Okay, first off, I know that's a classic click-bait grab, but so it goes. This is the internet and it's a dog-eat-fucking-dog world to claim eyeballs, attention, and maybe even a goddamn viral sensation for all of 15 forgettable minutes! Again, so it goes. But the thing is, a Florida Man really did get bit in the dick by a bear, and that man just happens to be our friend David Weathers. You know, the David Weathers we always jokingly referred to as a "venemous snake idiot" on Wildboyz, but the truth is he really is a professional in his realm and we thought it would be a fine time to catch up with him and his recent handlings. Take it away, Kosick!
Rick Kosick: So what’s been going on with you lately?
David Weathers: Lately I’ve not been doing as many cobra shows as I was doing due to some law changes… stuff that makes it a little harder for me to get around with king cobras in a box, you know? Assholes in Florida let them out in the wild, and that doesn’t make it any easier for me to get around these laws. So, I’ve been cutting back on shows, but a couple times a year I do these training courses at hunting camps where I teach dogs how to avert from venomous snakes in the woods so they don’t get killed by rattlesnakes or water moccasins. On the off-season right now, I’ll do a lot of snake breeding. I got into designer ball pythons and they do pretty well as far as finances go. I do a lot of crocodile stuff lately, too—lots of crocs going on at the house right not. And I just got back from picking up grizzly bears yesterday.
Do you still live at the same place I once visited you at—the trailer with the snakes and spiders that smelled like a pet store?
I don’t have the same place I had when you were there… I got a new place and I own the property. Still the same ranch, though. We got the five acres over there and the snake room still smells like snake rooms, but, you know, the house doesn’t smell like a pet store anymore, because I only have a couple snakes and baby crocodiles inside.
So did you stay during the last hurricane or did you evacuate?
No, I stayed. I did a whole Facebook Live for an hour and twelve minutes out in the middle of the eye when it passed through my area. It beat on us pretty good. I was out in the front yard and being blown around a little bit, answering people’s questions and talking shit, you know—a typical David Weathers day in hurricane season.
How did you get your start in the animal business?
It started when I was like ten-years-old. Well, my interest was beyond that. When I was three-years-old, I went to the Miami serpentarium and I saw this guy out on the lawn hanging with king cobras, grabbing them by the heads, extracting venom from them and shit. I was like, “I want to be able to handle a king cobra like that! That’s what I’m gonna do when I get older.” So that’s where the spark started. And then when I was ten, I went over to the Native Village in Hollywood, Florida, over at the Indian reservation, and started working and wrestling with ’gators and working with the panthers and other animals they had. That’s where all the experience started. I always had an interest in snakes and alligators, but I didn’t know anything about them. But the guy over there, he brought me in and taught me how to handle alligators and all these dangerous animals.
A couple years into being there, I went to a circus and saw this guy playing with some badass tigers and lions and leopards. I was like, “Man, I wanna learn how to train a tiger!” So I linked up with this guy when I was about 13 or 14 and he introduced me to Frank Weed. He did film work, like National Geographic stuff with his panthers and leopards. I started going out there and volunteering on weekends when I wasn’t at the village and learned how to train and handle big animals, just the life about them. After that, I just kind of started doing my own thing. I was 18, had all kinds of experience with these animals, and I was like “I can get my own licenses.” Immediately I went and bought a lion, a tiger, and I already had a cougar at the time. And I was still doing the snake and alligator thing, so it just kind of went from there and I’ve been doing my own thing ever since.
At what age did you start playing with your snake?
I started playing with my snake—you mean my snake or snakes in general, like what’s the difference here?
How many animals do you own at the moment?
I have a coatamundi, a cat, probably over a hundred snakes… probably 25 alligators and probably another 20 turtles and tortoises.
You don’t have a tiger anymore?
No, no tigers. No big cats. Everything got old and passed on. Cats don’t live very long. I turned 40 recently, so I’ve been doing this for 30 years, you know?
When did you first meet Jeff Tremaine?
First time I met Jeff Tremaine, it was prior to filming for Wildboyz. It was when jackass first started, they went down to Florida and wanted to go scare people with a dead alligator and I think we had a caiman in the freezer at the time. I didn’t really know what jackass was or anything or much about it, but I remember he introduced himself to me briefly. I didn’t even stick around for the filming. It was just an in and out thing. I was doing my own thing, travelling around, doing alligator shows. I didn’t even watch TV at the time. So it was just one of those things where, “Hey, it’s nothing, not a big deal, just a small gig.” I wasn’t sweatin’ it back then. Next thing I know, somebody had told me, “Oh yeah, the Village was on MTV,” and I’m like, “That must’ve been that thing!” So I checked it out and I was like, “Man, it’s funny.” You know, somebody gets hurt, you’re gonna laugh about shit. It was entertaining, but I didn’t think a whole lot about it. And I’ve known Mark [Rackley] and Manny [Puig] for a long time. I knew they were doing work like that with jackass during the series.
