Taming the Wild: Woman finds success as pro snake wrangler
CUMMING — Inside Kim Mross’s home are various artifacts of her obsession. A coiled snake skeleton sits atop an amethyst rock on the living room coffee table. Nearby, in a glass case, is a whale vertebrae fossil. On a wall, shark teeth are displayed in chic frames. A taxidermized fox poses on the hearth.
She warned her husband of this. “Nobody understands my level of passion when it comes to wildlife,” Mross says she told him, but he was game, so she plunged further into the field. She is now a professional snake wrangler.
Mross regularly makes house calls to relocate snakes and works on movie and television productions around Georgia to clear the set of snakes, spiders, turtles and the like. She also runs All Things Wild North Georgia, a website that provides educational resources about wildlife native to the region.
Mross, though, was not allowed to have pets as a child living in Atlanta, she said. The neighborhood dogs and cats had to suffice.
Mross’ father, a fire chief, loved to camp, however, and he would identify wildlife for her during hikes, including snakes.
“He said, ‘Leave it alone and (it) won’t mess with you,’” Mross remembered. “So I never had that fear in me. I was always open-minded about wildlife.”
Mross’s first career was as a preschool teacher, but that was largely unfulfilling. Then, when she had her son, Cade, who is now 17, she focused on parenting. But Mross kept herself involved in the animal world and developed an expansive knowledge. She volunteered at animal shelters. She took animal rehab classes. She worked with area biologists. She helped conduct surveys of gopher tortoises in South Georgia.
As social media emerged, Mross saw more and more people post pictures of animals they had found, particularly snakes, and she was struck by the comments she saw from other people. They often misidentified the snake or condoned killing it, even nonvenomous ones Mross knew to be beneficial to local ecosystems. Many commenters perpetuated old wives’ tales. Most of the comments were tinged with fear.
Mross started responding to bad information and in the process rehabilitate the snake’s image, even venomous ones. “Taking the villain status away from them,” Mross said. She added, “People only know of the bad things.”