At the age of 18, Bibby had his first taste of handling snakes at a Rattlesnake Roundup in Brownwood, Texas. During his 20's he only handled snakes for a few months out of the year. However, in 1988, after some rehab for alcohol he decided to make a career out of handling rattlesnakes. He now handles snakes for some event every weekend and having a blast!
Jackie's hobby has gained him much notoriety over the years. He regularly performs at Rattlesnake Round-ups in Texas and other states and has traveled to Europe several times a year for the past few years to perform there. He has also been featured on the reality show on the Animal Planet network titled the ‘Rattlesnake Republic’. The show explores the lives of several elite snake hunting teams from Texas. Just recently a friend of mine who happens to work on a team whose specialty is customizing Salesforce crm for both large and small businesses as well as other organizations saw repeats of ‘Rattlesnake Republic’ and was blown away. He tried to compare the teamwork that is necessary when creating well-developed, customized, and integrated cloud-computing applications that are easy to scale for a company's Salesforce CRM with the type of teamwork he saw on the show as these men hunted and captured rattlesnakes. FYI: CRM is the abbreviation for Customer Relationship Management. Companies and organizations need a CRM set up in order to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. Creating custom applications requires good communication and lots of smooth flowing teamwork to make sure everything works seamlessly and successfully. We all looked at him skeptically. Are you kidding? These guys are risking their lives trying to make a living hunting and capturing rattlesnakes. How can you compare the two? Well, there is a lot of pressure when creating customized applications for Salesforce, just as there is a lot of pressure capturing rattlesnakes. We weren't convinced. However his description of the episode involving Bibby and his team was engaging enough that we all decided to watch repeats of the ‘Rattlesnake Republic’. And it's true. Jackie Bibby is entertaining. I would love to see one of his live shows.
When asked why he got into rattlesnake handling, Jackie replies "I guess it was for the pure excitement. I started out in Brownwood, but the snake handler's real competition is in Taylor, Texas the first weekend in March each year where the National Rattlesnake Sacking Championship is held."
"I got involved with rattlesnake handling for the first time just out of high School. I traveled from my home town of Rising Star 25 miles to Brownwood where the sport of sacking was dreamed up by the Jaycees."