A video accompanying a post is being widely shared on social media claiming that a snake in Velichala village of Karimnagar district in Telangana was making strange sounds when it opens its mouth and that locals were demanding forest officials to catch the snake and find out how many more such snakes were there. Let us fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of snake making strange noises in Karimnagar.
Fact: This video has nothing to do with Karimnagar. The video was uploaded to YouTube a month earlier. News reports have been published that a miscreant wrongly shared the video on social media as an incident in Velichala, Karimnagar and the police have launched an investigation. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When reverse image search on the screenshots of the video were done, we found the same video which was uploaded on 05 May 2021 on a YouTube channel named Mike Martin. He uploaded the video with the title ‘Hognose hits the high notes’.
Based on this video, we found some more Hognose snake videos (here and here) that are uploaded on YouTube, and one can see that the snake did not make any noise in these videos. Eastern Hognose is mostly seen in North American countries like the USA and Canada. These are non-venomous snakes according to articles (here and here). When threatened, Hognose snakes hiss loudly and spread their necks like cobras do, resulting in the nicknames “puff adder” or “spreading adder”, according to this website.
In the wake of the video going viral as an incident from Karimnagar on social media, S.I. (Sub-Inspector) Vivek said the video is not related to Karimnagar, and that some miscreant has posted this video on social media and that he is being investigated, this is according to the TV9 article.
To sum it up, this video of snake screaming has nothing to do with Karimnagar.
