Abu Dhabi zoo reptile keeper on why he loves the snakes most people fear: ‘They’re not mindless killing machines’

Say the word 'snake' and most of us already imagine the hiss. Show us a picture and we might recoil.

What we know comes from what we’ve read and watched (cough, cough Anaconda franchise), so we picture venom-filled reptiles ready to strike at the slightest provocation. Even the language is against them: Call someone a snake and you’re calling them a traitor. A snake is associated with sliminess, slithery, and treacherous.

Then you listen to Mohammed Bashar Hittini, and the fear starts to thaw. Slowly, you begin to see snakes through his eyes, and his mornings come into focus: Among anacondas, crocodiles and bearded dragons, cleaning enclosures, checking for anything that went wrong overnight, and handling the animals his colleagues won’t go near.

Then he goes home to his own pet snake.

It’s a passion he has carried since childhood, and it has made him a reptile keeper at Emirates Park Zoo and Resort.

Hittini was four or five when the obsession took hold and it all began with dinosaurs.

"I just had this natural love for animals and stuff, but it began with dinosaurs," he says. "So dinosaurs was my obsession as a child." The demands were non-negotiable: "If my parents didn't buy me a new dinosaur toy every couple of weeks, I would throw a tantrum, basically."

The spark was Disney's Dinosaur, the story of a herbivore hatchling raised by primates who must survive a meteor strike and a great migration while being hunted. The antagonist— a horned Carnotaurus stayed with him. “Carnotaurus is one of the most terrifying but strange predators to ever exist," he says, before getting to the detail that clearly still delights him: The arms. "They're like even smaller and more useless than the T-Rex arms.”

No doubt, most children go through the dinosaur phase. Yet, his never ended, because it was never only about the teeth and claws. It was the fascination that there was an entire race of animals that existed before humanity. He was curious about how each species was built. How did they defend themselves? How did the predator and prey play off each other? 

The questions were infinite. Yet, when it came time to choose a career, curiosity took a back seat to something more practical.

The road to the reptile house ran, briefly, through a business school. Hittini's father had moved from Jordan to the UAE for work and was working to build the family’s security. “Growing up, we didn't really have too much money, too much freedom,”  Hittini says. "And my dad worked really hard to make sure that now we do."

So when graduation came and his son was still trying to find his footing, the advice was practical: "Look into finance, there's always money in finance." Hittini agreed. The first semester went well. The second did not. "My life flipped upside down and finance just made it a bit worse," he says.

He went to his father. "The first time I opened up to him emotionally, to the point of crying," he recalls. His father's answer changed everything: "Okay, let's look into something different."

They settled on sports management at Canadian University Dubai, a business degree that wasn't finance. However, the plan fell apart.

On the day they arrived, the university told them it had shut the major down for lack of students. Hittini was flummoxed. “I don't know what I'm going to do with my life."

A staff member, hearing he loved biology, pointed him to public health. One look at the study plan, packed with human anatomy, microbiology, environmental biology and organic chemistry, was enough. "It was basically everything I loved, just in a field that I wasn't very familiar with," he says. Biology had always been his best subject at school. He enrolled, half-thinking of medicine, and resolved to follow whatever he fell for.

The turning point came in his third year, when the dean of public health mentioned that SeaWorld Abu Dhabi was looking for interns. Hittini, already juggling his studies with a job coaching children with autism and ADHD, signed up with his best friend mostly to fill his time.

Three days of training settled the question. Most of the material, on how the animals live, behave and survive, he already knew. "I knew everything without even studying before or doing anything to prepare for this," he says. "And I was like, I'm kind of enjoying this a little bit too much.”

What did he love the most? As he says, teaching people, and then going home and doing his own research. Much of his work involved helping visitors understand the impact of plastic pollution and oil spills, and the importance of conservation. When the internship ended, he was upset, but went back to university with a new sense of purpose. "I found something that I love doing and I want to pursue it."

SeaWorld asked for him and his friend back by name for the busy winter season.

