His escaped cobra scared Raleigh in 2021. Now he’s back handling venomous snakes online.

In the video, Chris Gifford stands shirtless on a residential street with his hat turned backward, gripping a cobra that looks to be 12 feet long.

Neighbors’ houses sit in the background while he holds the venomous snake named Godzilla up to the camera, gushing in admiration.

“That is a king if I’ve ever seen one,” he tells his Instagram audience. “What an insane, magnificent animal.”

Raleigh’s 2021 snake scare

Three years ago, Raleigh will remember, another magnificent animal turned up on a North Raleigh porch — this one a spitting zebra cobra that sparked a citywide panic and made international headlines.

It took two days to catch Gifford’s deadly snake in a bucket, and in that time, Raleigh learned that he had failed to report it slithering away more than six months earlier.

The city further learned that Gifford had been keeping dozens of venomous snakes in his parents’ basement a few blocks away, shooting TikTok videos to an audience of 500,000, sometimes letting a cobra slither freely through the yard.

So I was surprised to stumble on the recent video of Gifford, now 24, playing outside with a snake the size of a fire hose, especially after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in Raleigh, surrendered 75 snakes and apologized in a WRAL interview, explaining, “I messed up big time.”

‘It’s truly not smart’

To me, jaunting around a yard with a king cobra looked like behavior from somebody who hadn’t learned a thing, though Gifford’s Instagram post did warn people not to imitate his casual snake handling because “it’s truly not smart” because “he could likely turn around and get in a bite.”

And he did point out that this particular snake display took place in Arkansas — not in Raleigh, where venomous snakes are now mostly outlawed thanks to a dangerous wild animals ordinance triggered by his cobra’s escape.

Still, aside from some fans who flattered his sexiness, Gifford took a few hits in the comments:

“Hope you get bit,” said one.

“Moron,” said another.

I do not know whether Gifford still keeps venomous snakes in Raleigh because he did not respond to my messages.

But they are illegal now in most cases. He did turn over more than 75 of them in 2022, and he was barred from keeping them for a year after his guilty plea.

So probably not.

A cavalier attitude

But his cavalier attitude toward dangerous animals bothers me, especially since he’d been bitten by his own green mamba snake and nearly died months before the cobra escape.

I’m not convinced by the warning on Gifford’s Instagram post with the Arkansas cobra, which boasts of his “many years of working with these animals and understanding their body language.”

I lack any experience at all with venomous snakes outside of a rattlesnake sighting on a hiking trip, but a casual poke around the internet will tell you that a good-sized portion of the venomous snake community thinks you shouldn’t be handling them at all.

Even when he posts videos of snakes indoors, he has cobras loose on the floor without any sort of restraint or head covering.

Tell me if I’m overreacting, but how easy would it be for that snake to dart away from Gifford and find a way outside?

In his many posts, Gifford speaks of a his Christian faith, and his snake videos typically come with a Bible verse attached.

“I’m going to start to actually listening to Mathew 5:14: ‘You are the light of the world, a city built upon a hill cannot be hidden,’” he wrote in 2021, “‘And use platforms to share Christ as well as God’s beautiful creatures that so many people dislike, the ‘scary and dangerous’ ones.”

Plenty of beautiful creatures are dangerous — no sarcastic quotation marks required.

Hippos. Grizzly bears. King cobras.

And I think most of us, God especially, wants that power shown more respect.