A similar incident was recorded in the Field newspaper, in May 1867, the editor introducing the narrator as one of undoubted intelligence and veracity.
His gardener informed him that a cobra had attacked a guinea-fowl’s nest in the compound. He took his gun and repaired immediately to the spot, where he saw the cobra making off, followed by a host of screaming fowls. The gentleman shot the culprit through the head, and then observed a tumour-like swelling, as of an egg recently swallowed. The gardener cut the reptile open, and took out the egg safe and sound. The gentleman marked the egg, and set it with fourteen others under a guinea-fowl. In due time the young chick was hatched; and this he also marked, in order to observe whether it would grow up a healthy bird, which it did.
Several other well-authenticated instances of this nature might be related; but those who have friends or relatives in India are no doubt sufficiently familiar with such stories to dispense with them here.
Aware of a cobra’s penchant for eggs, the snake-catchers, or those who pack them for transportation to Europe, sometimes place a supply in the cages, as convenient food for the snakes during the voyage. The keeper of the Ophidarium[7] at the London Zoological Gardens frequently finds hens’ eggs unbroken on opening a case containing the newly-arrived cobras. How many eggs were originally in the box, and how many had been eaten and digested, or reproduced during the voyage, it would be interesting to ascertain if possible.
Snakes are fastidious feeders and long fasters during confinement. Those cobras may have fasted during the whole journey, or they may have swallowed and disgorged the eggs through terror, like their friends at home. Two things are clear, viz. that the eggs were deposited in the cage as a favourite delicacy, and that a hen’s egg is not a too cumbrous morsel for even the small-headed cobra to manage.
A gentleman, accustomed to snakes, on hearing of this, regarded the eggs found intact in the box as a proof against their egg-eating propensities, and pointed to the Ophiophagus which, for lack of his ordinary food one winter, had in vain been tempted with both pigeons’ and hens’ eggs. ‘He won’t eat them, he won’t notice them,’ was the keeper’s testimony; but, then, other snakes often decline food, even their habitual and favourite food, when in confinement; and so far as the Indian snakes are concerned, their egg-eating habits are confirmed by many writers, including Sir Joseph Fayrer, who affirms that ‘they will eat and swallow the eggs whole.’ ‘Snakes are all carnivorous, existing on animals and birds’ eggs,’ he again remarks.[8] ‘Cobras rob hen-roosts, and swallow the eggs whole.’[9]
And does not the very fact of the eggs being placed in the cages by the natives for their food during a journey, show that these latter knew what would be most likely to tempt them?
The Indian vernacular of the Ophiophagus is Sunkerchor, which means, as Fayrer tells us, ‘a breaker of shells.’ I have taken some pains to ascertain a more definite reason for this name being assigned to the Ophiophagus, or snake-eater, but without success. Is it because he is an exception to the rule of eggs being swallowed whole, he having for his size a particularly small mouth and swallow; and that he, like his relatives the cobras, being unwilling to relinquish the dainty, manages them clumsily, and breaks the shells? There must be some reason for his being known as the ‘shell-breaker.’
Being a tree snake, it may be that ‘Sunkerchor,’ the shell-breaker, attempts the smaller birds’ eggs, which are too tender to be swallowed without fracture.
The cobra-worshipping Hindûs on their festivals place eggs for their gods, that they also may partake of the feast.