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A Scary Encounter Inspired Her to Become a Rattlesnake Wrangler. Now, She's Dedicated Her Life to Saving Them (Exclusive)
Danielle Wall has made a name for herself in Joshua Tree as a local rattlesnake wrangler. After encountering one on the road in 2018, she taught herself about the species and how to handle them
While California's animal control laws require captured rattlesnakes to be euthanized, Wall sends them away from properties without harming them. She does not charge for her services at all
Wall supplements her reptile management volunteer work with paid gigs handling animals on TV and film sets, and she's also gained a following of over 116,000 on social mediaIt was August 2018. Danielle Wall was in college at the time and trying to make ends meet. She worked jobs at a wedding venue and took tutoring gigs to pull in some cash. She was driving to her home in Joshua Tree, Calif., after yet another long day when something in the middle of the road made her suddenly swerve her Honda Civic.
Sprawled out in the center of the street was a rattlesnake, something Wall had never seen in her two years living out in the desert. She didn't know much about snakes, but she knew she didn't want to crush it. Wall maneuvered her car directly over the reptile so the tires would pass by it on either side, but when she looked back, the rattlesnake wasn't moving.
"I pulled over, and I was like, 'Oh God, did I kill it?' Because it was just laying there, not moving, not doing anything," she recalls to PEOPLE almost seven years later. But looking at it from outside of her car, she realized it was alive.
With no cell service or any experience with snakes, Wall was scared. Terrified, in fact, but not paralyzingly so. Her empathy for the living creature took over. She broke off a stick from a nearby bush and returned to the road to poke the snake. After a jab, the rattlesnake took off, slithering away from the road and out of danger.
"That's the grand story," says Wall, now 31. The next chapter of her life unfolded from there, the moment she simply poked a rattlesnake on the road. She's since dedicated herself to safely removing rattlesnakes from dangerous places, where they may be threatened or where they may pose a threat to others. In most scenarios, Wall explains, the latter only occurs after the former.
"People think they're aggressive, but on paper, they have the same behavioral defenses as feral kittens. And a feral kitten's not going to attack a human or bite a human for no reason," she tells PEOPLE. "But if you trap it, the feral kitten's going to try to run past you before jumping on you. And the snakes are all the same ... Most bites are completely preventable."
Of course, Wall didn't know that back in 2018. But when she got home after her first rattlesnake encounter in the round, she decided to familiarize herself with the species and find out how others handle such encounters.
Her search yielded chilling information, findings that didn't sit right with Wall at all. California animal control's typical protocol was — and still is, legally — to euthanize found and caught rattlesnakes. The violence of it all got to her. A born nature-lover, Wall was appalled to learn that people were killing wildlife out of fear.
Wall wasn't just going to sit with the horror. She felt compelled to fix the problem. "I was like, 'How hard could it be? I'll teach myself or reach out, see if anyone will teach me,'" the SoCal resident recalls.
"I found no resources. And then the few people I did reach out to that answered were like, 'No,'" says Wall. "One guy said, 'Sit down, little girl, you're going to get hurt.'"
Rejection after rejection, Wall resolved to just put herself out there. She educated herself on reptile husbandry and rattlesnake anatomy, reading research published by the likes of Loma Linda Medical University's herpetology department. And she watched local Facebook groups, waiting for a post by someone looking for help with a rattlesnake.
Her interest was piqued by one woman's post about a snake on her property. In her caption, she specified, "I don't want it killed." The replies completely dismissed the woman's wishes.
"Out of the 30 comments saying, 'Kill it,' I'm the one comment saying, 'I've moved one off the road before. I've got a stick and a bucket. Can I come try?'" Wall remembers. The woman agreed, and Wall was able to successfully, safely send off a second snake.
It wasn't just how easy it was for her to catch and release the snake. It was seeing how happy and calm the woman was as Wall helped her out. "That was the pivot of, 'I can f------ do this,'" says Wall. "And then it built up from there."
At first, she expected it to be a "little bit of a side thing," Wall explains, especially since she doesn't charge for her rattlesnake wrangling service at all. It's donation-based, and she was lucky enough to nab a tire sponsor after she once caught a snake for a man who owns a tire company. He gave her a $2,000 set of tires to help her drive the lengths of Joshua Tree.
The new tires came at the perfect time, too, because it didn't take long before Wall's phone was constantly blowing up with requests for her to wrangle on various properties across the desert. COVID hit during year three of her business, and with so many people staying home — and plenty of city folk heading out to quieter Joshua Tree residences — they started to notice more and more snakes.
"The population was getting higher. The building rates were exponential, just so many houses being built. So a lot of territory for the snakes was demolished," she explains to PEOPLE.
That's not to say there were never any roaming snakes to start with, though. Snakes are all over the desert, hiding in plain sight, especially in Joshua Tree National Park, where people regularly hike and hang out without noticing any vipers. In fact, Wall nods to their widespread presence to illustrate just how mild these creatures really are.
"There's no such thing as an aggressive rattlesnake towards people, because if they were aggressive, no one could live in Joshua Tree. It'd be like the movie Zombieland, but snakes," she says. "If the snakes actually decided to say, 'F--- people,' they could run everyone out of this desert."
Wall continues, "They're plentiful out here, but they're so peaceful and they don't ambush us. It's nothing like that. People just think, 'Oh, well, I don't see them. So, they're not there.'"
