Practice
Snakecharmer was organized in 2009 as a sole practice and expanded in 2017 to include a second principal and a rotating reserve of three field associates. We have never advertised. Our client list is shorter than it could be, on purpose.
Every engagement begins with a site walk or, where that is not feasible, a structured document review. We do not quote fees before understanding the physical and procedural environment. We do not quote fees over the phone at all.
Our written work is peer-reviewed internally before release. Field operations are staffed to the two-person rule without exception, including routine feed calls on familiar collections.
The practice maintains a modest reference library — the Klauber monograph, Mattison, Warrell's clinical chapters, the Biology of the Vipers proceedings, and the standing run of Herpetological Review back to 1994 — and a bench archive of retired tools kept for comparison with incoming client stock.
We maintain standing cooperative agreements with three university venom laboratories and two regional poison control centers. These relationships are not transferable; they exist because specific individuals have known our work across many years.
We decline matters where the client's goal is to defeat a regulation we consider reasonable. We have lost engagements this way and consider the losses to be evidence of the method working.
We do not maintain a standing collection. The practice holds no live animals of its own. This is a deliberate structural choice: it eliminates conflict when advising clients on disposition of surrendered specimens.
Principal, Field Operations
Twenty-two years in institutional herpetology, formerly senior keeper of venomous collections at a mid-Atlantic zoological park. MS in wildlife biology. Lead author on two peer-reviewed papers concerning keeper workflow and escape etiology.
Principal, Clinical Liaison
Veterinarian with residency training in zoological medicine. Joined the practice in 2017. Coordinates all protocol-drafting engagements and manages cooperative antivenom logistics. Does not accept matters in which a sitting client is an adverse party.
Three field associates rotate through engagements under non-advertised terms. Each holds an independent professional identity and is credentialed separately under applicable state authority. Associates do not sign reports and are not held out as principals.
We are based in the high desert and operate routinely across the inland west and the Gulf coast. Field work outside those regions is accepted for standing clients and for cases where the species or incident profile is unusual enough to justify the transit.
Seasonal advisory: monsoon work is suspended during active thunderstorm weeks because hook footing and anteroom humidity both degrade to the point where the work is not worth doing well.
The practice is not structured to receive cold inquiries; the deliberate absence of a contact form on this site is a containment choice, not an oversight. A referring DVM, curator, or counsel of record already knows how to reach us, and that is the chain the intake docket expects.
Field work resumes with measured substrate temperatures (≥ 12 °C at 100 mm depth, three consecutive mornings) — not with the calendar. Document review, SOP revision, and bench work proceed year-round from the benchroom in the high-desert practice.