Daring test challenged 11 rattlesnakes to escape in Arizona office. See what happened

Giving 11 venomous snakes a chance to escape inside your office sounds risky, but one of the nation’s top rattlesnake experts did just that to prove a point.

The goal? To debunk the myth that rattlesnakes climb sheer walls, Arizona-based researcher Bryan Hughes declared in a Dec. 20 YouTube video.

“To anyone with some working knowledge about rattlesnakes, this is of course silly. But these comments have been so pervasive that it would be useful to create a demonstration to put the idea to rest,” Hughes told McClatchy News.

“Yes, rattlesnakes can and do climb to some degree. They have no problem getting up something like a rough bark trees, a bush with a bunch of branches, anything ... that lets them lift about half their body off the ground. But climbing a tree and belly crawling straight up a smooth steel wall like a slug are not the same thing.”

To prove it, Hughes built a 32-inch-tall cinder block box in his Rattlesnake Solutions office space — but with the top wide open.

He then gave 11 types of Arizona rattlesnakes a 10-hour block of time to find their way out.

The test subjects included western diamondbacks, a southwestern speckled rattlesnake, a black-tailed rattlesnake, a Sonoran Desert sidewinder, a tiger rattlesnake and “a trio of tiny newborn rattlesnakes that are less than a week old.”

Any one of the snakes — the biggest of which was 3 feet long — has the capability to put a bite victim in the hospital, but Hughes was confident.

“We have cameras set up, too, so there were no instances where I was not completely sure where the snake was,” he said.

“This is not a line of work that can safely accommodate any assumptions. But I do have to say, that personally, I’d have been perfectly comfortable setting up a sleeping bag in there next to it all.”

He was right.

Not a single one of the 11 rattlesnakes climbed the wall, video shows. Most just circled the space for hours, going from corner to corner in search of an outlet. One went so far as to poop, perhaps to lessen its body weight, but that didn’t help.

The western diamondback made it up about 28 inches before falling, video shows.

It’s an outcome Hughes expected, having spent years perfecting snake-proof walls of metal and concrete. Still, he knows naysayers reign on social media.

“The chasm between reality and what most people think about snakes is so wide that any progress at all is good progress,” Hughes said.

“But I also understand modern social media culture and evidence, experience, and knowledge have little effect on what many choose to believe. The desire to maintain rattlesnakes as a scary monster in the eyes of some will make even cut-and-dry demonstrations like this meaningless.”

This story was originally published January 3, 2025 at 7:36 AM with the headline "Daring test challenged 11 rattlesnakes to escape in Arizona office. See what happened."