Our irrational fear of snakes

WHEN the Northglen News received the call that the capture of a black mamba, one of the deadliest snakes in the world was in progress at the Prestondale home on election day, 7 May, fear set in before we arrived to cover the story.

The snake had coiled itself under the Wendy house of the Mallon family who are understandably terrified.
Our enthusiasm to cover the story, capturing close up pictures soon waned when we arrived and discovered that the man entrusted to catch the snake, Jason Arnold said he would have to agitate it in order to get it out from its hiding place. Clearly the snake was not looking for a confrontation and had decided to remain coiled up under the Wendy house.
Arnold was on his cell phone with his head peeping under the Wendy house and the rest of the family and several; neighbours were standing a distance away from the mamba’s chosen spot. It got me thinking, “why are we so afraid of snakes?”

Well according to the website, LiveScience the fear of snakes is one of the most common phobias, yet many people have never seen a snake in person.
They suggest that humans have evolved an innate tendency to sense snakes and to learn to fear them.
They said that psychologists have found that both adults and children could detect images of snakes among a variety of non-threatening objects more quickly than they could pinpoint frogs, flowers or caterpillars. They quote Vanessa LoBue, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Virginia in the US who said: “The idea is that throughout evolutionary history, humans that learned quickly to fear snakes would have been at an advantage to survive and reproduce. Humans who detected the presence of snakes very quickly would have been more likely to pass on their genes.”
The fear of snakes is called ophidiophobia while the fear of all reptiles is called herpetophobia.

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