George Van Horn

Principal Advisor

Venomous · Venom milking · Reptile history

Reptile World Serpentarium

He built Reptile World Serpentarium in St. Cloud, Florida. He was three or four years old, walking the palmettos with a friend, when an eastern diamondback let off a rattle nearby, and he's been chasing that feeling ever since. He enlisted in the Army out of high school and was sent to Vietnam, where he went snake hunting on his days off with the author of Snakes of South Vietnam. Back home he worked for Bill Haast at the Miami Serpentarium, building plexiglass cages for the mambas. He graduated from Florida Atlantic in 1972, drove up to St. Cloud with thirty snakes from his apartment, and started figuring out how to build a snake farm on what had been a cow pasture, and that's the Serpentarium today. He trained at the Salk Institute and in the Harvard neurobiology lab, learned to purify venom proteins, and came home to set up his own venom lab, which has supplied research for decades. He keeps all four mambas and works twelve-foot king cobras on the table. He's taken the bites, including four from an eleven-and-a-half-foot king. His rules: two people in the room, don't get bit, don't hurt the snake. When Tom Crutchfield took a mamba bite years ago, George was the one with the antivenom.

George Van Horn is Principal Advisor and a member of the faculty at Citadel Culebra, the online school of reptile-keeping, and is associated with Reptile World Serpentarium.

Find George at: reptileworldserpentarium.net