SIMON: Shawn Jonas, president of the Taylor JCs, thank you. If anybody out there is listening and they're close, come on out. SIMON: I've had rattlesnake too, come to think of it. SIMON: So you've eaten rattlesnakes after you bag them? There's not a whole lot on the rattlesnake that's not used. JONAS: There's actually a guy here that shows up that buys every snake that comes in the show.

So when the competition is over, what do you do with all these burlap sacks filled with snakes? I think the last one that showed up got bit on about his third snake. We've had a few out of Oklahoma and stuff like that. JONAS: Most of them are from around Texas. SIMON: So are all the contestants from Texas - or maybe Oklahoma? JONAS: We have an extractor kit, and we use that to try to draw the venom back out. SIMON: We've all seen the cowboy movies where they make the little incision and suck out the venom. Right away, it kind of feels like somebody's taken a lit cigarette and they're holding it to you, and you can't get it off. JONAS: Because you have to immobilize its head before you throw it into the bag. JONAS: You put your index finger on top of its head, your thumb and your middle finger around the back of its neck. SIMON: So what do you do? Grab it by its little, green throat or something? And if you hurt it severely enough, you get disqualified. If you harm the snake, you get a penalty. JONAS: You're not allowed to harm the snake in any way. SIMON: Oh, I guarantee you - I don't think many of our listeners think it's easy. You've got to have a little bit of finesse to it, because you. JONAS: It's harder than what a person would think. SIMON: How hard is it to pin a snake, as you call it, to capture its little head in one of those contraptions? And the clock stops once you throw the tenth snake into the bag. The clock starts once you pin the first snake's head. You pin the snake's head with a pinner, which is usually a golf club converted with a hook on the end of it. You dump 10 snakes out of a burlap bag, take you a little time, sort them out. JONAS: The point of the competition is you - it's a two-man team, the pinner and a bag man. SIMON: Well, we're doing just fine, but we're probably not going to be picking up rattlesnakes and putting them in a sack. SHAWN JONAS (Taylor Junior Chamber of Commerce): No problem. Shawn Jonas is the president of the Taylor Junior Chamber of Commerce, the organization that hosts the event. The National Rattlesnake Sacking Competition kicks off in the town of Taylor, Texas. The site might be getting some traffic out of Texas today. This week, the World Health Organization launched a snake anti-venom website aimed at reducing annual snake bite casualties.

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