Gerry Martin is a Herpetologist and Conservationist in India and the Director and Founder of The Gerry Martin Project. The project’s primary agenda is to help people coexist with snakes. He has also launched a snakebite initiative to help reduce the number of deaths due to snakebites in India. India loses about 40,000-50,000 people every year because of snakebites. It is by far the highest in the world. India has a really terrifying human-snake conflict. Recently, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reinstated snakebite as a neglected tropical disease. 

Firefly realized that we were not equipped to deal with snake related issues at our farms. Our lack of knowledge and experience in handling snakes and snake-related concerns led us to connect with Gerry Martin, whom we found out many years after we began work at Hunsur, has his home in Hunsur too. In connecting with Gerry Martin, we seek to understand and begin to resolve snake related conflicts, psychological fears of our own and our labourers’, as well as preventive measures and practices that we can adopt at our farms in order to empower ourselves to be in peaceful coexistence with snakes. We would also explore further conservation opportunities with Gerry Martin and offer up our farms, properties and resources for such collaboration. An exciting day that the Firefly team is looking forward to with much anticipation!