so someone got bit let's talk about it for a little while I decided not to make a video about this because I didn't really want to bring any extra attention to it but after multiple news sources and other large social media creators have made content about this and picked up this story I figured it wouldn't hurt to give my take on the matter and being as I actually have experience with this specific species involved in this bite I figured maybe I could actually give a little bit of valuable insight to the whole situation this bite is likely to be sensationalized due to a few different factors most namely because it's a high-profile bite it's an inland typan literally the most venomous snake on the entire planet Bar None right most toxic snake on the planet so this is going to get picked up people are going to talk about it and it also doesn't help um that the guy is pretty well known in the community for for all of the wrong reasons the inland taipan is a very large snake from Australia like I said before it also happens to be the most venomous snake on the planet they are a very erratic quick moving agile intelligent snake that are not to be messed with under any circumstances if you come across it in the wild in fact these are considered expert expert level snakes to keep in captivity even inside of the venomous snake keeping circles we're talking tippy top of the pyramid taipans are not for the faint of heart they can and will put you down but now that we have that out of the way I'm sure you're all wondering if you don't already know who got bit normally I wouldn't name drop because that's kind of cringe to be honest with you but because of the profile of this bite most people already know who it was the man's name is Jeff Liebowitz he's a teacher from South Carolina or at least he just moved to South Carolina which is really unfortunate because I'm moving there next month and because of this whole situation it's entirely possible that new laws get put into place that actually prevent me from moving there or after I do move there mean I have to give up my animals or makes it way more difficult for me to legally keep them thank you for that now there are a couple things that we should get out of the way before I go any further firstly I truly hope that this man survives this Bight I don't wish death upon anyone regardless of what comes next in this video I'm going to give you my unbiased or maybe slightly biased opinion on the matter um and I'm not going to hold anything back I'm sorry if this offends you I'm sure it will make some people mad but I want to let you know what I think about the situation and you can extrapolate upon that and make your own decision Jeff liebertz is a relatively newcomer to the venomous keeping hobby although he claims to have over 40 years of experience I first try into to him late in 2022 when he sent me a message asking me if he could buy one of the snakes that I had available at the time this is a small Viper species from Europe a relatively easy snake to keep in captivity that he inquired about uh so as you would expect I asked him a couple of questions just to make sure that his experience level was something that I was comfortable with before I went ahead and actually sold him a potentially dangerous animal being a venomous snake his response was that he had 40 years of experience uh but however right after that he asked me a question that was super simple that he should have known the answer to so I immediately got cold feet about the situation and I did not end up selling him the snake now shortly after that I began to see his name popping up more and more in the venomous snake groups on Facebook which is a pretty active Community believe it or not for all of you that do not know uh but I would see him everywhere asking to buy snakes looking for new snakes and I would just see him more and more he wormed his way in he wiggled his way into the Facebook groups and he gradually started becoming known by most people now at this point there was really nothing wrong with the situation regardless of whether or not he actually had experience or not you know not for me to decide I personally don't think he's experienced as he claimed and we'll get to that in the future but he started buying snakes he was going to reptile Expos and buying venomous snakes in person and eventually things took a sour turn now nothing was really out of the ordinary to this point in fact I was on good relations with this man as were most people but then things really started to change he ended up making his own private Facebook group to rival the other main private group at the time now there wouldn't normally be an issue with this anyone can do what they want however he started to do some really bad things he started coming after very well recognized Keepers in the hobby well-respected people that keep very cool reptiles and do it very well and he started going after them defaming them and things like that publicly shaming them and coming after them I'm not sure why he did it but he did he started posting videos in his private group of him fre free handling and when I'm talking about free handling I don't mean like what you see with Chandler and Tyler now personally I don't like doing that and I don't like showing that because I don't like um the potential message that it could send with other people thinking it's easy and immediately trying to pick up on that and whatnot but I can still appreciate the skill involved with what Chandler and Tyler do they clearly are able to at least somewhat read the behaviors and actions of their animals right and extrapolate what they're going to do in they are able to handle the snakes in accordance with that very well most of the time but this is not like that this is on a whole another level of carelessness and recklessness what Jeff would do is he would just hold them he would just grab them it was absolutely insane and he would post videos of that specifically on Facebook and then eventually on Instagram and YouTube as well he really started going after the Social Media stuff he wanted to get big get known and I'm not going to lie I think a