“As a child, you would find me hanging off tree branches or inspecting the earth for bugs,” recalls Iraqi wildlife activist Mahdi Laith, better known as the “snake man of Baghdad” for his widely publicized photos with snakes and other reptiles.
The animal enthusiast tells Al-Monitor that his love for wildlife came from his father. Laith spent his early childhood in London, where his first encounters with wild animals were limited to the zoos and nature parks his family would take him to. Some of the animals he now keeps at home in Kerrada, an upper-middle-class district of Baghdad, are the same ones that fascinated him in the London zoos.