Tennessee museum takes preacher’s dead snakes
GRAY – The remains of dozens of poisonous snakes confiscated from a Tennessee preacher have been sent to a museum for research.
The 53 frozen carcasses were given to East Tennessee State University’s Natural History Museum at Gray. The museum is planning to use the bones for scientific study.
“We are always in need of good skeletons of modern animals,” Stephen Wallace, the museum’s curator of vertebrates, told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Things can be learned from snakes that have been bred or lived in captivity that cannot be learned from those that have lived in the wild, Wallace said.
“For example, an animal that has lived in a zoo will live longer than one in the wild, and its bones can show such things as arthritis or old age,” he said.
The snakes are also valuable to the museum, he said, because venomous snakes are hard to come by.
Tennessee Wildlife officers seized the snakes last year from Andrew Hamblin, pastor of the Tabernacle Church of God in LaFollette, which uses snake handling in services. A Campbell County grand jury chose earlier this year not to indict Hamblin, but he didn’t get the snakes back.
Some snakes had already died by the time wildlife officials turned them over to the Knoxville Zoo. Many had parasites or were stricken with diseases that could not be treated, said Phil Colclough,a herpetologist and the zoo’s director of animal collections and conservation.
None of the snakes were suitable for release to the wild or for keeping at the zoo.