Between his two SeaWorld internships, Hittini was keen to gain more hands-on experience. He approached his colleagues at SeaWorld, asking if they knew of any opportunities at a zoo. One of them connected him to Emirates Park Zoo and Resort.

The interview panel included the education manager, the zoological manager, marketing and HR. It began with his CV and ended somewhere else entirely: favourite animal, why he loves the ocean, why he loves animals. "It became more like very, very personal," he says.

He started in August 2025 as an education intern. His manager went further than the brief and built him a schedule split between education and reptile keeping. "I want you to get the most out of your experience here," she told him. He calls himself ‘eternally grateful’ for it.

Three months in, he was hired part-time. In April, as regional tensions forced the zoo to scale back, his part-time role came to an end  He finished his degree and promised himself two months of doing nothing. It lasted one. "I don't know how to sit down for more than a month," he says. "I have to be doing things with my life."

He filled the gap with the gym and with Terra, a sustainability organisation he had volunteered with at the IUCN Congress in the UAE. "I met so many different people and experts from all over the world. It was insane to me."

He applied everywhere he had worked. Today he is back at Emirates Park Zoo, full-time, as a Reptile Keeper.

And then, came the snakes. The joy in Hittini’s voice as he talks about his new job is palpable. He describes the snakes: There are around 20 to 25, corn snakes, ball pythons, reticulated and carpet pythons, and a couple of anacondas. 

The job, as Hittini sees it, comes down to one skill. "The whole point of being a reptile keeper is being able to handle whatever reptile is in front of you," he says. “It matters, because most keepers that I've met are scared of snakes.” 

Mornings start with husbandry: Cleaning enclosures, changing water, checking conditions and looking each animal over, because anything can happen overnight. Then come feeds. Tortoises, skinks and bearded dragons eat daily. Snakes and crocodiles don't. Young snakes eat about once a week, adults every 10 to 12 days in summer, less in winter, when the cold slows a reptile's metabolism.

There are risks in winter, as some snakes develop respiratory infections every year. The warning sign is a runny nose. "Snakes don't have a diaphragm, so they can't force out anything that's in their lungs," he explains. When the keepers spot discharge, the vets are called in and a treatment plan drawn up.

There's a fear around snakes.

And some of them might be ridden with misconceptions.

Hittini understands where the fear stems from. You hear the stories of them being aggressive, unpredictable, and tales of giant pythons swallowing people have only cemented this reputation. Yet, these tales say little about how snakes actually behave.

He is used to the questions surrounding his own pet snake. Will it grow big enough to eat him? He dismisses the idea with a wry laugh. "Snakes will never attack a person for no reason," he says.

In his experience, snakes do not see humans as prey, and most bites are defensive, a reaction to feeling cornered or threatened. That does not make them harmless. Some species are venomous and large constrictors can be dangerous, which is why snakes should always be treated with caution and handled by trained professionals.

What he pushes back on is the idea that they run on mindless instinct. He talks about their defences, their adaptations and their role as predators with obvious fascination. "Snakes are not mindless killing machines. They are not monsters."

Their place in the food chain matters, too. Snakes keep rodent populations in check, and removing them has consequences that reach far beyond the animals themselves. "If we don't have snakes in the world, then rats and mice and all these different rodents would grow at an exponential rate and it would be catastrophic to every ecosystem on the planet."

Twice a year, every reptile gets a health check and a dose of deworming medicine, mixed into its food. For tortoises and lizards, it’s simple. For snakes, the health check means catching them.

The smallest, at around 30 centimetres, are easy and used to being handled. The five- to seven-footers are defensive. Then there are the four snakes over 12 feet. Size is only part of the challenge: pythons have more than 10,000 muscles, compared with a few hundred in a human, and the big ones use every one of them.

Those catches take three keepers at least, preferably more. “You could be trying to get the head, and the snake could turn and strike at you,” he says. “We always go in with the mindset of anything can happen, so expect it.”

Most of us will never hold a python, and plenty of us will still flinch at the word. But spend half an hour listening to Hittini and you start to wonder whether the snakes were ever the problem.

Maybe it was the stories we told about them.