wonder why you need fresh not frozen could you explain why.