little that stems with what he saw from me and how he saw my social media going this eventually led him to have a very very sour online relationship with me that will get to further on he began blocking anyone that disagreed with what he was doing from his Facebook groups including myself and many other uh well-known and respected venomous Keepers this led to an almost cult-like following within the group of people that believed he could do know wrong and that he couldn't get hurt and that he was pretty much preaching what everyone else wanted to be true that these snakes cannot hurt you and do not want to hurt you at all and while that is true most of the time that is not true 100% of the time if you are annoying the animal constantly handling it like an absolute loon one of these days it's going to go off on you and that's pretty much a fact luckily to this point for him he had been a key keeping his animals so terribly and so negligently that most of them ended up dying off in the videos you can see how absolutely terrible these animals look super skinny dehydrated he kept them in aquariums glass aquariums on the floor in his house just dozens of glass aquariums uh cohabbing different venomous snakes like booms slings he would post videos of boomlings fighting each other in their glass aquarium that he kept them in it was a really bad situation and this ended up leading to him getting bit that's right this is not his first venomous snake bite that he's actually received just in the last year or two alone previously to this he's been bitten by both a copperhead and a coral Cobra and those are just the two that I personally know about who knows if he's been bitten by any others now luckily for him those bites were not super serious with him not really having any long-term medical effects from that but eventually he got carried away and things got even worse now I really don't like the saying it's not if you're going to get bit it's when because I have people saying that to me all the time and I personally think it's entirely possible to keep these amazing animals fairly safely without getting bit for your entire life and I know several people that have done so competently but when it comes to him in this specific situation it was not if it was when and when happened multip multiple times now for the win when it came to a serious bite we knew it was coming to a close we knew it was going to happen as he got more and more dangerous stuff and was doing more and more Reckless handling he ended up getting stiletto snakes s skilled vipers Forest cobas mambas and that's right his most recent addition to his collection a baby Inland typan now this is a baby Inland typan I'm talking a month old I actually saw this specific animal for sale several weeks ago and at the time I was told it was born one week ago we're talking a very very small Inland thaan and for those of you that don't know the size of the snake determines how bad the bite is usually because of the Venom yield the larger the snake the larger the Venom glands and the larger the Venom yield and the more Venom the worse the reaction is on the human body you have a much higher chance of surviving a bite from a baby snake than you do from an adult snake because of that fact alone contrary to the popular myth that babies cannot control their venom they can and they have way less of it when it comes to elapids specifically super freaking toxic elapids like the inland taipan even a scratch is enough to put you in the ground we're talking they have the highest ld50 value of any snake which is how they measure Venom typ toxicity they are 10 to 20 times as toxic as the Black Mamba and the lethal dose estimated for human is about 1 mgram which is for comparison about the same weight as 17 grains of fine iodized salt we're talking a very very very minuscule amount of Venom that it would take to actually end up taking someone's life now that we've talked about that let's go back to Jeff he had a really bad online Feud with me I'm not really sure why but for some reason he really really disliked me and he actually made a public post coming after me in my handling techniques and my inability as a keeper even coming after my physical appearance this post was about one a week could go and obviously things took a turn just a few days later the the last post Jeff made before the bite happened was of him freeh handling his new Inland Tai Pan he was holding it by the center of the body saying how easy it was to control these snakes and that they're nothing to be afraid of now personally I think this was a dig at me because of my recent video handling my Coastal taipans and showing how crazy that they could be obviously just a couple hours after he posted that video he made a post on his Facebook group asking if anyone had antivenom for the Inland typ pan approximately 3 in the morning he received a bite from his Inland taian and was taken to the hospital via EMS keep in mind that he had been preaching in his private group that antivenom was unnecessary and was for people that well don't have big konas he was actually illegally keeping all of these snakes after moving to South Carolina now now in the state of South Carolina it is legal to keep venomous snakes uh South Carolina actually delegates that power down to the city and county levels now the city that Jeff specifically just moved to actually has a law in place that makes it completely illegal to have venomous snakes so he was illegally keeping these snakes and because of that the police executed a search warrant on his property and they actually recovered 14 venomous snakes along with a domesticated cat apparently Jeff hasn't found his Servo that he used to have that Got Away several months back this is a very bad look for the venomous keeping Community because when things like this happen they get sensationalized via social media people want action because they fear that their lives are in danger and then legislation may end up passing that makes it harder for us to actually keep these animals that's why this situation is so bad for the venomous keeping Community outside of the one person's health