Inside Tukur and Tukur snake farm

The atmosphere is cool and enjoyable for any living thing around. The clean environment, decorated with flowers beside the expressway could be mistaken for the abode of a well-to-do person wanting to live away from the usual noisy town life. This, however is far from that; it is a snake kingdom where the reptiles are […]

The atmosphere is cool and enjoyable for any living thing around. The clean environment, decorated with flowers beside the expressway could be mistaken for the abode of a well-to-do person wanting to live away from the usual noisy town life. This, however is far from that; it is a snake kingdom where the reptiles are reared for sale.
Sitting on an expanse of land over 20 hectares, the farm is partitioned into different sections that include the fishery section with over 10 earth ponds, giant rat cages, cattle range, maize and millet farms among other crops.  The snake cages with space large enough to have school constructed along  with its football field and all of them fenced.
The snake keeper, 25-year-old Muhammadu Salisu, haven been told to conduct these reporters round the snake cages by the farm manager, Mamman Shua’ibu, went straight to throw open the nearest snake cage in which three of the reptiles immediately began to uncoil. Muhammadu entered the cage and asked the reporters to follow. “Don’t worry, we are seeing everything from here,” the reporters responded.
Holding a black cobra in his hands, Muhammadu said, “I use charms to catch them. When I am with you, they will not harm you. I inherited it from my parents. My father used to tell me that it was from snake business that he paid my mother’s dowry.”
All of that explanation did not convince the reporters to enter the neat cage.
“I feed them with meat but they also eat live rats. If the rat is dead they will never eat it.
“They must see a rat moving before they would catch it and eat it. It is not easy to get live rats for them though we have started rearing some for them. The rats are yet to be big enough for us to start feeding them with them. We buy fresh meat for them, preferably hunchback meat or the lap of a cow that is pure meat. They only eat clean pure meat,” he said while holding two small pythons in the third cage.
Mamman Shuaibu also said that the farm has separate cages for snakes that they would not want to put along with the others, adding, “we are now rearing small ones. We have five different cages of snakes. At the moment we have cobra, pythons, black mamba and rattle snakes. We started the snake business in April this year. We started by rearing grown up ones.
“We have sold the first batch. Now we have small ones that we are rearing. We have ordered for bigger ones from some hunters and snake charmers. People come around to buy and keep them in cages as pets while others buy to them to eat as a delicacy. We also send people to hunt them for us. We have not recorded any incident of snake bite since we started,” he said.    
On the cattle range, Mamman said: “We have many Nigerian cows that we are breeding for meat. When they grow big we sell and replace them with smaller ones. We take very good care of our cows. We feed them well and take good care of their medication. The female ones are allowed to born while the fat males are mainly sold out and replaced with small ones.
“At the fishery section, we have over 10 fish ponds with over 10,000 an-tilapia and marine fish. Sometimes we hatch the fish ourselves while in most cases we buy. We keep a particular variety in each pond. We do not mix the varieties. We buy their feed from the market especially when they are small. But when they grow big, we buy offal and mix with crayfish to locally prepare feed for them. We have people that specialize in cooking and mixing the local feed for them,” he said.