Forest Reserve where I spent several years of my childhood did indeed have many snakes since it was an oilfield placed in the middle of a forest which was cleared only for the necessary housing and equipment instillations. In that environment snakes were usually left alone to continue their journey and there were no stories from adults told to me about their character, so I had no negative feelings towards them or most other animals. My first memory of snakes was of a massive one killed when I was a baby. As a teenager a neighbour of mine confirmed that it was very large and that he had helped kill it. In another episode I crossed over one walking home from the bus-stop after school. Hearing the cries of my siblings I crossed over it again to find out what they were agitated about. I had not seen the head nor the tail because it was so long it stretched across the entire driveway. It stayed in the garden for another few hours digesting the bulge in its stomach before moving on. In another case a small landslip close to my house exposed some eggs which I took home and put in a box in my room. A few weeks later I went outside to see four small snakes hanging from the clothesline, and they stayed there for about an hour. I decided to put the un-hatched eggs back, even though I did not know what kind of eggs they were; but my main concern was whether they would still hatch after I had disturbed them twice. My brother and I often went into the forest with three brothers from a neighbouring family to look for things that they wanted, such as sucker fish ‘mamatetas’ (Hypostomus plecostomus) for their aquariums and specific butterflies for my brother’s collection. On these nature trips the snakes that we encountered the most often were ‘horsewhips’ Oxybelis aeneus, we were never attacked, nor did we kill them. For my doctorate I conducted participatory research with hunters (Lans et al., 2001). They did hot have any excuse for killing snakes except that they did not see why they should let them live. After several months when they knew me better they acknowledged that they had never been harmed and had no justification.