POSTER FOR IDENTIFYING SNAKES
When living on a college campus, young adults often encounter apodal creatures that assume them venomous, and there starts the urban human-animal conflict, where, more often than not, the animal gets harmed - beaten to death or squashed under their vehicle tyres. I couldn't have differentiated between a viper and a trinket if you asked me a week ago. Barring the notorious cobra, snakes looked similar to me. A month's internship at Madras Crocodile Bank Trust was not enough to enlighten me. So when I (as part of our campus Ecoclub) decided to design pamphlets for the guards of our campus, who, being omnipresent on the campus, are called upon by the students to 'take care' of the snakes they run into, I needed to know my subjects - the 12 species found in the campus ground. Four are fatal if they bite, and the rest, well, rats and lizards need to be scared of them, not humans. With each illustration, we (two of my classmates insisted on learning Corel Draw and illustrating their favourite species) could start to tell apart the venomous from the non-venomous, the lines from the rings, and the squiggles from the spots. Eyes were widened, and a twinkle added, just in an attempt to caricature the snakes and reverse their vilified status published aeons ago in the Book of Genesis. The description of these snakes would be limited to their appearances and my personal experiences. I did not want to crowd this blog with second-hand information that could otherwise be googled up easily. The Hindi and Tamil translations and the English descriptions were provided for the poster to cater to a broader audience.