So then the first movie came out [Mark and Manny] were working on their own documentary and Tremaine was gonna help with that. And then Pontius had come down to Florida and while they were down there, they were like, “Let’s go out to the Everglades and film something.” So they went out that night to the Everglades—Mark, Manny, Pontius, and Tremaine, and I met up with them later on that evening at a club. That’s when I officially sat down and had a talk with him and told him what I was all about. So we talked about the Wildboyz stuff coming up. He was saying, “We wanna do an animal show, kind of like Jackass and an animal show combined.” He asked if I’d be interested in doing some animal work and that’s how all that started. Naturally, what we were doing with Wildboyz graduated into some crazy pranks during the jackass movies. But when Wildboyz got started, I was already familiar with Steve-O, because he used to work for a friend of mine in the flea market circus doing clown stuff where I was trying to put on my alligator show. So, everything kind of came around together and next thing you know, you got wild, crazy animal shit with a bunch of other crazy guys doing crazy shit.
What were some of your favorite episodes of Wildboyz you got to be involved with?
Probably down in Costa Rica, because it was travelling outside, doing new stuff. I’d been down there several times before, but just the experiences of being able to go above and beyond what I would normally do on my own. It was serious shit, but it was a fun trip, like we never worried about dying until we were already okay. It was weird. It was just one of those trips where everybody was absorbing the atmosphere, the jungle, and nature. And the Florida stuff was all fun, but that was just like my own backyard stuff, like I do this on a daily basis, so it’s more work for me than a good time. So for Wildboyz, I would say Costa Rica takes the cake.
And that would’ve been the “Fer-de-lance Dance” segment?
The fer-de-lance is by far the most deadly skit we’ve done as a group, I would say. Just because nobody handles fer-de-lances that way—including me. I was a little skeptical on handling them that way, but if you remember correctly, that moment I decided to grab them with my hands was because it was going right for Mark and I couldn’t let my bro get bit by a fucking fer-de-lance. He had his eye up in the camera, laying in the ground, didn’t even see it coming. You know how Rack is. And that was my job, to handle animals and make sure people are safe, so I just took the initiative on that real quickly, but when it was over, I was just like, “Holy shit… at any given time, that thing could have either sent me to the hospital or to the grave.” I’d only handled them to bag ’em up, ship ’em out, stuff like that, but I’d never handled a wild fer-de-lance in an environment that had to be controlled for safety. It was like biting off a big chunk of something and hoping you can chew it up, because that could have went really shitty real fast for a lot of people.
Do you feel bad that Bam cried on jackass 3D, knowing that it’s your fault?
I feel like he cried in part two also, and that one was a little more different. That was a king cobra. I didn’t even really know he was that drastically afraid of it. So that’s when I was just having fun with it. But then the third one and threw him in the snake pit… we got the same reaction and it was literally just a bunch of rat snakes and king snakes—things that aren’t gonna hurt you too bad and he was really that scared of them. And when Ryan went over and helped him out, feeling bad for him as his friend, it kind of made me feel like, “Wow, he really hates fucking snakes. Oh shit.” So I kind of felt bad. I mean, I feel bad to a point, but at the same time, I’m doing my job. At the end of the day, you gotta just blame Tremaine. When the guy says you gotta do something, that’s how you get your paycheck. It’s a job. My feelings had to stay outside the box on this one, or I wouldn’t have been able to do any of my jobs for Wildboyz and jackass, because I literally get paid to bring these guys to near-death situations. I remember Jeff telling me, “Just as bad as we can get them hurt without actually killing somebody. That’s the kind of skits we need to come up with.” So, with that in mind, I took on a job knowing that I’m gonna have to hurt my friends and they’re gonna like me for it.
Out of all the years of you dealing with animals, what’s the worst injury you’ve ever experienced?
I got bit by a cantil, which is like a Costa Rican water moccasin. Within 48 hours, my liver was in a cirrhosis state of destruction. I was going into liver failure and having all kinds of things shut down inside my body. The hospital had been giving me the wrong antivenin for two days. So I drastically started getting worse inside and when I finally got the right antivenin it was another two or three days of recovery until I was out of the hospital. I was laying there dying, calling family members and saying, “I may or may not make it out of this one.” So, physically, like that was probably like the worst thing I went through animal-wise. But emotionally, I got bit in the dick by a bear. I don’t think you can ever get away from that, man… that just kind of haunts you forever after.