During lockdown, her phone started ringing nonstop. She was constantly dropping everything to go visit properties and remove visiting reptiles. It got to the point where she could no longer keep up with her busy lifestyle, balancing school and full-time paid work. She dropped out of college and pointed all her efforts toward snake wrangling.
In place of a steady income, she picks up odd jobs on the side, usually cleaning houses. She used to offer classes on rattlesnakes, charging people $150 to attend a session, but wrangling got in the way of that, too.
"I'd book an hour-and-a-half class, then 10 minutes in, I'd get a snake call. I send my assistant, and then two minutes later, I get another call," she says. "It got to the point where the anxiety I was getting trying to schedule classes to make money was making it so I couldn't go save the snakes, which is my whole purpose."
Legally, she's not able to officially turn her work into a business, but even if she could charge for rattlesnake wrangling, Wall says she wouldn't. She looked at non-profit options, but the California Department of Fish and Wildlife doesn't grant third-party permits.
She's come to terms with the unsteady income, but even with acceptance, Wall admits that times do get tough.
"I struggle financially, big time. People have no idea. They have no f------ clue, and maybe I should be a bit more transparent about it," she tells PEOPLE. "I've had my electricity cut off because I'm more worried about making sure there's gas in my car to go and get snakes instead of paying my own bills."
In place of money, however, Wall soon gained something else: notoriety. "You post one picture of a small tattooed chick holding a rattlesnake," she chuckles, admitting, "It got a lot of attention, and I didn't anticipate that."
Wall's Instagram page, @High_Desert_Dani, has over 116,000 followers. The attention has paid off in a literal sense, too. She works in the entertainment business every so often, with sets hiring her to handle snakes featured in film and television.
"I can charge upwards of a thousand dollars a day. So, if I get two or three really good set gigs over the year, it'll help me make my bills," Wall explains. "But I'm still in the red every year on terms of upkeep on just the snake stuff."
It's an uphill battle, but it's worth it to the California native. She wants to see the state's animal control laws evolve toward a more humane approach. Other parts of the country don't require the vipers to be killed when caught. Elsewhere, there are wildlife facilities that offer rattlesnake relocation training classes and seminars.
"There's other states that are already doing this, and that's how California should be. It shouldn't be that it is just me," she says.
Wall admits that she gets anxiety doing publicity for herself, whether she's speaking to the press, appearing on a screen or posting for her substantial social media audience. She pushes on because she knows more attention will help her change her state's Fish and Game official protocol for handling rattlesnakes.
"When I did some research, that's how a lot of other states ended up getting laws changed: Publicity," she notes. "Enough of the community was in an uproar over the killing. They were able to push for each individual county and eventually the state to uphold those laws."
Sometimes her means of advocacy is misread. People challenge her motives. "I get people online that are like, 'You do this for the fame and money,'" says Wall. "And I love that people do question me, because there are people that claim to do good and they're evil. So I always say, 'Please question me.' I love to be able to prove that I'm doing this for the right reasons over and over and over."
She can sense when someone is in the rattlesnake wrangling business for the wrong reasons. Those people usually wave the bright red flag of a competitive attitude.
"People are like, 'Well, Danielle, you must not want more snake wranglers coming out and taking your job.' I'm like, 'What do you mean f------ taking my job?'" Wall says. "There's always snakes to save. I could use 10 helpers that I could trust, and I would be so grateful."
In Wall's experience, men can be particularly competitive with her, though the snake wrangling is generally a male-dominated field. Wall has had her fair share of sexist remarks since that first "Sit down, little girl." But she's also learned that snake biting is a male-focused area, too. While she was researching the reptiles, she learned that hospital data largely shows snake bites on men 75% to 80% of the time.
"There's a guy at Loma Linda [University] that does the presentations and lectures and seminars on snakes, and he's like, 'The two main reasons for rattlesnake bites are testosterone and booze,'" Wall explains. "And he is a middle-aged man, and he has no shame of being like, 'Men are dumb sometimes.' Because that's how it is in the bite world."
Not unlike the rattlesnakes that lash out, Wall calls men the "number one" thing that scares her. But having grown up with brothers, it's not that she's intimidated, nor that she hates men in general.
"It's more so the fact that these other male snake wranglers have to be better than me," she says. "If that's your goal, you're in it for the wrong reasons. Because I didn't get into this to be the best, I got into it to have a purpose in life."
That really is how it boils down. Rattlesnakes came into Wall's life when she needed something bigger to guide her, something that she could do and feel good doing. Somehow, the timing has always made sense; in addition to her advocacy motive, these reptiles continue to pull her out of her lowest lows.
One December saw Wall deeply depressed. She was going through a "pretty gnarly" breakup, and snakes rarely come out in the winter months. Without wrangling requests on her phone, she really couldn't bring herself up and out of bed. Over the course of months, she lost weight and fell further into that dark place.
On the other side of winter, the sun warmed up the desert again. Snakes started to come out of hiding, and Wall's sense of happiness returned with the snake calls.
"It was a very pivotal moment of just figuring out what makes me happy, why I do what I do, why I am the way I am," she recalls to PEOPLE, with an emotional catch to her voice. "I didn't realize how much the snakes actually gave me the purpose to get up ... I saved snakes and they saved me."
Read the original article on People
