Last week saw the world’s deadliest snake, the much feared Inland Taipan, making an entry to Mount Isa for the first time.
However this was not a cause for alarm.
Australia’s foremost reptile expert, the Snakeman Raymond Hoser was in the Isa to visit a mine site two hours out of town to teach people there how to catch and handle snakes.
Hoser had brought along the deadly snakes, including the much feared Inland Taipan so that course participants had the opportunity to handle the world’s deadliest snakes as part of the training.
Hoser, based in Melbourne, travels all over Australia and to other countries to teach people the necessary skills to handle the most dangerous snakes without being bitten and is in strong demand in Queensland following a spate of fatal and near fatal bites in Queensland involving people who have done snake handler courses taught by novices and using unsafe handling methods.
An audit of a few Mount Isa mine sites by Hoser found that people had been trained to catch venomous snakes using metal tongs using so-called “non-contact” handling methods.
A peer reviewed scientific paper published by Hoser back in 2009 showed that tongs cause immense pain and often break snake’s bones and turn otherwise innocuous snakes into one-dimensional killing machines.
The growing use of tongs by novice snake catchers had turbo-charged the rate of increase of fatal and near fatal snakebites in Queensland in recent years.
This in turn has fuelled demand for Hoser to come to Queensland to retrain snake handlers, with Hoser’s services typically being booked months in advance.
Due to the need to retrain handlers in the Mount Isa region, Hoser says he will be back in the next year to both train people and to check the competency of people who think they may know how to handle snakes or been trained by providers who taught unsafe methods such by using tongs.
Snakeman Raymond Hoser is the only provider of “Verification of Competency” (VOC) for reptile handlers in Australia and is sought after by mine sites and others to confirm that they have properly trained staff on hand to deal with snakes or able to be trained via a refresher course as required.
Hoser is the only snake course provider who complies fully with OH and S Laws in Queensland, because he alone has the expertise to have and use vet certified surgically devenomized snakes in his training, meaning that there is zero risk at training courses.
Recently three people have had to be rushed to hospital after being bitten by deadly snakes at courses in which devenomized snakes were not used and one of these bites resulted in protracted legal proceedings against the provider, who now no longer does snake handler courses.
There is also an unprecedented shortage of licensed snake catchers in some cities and towns in various parts of Queensland and elsewhere in Australia leading to further demand for snake handler training.
Following a spate of recent snakebites involving handlers, a number have left the industry causing a severe shortage of snake catchers in some areas, including the Gold Coast, Townsville, western Melbourne, much of Sydney and numerous smaller regional towns.
On the Gold Coast for example, snake catchers there who charge $200 a call out are commonly doing 10 or more a day and earning over $2K a day, of $14K per week.
A similar situation is seen in Werribee, Victoria.
Hoser was the first government licensed snake catcher in Australia, more than 40 years ago and now there are hundreds and Hoser says this is a good thing. “In the old days, people would kill snakes on sight. Now they know to either let them be or to call a snake catcher to take the snake away and relocate it out of harm’s way.”
Snakeman Raymond Hoser is the world’s foremost reptile expert, having authored nine major books including the so-called "Bible's", Australian Reptiles and Frogs (in 1989) Endangered Animals of Australia (in 1991), the latter widely regarded as the most significant contribution to wildlife conservation in Australia's history.
He is a regular on TV documentaries and news bulletins as the recognized expert on reptiles.
He has also discovered and named hundreds of species of reptile worldwide, including over 100 in Australia, and in total named more than anyone else born in the last 150 years, and by a significant margin. Hoser has also discovered and named five species of snake and more than six species of lizards found in the Mount Isa region, including the Pygmy King Brown Snake, a species of Speckled Brown Snake, the local species of Death Adder, a Mud Adder, a blind snake, some geckos, two dragon lizards, a large spikey skink, a local legless lizard and some Goannas, meaning that if someone starts looking for reptiles in the area, it is pretty hard not to find something Hoser has already discovered and named in previous decades.
He is also a world leader in breeding rare and threatened species of wildlife. In a world first, he developed a successful method of artificial insemination for use in snakes and lizards that has since been used globally to save rare and threatened species.

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