This is what happens when you round up more than 2,000 pounds of rattlesnakes for an annual event in a small West Texas town. You get loads of people from Georgia, Oklahoma, Indiana and even Germany. Each year, Sweetwater's annual World's Largest Rattlesnake Round-up averages between 25,000 and 30,000 visitors, who come with tents, campers and trailers sporting American flags, Texas flags and, yes, Confederate flags.
People kill people.
Inside Nolan County's Coliseum, children in stands watch snake handlers milk venom and hold the rattlers up so the kids can pet them. You hear oohs and aahs erupt from youngsters as a man jumps back and forth taunting a rattler with a red balloon until it strikes. You get plenty of blood and snake guts, emitting a pungent odor that smells something like raw eggs left to rot in a jar of mildew. A man chops off the rattlers' heads, drops them in a bucket where they still squirm in one slithering gory mass, and then he passes the bodies off to be stringed up and gutted. You get vendors.