Updated on 13 October 2026. The original 2007 post is kept below.
Why marines were drinking snake blood
This wasn’t a dare at a bar. The photo comes from Cobra Gold, a big yearly military exercise in Thailand that brings together US, Thai and other allied forces. Part of it was jungle survival training led by Royal Thai Marines: how to find water, start a fire, tell edible plants from bad ones, and handle snakes.
The cobra-blood moment was the famous finale. Instructors taught that in an emergency, snake blood can provide some fluid and the meat some food, and US military photo captions called it a last-resort option. One marine described the taste as “blood with a hint of fish”, which is honestly more review than we needed.
After years of campaigning by PETA, the 2021 exercise reportedly went ahead without killing any animals, so the cobra-blood tradition seems to have been retired. Our advice for jungle hydration remains: pack a water filter.
More snakes in strange places: cobra schnapps and how to skin a snake for cooking.
From the 2007 original
“American Marine drinks the blood of a cobra after an exercise of survival in the jungle in a field of training in Chanthaburi, Thailand.”
Need we say more?
Source: www.neatorama.com
