Pinned to a wall are the skins of two rattlesnakes. Surrounding each one are signed bloody handprints, triumphant marks of those who skinned a snake at the annual Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup in Texas. What Jo-Anne finds most unsettling about this image is that ‘so many of the bloodied handprints are those of children’.
Each year tens of thousands of rattlesnakes are captured for the festival, where they are decapitated and people can pay to skin them. Festival supporters claim it is important to control the population. But campaigners against roundups argue it is cruel and puts rattlesnakes’ long-term survival at risk.
Canada
Jo-Anne is a photographer, author and speaker. She has documented our relationship with animals for the last fifteen years through her long-term body of work, We Animals. She was the subject of the 2013 documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine and is the author of two books, We Animals and Captive. She also co-founded the Unbound Project, celebrating women animal advocates worldwide.
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