In 1991 the Indian government outlawed snake charmers working with live snakes – that’s one the legislator’s managed to slip in below my radar while I was not paying attention. I’m only catching up with it now because over a thousand of the pipe-toting workers have taken to the streets of Kolkata in protest, albeit 18 years after the fact.

For Westerners the snake charmer and his pet Cobra are an iconic image that leaps into the popular mind automatically when India is mentioned. Any caricature of India includes the image, and now the government has tried to ban it, but not without reason. Parliamentary concern has sided with the poor reptiles because it is said they are cruelly treated by the charmers. Perhaps so, to a degree, but at the same time the activity provides much needed employment to thousands of people throughout the country, and surely human need should come first.

In 2007 snakes accounted for 50,000 deaths in India, 50% of the world total, so sympathy for the snake is not easily drummed up. However if you take this horrifying statistic and put it alongside thousands of redundant snakes and their handlers you might well come up with a solution to the charming difficulties.

Instead of banning snake charmers, why not make it worth their while to move from the entertainment business to keeping their reptiles in proper conditions for the purpose of harvesting venom for hospital venom banks?

This way everyone wins. The snakes escape cruelty, the charmers have a new and lucrative way of using their skills and the victims of snake bites have a greater chance of surviving.

My own experience of snake charmers has always been unsavoury. I’ve had men chase me with their snakes, threatening to let them bite me because I wouldn’t give them any money even though I hadn’t stopped to watch their act. I’ve had a snake thrust up in front of my face, again to terrorise me into parting with cash, although that time I judged the animal to be so near death it was unlikely to bite me so I just kissed it and send the charmer into a very uncharming rage! Another close shave is retold in The Beach.

I have little sympathy with snakes, I find the practice of snake-charming distasteful, but you can’t just put thousands of people out of work without offering an alternative (unless you are a car manufacturer in a declining economy). There must be another way – snake farms. Oh and they taste good too, and I know that purely by accident, not by design.