So, imagine you’re a traffic cop on duty in Vietnam, and you pull over a driver.  And inside his car are a bunch of bags, strangely wiggling about.  It turned out the bags were not just filled with snakes, but with the scariest snake:  53 deadly King Cobras.

Officer Dang Van Hanh got the slithery surprise of his life in the capital Hanoi last Friday.  He says the Cobras were taken to a wildlife rescue center near the capital where they treated before being released into the wild.  Hopefully, whoever lives near there will get a little warning about the new neighbors.

The driver was arrested, and admitted he was being paid less than $50 to smuggle the snakes.  Which when you think about it is less than $1 per risk of a potentially lethal bite if anything went wrong.

But here’s the thing:  It wasn’t even the biggest haul of snakes in Vietnam that day.  56 King Cobras were recovered in a bust in the Hong Mai district.  That’s 109 snakes in a day.

The world’s King Cobra population is being decimated, dropping 30 percent in the last two decades.  Poaching is illegal in Vietnam.  Cobra meat is considered a delicacy to some, and the skins are used in high-end belts and shoes and other leather products.  And then there’s traditional “medicines” that claim to be aphrodisiacs, or cure farsightedness and hair loss.  They don’t work, and the snakes shouldn’t be killed for these products.