Occasionally you hear people from overseas talk about venomous creatures of Australia. It’s very rare for me to interact with any of them, and always a good idea to give them a wide berth. This show, more than any other, scares the willies out of me. Snake and spider trigger warning:
It seems totally wrong to 
this - but I have to 
I’m with you on the ‘wide berth’ when it comes to spiders. Anything exotic (and unknown) I will give a wide berth. Having said that, I have handled Redknee Tarantulas (and a couple of other large Tarantulas) in the past but funnel web spiders are just a completely different kettle of fish.
The late Struan Sutherland, who wrote the seminal work ‘Venomous Creatures of Australia’ and developed the funnel web antivenom, told a story about receiving a parcel one day that had a periodic knocking sound coming from it. When opened it contained a very large, very aggressive specimen of a tree dwelling funnel web that had attacked some timber cutters after they cut its tree down. It was throwing itself against the walls of the container that held it. That spider subsequently became the most productive venom source for the CSL researchers and after a few years died of ‘chronic rage’.
We don’t get Funnel Webs in Melbourne thank goodness (plenty of Redbacks though). I’m sure there are plenty of Eastern Brown snakes within a few hundred meters of me as I live next to the Yarra River, but I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me.
The folks at this venom collection centre are doing vital work. I hadn’t realised how much venom is needed to make enough anti-venom to treat a funnel web victim. Glad I don’t have to wake up in the morning and think about handling snakes or milking spiders.
To be fair, as far as the procedures shown in the video are concerned, I think I would prefer to harvest venom from the spiders rather than the Brown Snake even though the venom is so much worse. Handling that 1.5m Brown Snake looked decidedly dodgy to me.
In general though, I’m not so bothered by the vast majority of snakes. Even venomous ones. I think most would prefer to avoid me as much as I would prefer to avoid them. Of course, there are always exceptions.
Fortunately, the worst that I am likely to encounter in this country is a common Adder which, whilst it can make you quite ill, is not likely to kill a healthy adult. The native spiders are generally not dangerous either.
My wife bought a UV torch aimed at highlighting scorpions, she gleefully ran around a rest camp in the Kruger Park nominally protected from wild animals.
The number of scorpions was scary, I have no stats but apparently quite a number are “not nice”
These bad boys are quite common here in the American Southwest. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index was developed by a local scientist who allowed himself to be stung multiple times and classified each sting. It goes from 1 to 4. The Tarantula Hawk is a 4. Described as “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano.”. Luckily they are not aggressive unless you’re a Tarantula.