that obviously got bit now back to just condition after the police recover those 14 venomous snakes in Tupperware containers on his floor by the way Jeff was finally able to receive antivenom 9 hours later now if you don't know how bad that is when it comes to a venomous snake bite it's really really bad especially when we're talking a snake like the inland taipan now these snakes specifically have pre and post synaptic neurotoxins among a bunch of other big venom property related words that I'm not going to go into but what these do is they absolutely devastate the human body he may not recover fully from this bite it's very possible that his organs just shut down on him that he needs to relearn how to walk amongst many other potentially really bad situations we just have to wait and see now after he was bit he was put on a ventilator and eventually put onto dialysis as his kidneys were going into renal failure he was in a medically induced coma for a while and he eventually received antivenom at around 12:00 p.m. noon on Friday now the initial round of antivenom he received was from Venom 1 the only public antivenom Bank in the country which is located down in Miami Florida they actually used up the entire rest of their Australian antivenom stock on this one situation and he also received follow-up antivenom from a zoo in North Carolina many zoos actually declined to give him their antivenom because they wanted to hold on to it for their own staff or maybe a more responsible private keeper should another emergency arise in the future they don't want to put their own employees into Harm's Way because with Australian antivenom the turnaround time for actually getting it is probably going to be around January so that's a long time to go without antivenom to protect their own employees it's worth mentioning that Australian lapid polyvent antivenom is pretty much liquid gold we're talking $3,000 to $3500 per vial with a long turnaround time plus a lot of money for shipping it's very expensive it's Liquid Gold but it is very good at what it does if it's given within a relatively short period after the bite with Jeff it took 9 hours before he received his first dose of antivenom and by that point he was already ravaged by the Venom the first dose of antivenom did not really do a whole lot based on my understanding but he was eventually given a second round of antivenom and now he's actually responsive to basic commands like when asked to grip the doctor's hand he was able to do so remember if it was a larger type hand he probably would have already passed away the only reason he's still alive is because of how tiny this snake was a larger dose of Venom would have absolutely destroyed his body it would not have been pretty at all now that he's used all that antivenom there's really not a whole lot of Australian antivenom left in the country which puts other people at risk in fact word on the street is that he used nine miles of antivenom I cannot confirm that for 100% that is just the number that I heard I do know for a fact that he received multiple vials though definitely multiple vials for sure and since Australian antivenom is usually effective with only one vial each vial used could be a potential person's life saved that was in instead used on Jeff a very very irresponsible keeper that held his typan by the midsection and said that it couldn't do anything unfortunately for him he didn't do enough research and it could do something so why are we talking about this well it's a really negative look for the venomous keeping Community whenever something like this happens now a bite on itself is usually not a huge deal it usually happens dozens of times per year in the private sector but with a high-profile bite like this with a somewhat public figure that was clearly very Reckless it definitely leaves the door open for some negative consequences for the rest of us so it's important for us to come together as a community and to push people like this out of the hobby we need to get rid of all the bad apples and we need to start policing ourselves to do better and to be better I understand that antivenom is very very expensive and can be difficult to try and stock privately on your own but there is a fantastic Facebook group called The antivenom support group that's run by some very very knowledgeable and wonderful people that can definitely get you the help you need if you're interested in stocking your own antivenom I know dozens of people that have already gone through the process gotten their BBD permits which is the permit that allows you to actually get the antivenom and are now able to stock their own antivenom privately obviously it's expensive but is there really a price that's worth your life to me no so I'm going through the process myself and I will be stocking my own antivenom in the very near future now I am moving to South Carolina which is kind of unfortunate because this happened in South Carolina and hopefully we don't have any negative repercussions because of it because because if he ruins it for me I'm going to be kind of sad and by kind of sad I mean I'm going to be really really mad the moral of the story is that we need to be more responsible as Keepers before we start paying for it with our rights because just like that we could lose every right we have to keep these animals as we've seen in countless other states it's already getting hard to find a place to live where we can legally keep these animals and it's just going to get harder as things progress don't keep venomous snakes to stroke your ego don't keep venomous snakes to look cool you should only keep these animals if you are truly interested in keeping them there's no other reason why you should keep them they are really cool in my opinion and I love doing what I do I love keeping these animals but I don't do it to stroke my own ego contrary to what some people may believe I do it because I love them and that's honestly the only reason you should be doing this there is a very real chance that I take a bite from a venomous snake one day I'm ready for the consequences should they ever come the question is are you Jeff