"I got bit in the dick by a bear."
You got bit in the dick by a bear?
Yeah… I don’t really talk about that one too much. But yeah, I had a little bear. She was about 60, 70 pounds, you know. Not too big. Stands up on her back legs up to my belly. We taught her to sit on a stool like a seat, so when I brought her on film sets that would be her home base, like “go to your seat and sit there.” Anyway, she wanted to get off of it, so I had a little stick—they call it like a “duke stick” for treats—and when she started getting off the seat, I reached out and tapped her on the foot with it like, “Hey, put your feet back up there.” But the bitch got mad and jumped probably three-and-a-half feet off of the seat and lashed out right on the head of my dick. Then she put her feet up on my hips and started pulling and shaking and making some crazy fucking noise. I was like, “Holy shit!” She shook like two or three times until I got her off, and the next thing I know I see blood coming through my pants and I thought, “I lost a dick. Fuck.” So I pull my pants down in front of a couple people that were watching just to make sure that my dick was still there—and it was, I just had three holes in it from her canines and it pierced through my fucking dick head.
How many times have you been bitten by a snake?
I’ve been bitten four times. Two times by cobras, one time by an Eastern Diamondback, and then the cantil bite was the worst one of all four.
Do you remember how you felt when you found out that the Crocodile Hunter died?
You know, I have mixed feelings about that. I’m very sad about the tragedy that he got killed. I don’t think he was a bad person with the animal. I think he was a very, very good advocate for the animal community because he brought awareness to it in a positive way. Getting killed by the stingray… people thought it was a fluke accident and all these things, but I don’t see it that way. I see it from a very realistic animal person standpoint, knowing a little about stingrays and how they work and whatnot, I feel like he could’ve avoided the injury altogether had they thought it out a little better. Or the person that should’ve been in charge of that maybe should’ve said, “Hey, look, these are the things you shouldn’t…,” like when we do an animal shoot. What’s the first thing Tremaine makes me do? “Hey, I want you to sit down with everybody here and make sure everybody does exactly what you want. If it’s not going your way, pull the fucking plug and we’ll reset it.” It was always safety. Even though it wasn’t, it was. He wanted me to make sure that Steve-O and Pontius got hurt, but you or anybody else better not get fucking hurt while we’re doing this thing. That was always the thing.
Well, I feel like if they had taken more of that assertive approach around the stingray. You got a guy swimming around with a camera, which is basically a giant eyeball, like it definitely intimidates aquatic animals—especially ones that are looking at it laterally like sharks. Now you’ve got Steve swimming above the stingray, trying to get footage of it, which is generally a safe thing to do, but then you add the element of the stingray guy on one side, the camera guy on the other, Steve closing in from up top. I feel like the stingray got put in a defensive position and he got a little too close and I feel like that’s why the stingray did what it did. Unfortunately for Steve, the way a stingray operates, they have hundreds and hundreds of sensors around their wings and their face. So they can pick up on sonar in a heartbeat, and that’s what their defense is designed for: to go for a vital area. It hasn’t got arms, it has no feet, it has a stinger, so it has to put it in a spot that’s gonna count, if that makes sense. So, realistically, I don’t feel like there was a surprise in the way it went down. I just think that for that to happen inside our world it’s very unfortunate, because what he did was gain the interest of people being supporters of animals. And I feel like myself and every other animal person should be greatly in debt of that for even having careers and stuff to keep going and getting people to be more interested in understanding rather than being hating on people that keep animals in captivity and stuff.
You were once on America’s Got Talent. How did that come about?
They called me for season four or something like that and I just said, “Nah, I’m good. I’m not a guy to go out there and do competition.” I mean, they’ve probably never had anybody like me win yet, and I didn’t feel like I was gonna change that at the moment. But then they called me up for season eight, and at the time I was reopening Native Village. So I thought about it differently. I thought this would be a good approach and a lot of people watch the show. It would be a good time for me to promote Native Village and get it back on the map, because it’s been down for a couple of years, especially after Skeet passed away. So I did some research and realized they have an audience of ten-to-eleven million per episode, and you can’t beat that. That’s nationwide advertising, so I decided to do it even though it seemed a little fishy from the offer. I think they knew what I accomplished with jackass and Wildboyz, which were real big things as far as in the public eye. So they asked me to come out to San Antonio. Paid for my flight, flew me out there, put us up in a hotel—me and my buddy Ian. Went out and did my balloon trick, which was created shortly before we did the “Rattlesnake Salad Toss.” That was kind of the beginning of it right around that time, so I capitalized on that. I did the show. It was a great performance, everybody liked it. Moved onto the second round. Well, the second round came around and I didn’t even perform. They automatically sent me to the finals in Radio City. And I even said, when I first signed up, “You know, they’re going to go ahead and run me all the way to the end and then I’m gonna get dropped.”
