Handling Tools For Keepers, Not For Animal Control Departments
Herpaxe sells two tools: a telescopic snake hook and a pair of folding tongs. Both are aimed at the keeper with a rack in a spare room, not at a professional venomous team.
The gap we set out to fill is easy to see the moment you go shopping for a hook. At one end of the market sits professional gear built for people who handle dangerous animals for a living, priced accordingly. At the other end sit unbranded rods on marketplace listings with a photo, a price and almost no numbers at all: no head dimensions, no extended length you can trust, no stated limit on what the tool can lift. A hobbyist with three corn snakes and a young ball python is standing between those two piles, and neither one is talking to them.
list price of the professional titanium snake hook from the best known US brand, for comparison
— Midwest Tongs store, tongs.com, 2026
That number is not a criticism of the brand that charges it. A titanium shaft built for venomous work is worth what it costs to the person doing venomous work. It simply is not the right purchase for someone whose largest animal is a yearling python, and telling that person to spend seventy dollars to move a corn snake is bad advice dressed up as safety advice.
What we actually are
We are a small independent online store. We do not run a factory and we have never claimed to. We select the tools, we buy them from a manufacturer, we measure and describe them, and we ship them to you. That model has one obligation attached to it, and it is the whole reason this page exists: if we are not the ones machining the steel, then the least we owe you is every specification the manufacturer does document, printed plainly, with the missing ones marked as missing.
So the hook page tells you the shaft telescopes through six sections from 7 in (18 cm) to 26 in (66 cm) and that the curved head measures roughly 1.8 by 2 by 2.2 in (4.5 by 5 by 5.5 cm). It also tells you there is no published weight for the tool, because there is not one, and we would rather leave a blank line in a specification table than fill it with a plausible guess. The same rule governs the tongs page and everything in our guides.
Why we publish a ceiling
Most listings for a compact hook say it is for snakes and stop there, which leaves you to discover the limit yourself, usually at the worst possible moment. We put the ceiling in public instead. This hook is right for hatchlings, juveniles, corn snakes, kingsnakes, milk snakes and ball pythons up to roughly a year old. For an adult boa, a burm or a retic, you want a full-size fixed hook and a second pair of hands. It is not sold as heavy-duty gear and it never will be.
The same honesty applies to venomous species, where the answer is simply no. Venomous handling is a trained discipline with long tools, tubes, a partner and legal requirements that vary by state, and no amount of stainless steel substitutes for that training.
of media-reported US snakebites came from purposefully handling the snake rather than an unseen encounter
— Curry et al., Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, 2016
Who writes here
Every guide, comparison and product page on this site is written by one person, and she keeps snakes. That is deliberate. A store this small cannot outrank anyone on volume, so the only thing worth publishing is writing that comes from actually using the tool.
Honest by default
We do not invent ratings and we do not invent buyers. The reviews page lists 4 verified ratings for the hook and 10 for the tongs, each with its date, including the ones where the buyer said nothing at all. Fourteen ratings is a modest number for a store, and it is printed as it stands rather than rounded up into something that sounds established.
The same applies to what we will not sell you. If your animals have outgrown a compact hook, the right answer is a heavier tool from someone else, and our pages say so in the sizing table rather than in fine print. Our DIY guide genuinely explains how to build a hook from hardware store parts, which costs us a sale to anyone with a bender and a free afternoon. That trade is fine with us.
Where to go next
If you are choosing between the two tools, the comparison in our hook versus tongs guide is the fastest read. If a snake has already turned up somewhere it should not be, go straight to the snake catcher guide. If you want to know what we measure before a product goes on sale, that is on the how we test page. And if something here is wrong, incomplete or contradicted by your own experience, the contact page reaches a human who answers within 24 hours.