So Howard Stern never said, “You’ve got talent?”
Well, at first he thought it was great. Then I get to Radio City and I bring a big king cobra up there and it wasn’t 100-percent cooperative. So I kind of narrated the show like, “Okay, listen. I’m going to attempt to handle the largest venomous snake in the world using nothing but my bare hands.” Which I did accomplish, by the way, but that’s what I had said. But they had it in their mind that I was supposed to kiss the cobra—that was what I told the director and one of the producers. I said, “If I can, I’m gonna try to do it, but there’s no guarantee because the snake has to be somewhat cooperative.” So, they made me do a recorded rehearsal the night before and the snake didn’t do anything. Nothing at all. Dead to the world. I was like, “Holy fuck.”
The next day, the snake was very active compared to the day before. So when I finished my act, Howard and all these guys were like, “Well, the snake didn’t even do anything. It didn’t even try to bite you.” Which the night before it didn’t, but it did that night several times. You can see it coming at me. I even had to drop it at one point, which I felt bad about. So, I started putting two and two together… the rehearsal, I’m pretty sure, is their pre-recorded “Let’s make a script of what we’re gonna say when he’s done with his show,” because everything he said was totally contradictory to what I did out there during the show. The only thing he did say that I agree with was that my act definitely gets left in the hands of the animal, like if the animal doesn’t cooperate I’m left without a show. That’s the risk of being an animal guy. You have to have enough entertainment behind your show if the animals don’t want to cooperate. Unfortunately, with what they were expecting, there’s only so much you can do with a 13-foot cobra.
But they used my balloon trick in every single promo for the finals, like on every taxicab, every commercial, everything you would see had my balloon trick. Howie Mandel went on Jay Leno about “This crazy guy came out there with a balloon put in his mouth, a rattlesnake, blah blah blah.” And they showed a clip of it. Boom, right there on The Tonight Show again. They did interviews on another show with Heidi Klum. Same thing, this crazy guy with the snakes. I know how things work, I’m not surprised when I see them pan out the way they do now. They needed something exciting to sell seats, and that’s what I was—I’m a thrill. They used it to draw a lot of people. The first episode I was in was the largest opening season audience with 11.2 million people or something. So it did its job for me, but I knew I wasn’t gonna win just because what else do you do? I mean, I kiss cobras, I get balloons popped out of my mouth. I gotta keep topping what I do. I can put together an easy show with animals, but not piece at a time. So I feel like they were expecting more, but it was a great experience. It was great publicity.
So what’s in store for you? Any projects coming up?
Just last year we did some bear work for a movie called Chuck. It was a story about Chuck Wepner, the Bayonne Bleeder. It was originally titled “Bleeder,” but then they had to retitle it. We had some other bear work recently with a TV show about the Unabomber that’s coming out soon… or maybe it’s out, I don’t know, but I’ve been doing a little of that stuff, wrangling with grizzly bears. A lot of animal transport, too, transporting them to sanctuaries. In the last couple months, I’ve relocated like seven tigers, a lion, three ligers, three hyenas, and then some birds that I need to pick up soon. So, you know, I’m just trying to stay busy and make a living.
(Photos by Sean Cliver)
. Her being the movie he wrote and directed. Her will make you laugh at times, cry at others, but simultaneously make you ponder the fate of humanity as it dives down a technological rabbit hole of social self-absorption. It will also drop your jaw at the nifty job of Production Design through the creative eyes of K.K. Barrett. For classic Jonze kicks, though, you can always pick up his 
collection of music videos and short flicks.
was that next great evolutionary leap in nature programming, the likes of which transcended the classroom and graduated to theme nights at a prominent gay club in West Hollywood. Chris Pontius and Steve-O commandeered four seasons of 
in all, covering most all regions on the globe in a generally uncovered fashion, with a bevy of guest-stars including Wee Man, Johnny Knoxville, Mat Hoffman, Manny Puig, David Hasselhoff, and more!
