Miss Snake Charmer is the face of a decades-old tradition featuring skinning and beheading that has prompted anger from animal rights activists

With her winsome smile, wholesome personality and soulful singing voice, Mikeilah Foust was a popular victor in her hometown pageant on Thursday night. The 17-year-old’s reward was a $1,500 scholarship and a walk through a pit of angry rattlesnakes the next morning.

Wearing a glittering tiara, camouflage chaps and a sash announcing her as “Miss Snake Charmer 2015”, the all-district volleyball player and member of a local Baptist church did her best to radiate elegance and self-assurance as she carried several restless reptiles around the hexagonal pit for the entertainment of the crowd. The high-school junior looked genuinely happy, for this, along with the opportunity to decapitate and skin western diamondback rattlesnakes, is one of the perks of the job.

Miss Snake Charmer is a quirky contest, but then Sweetwater is an unusual place. Fortunes in this dusty little west Texas town, 220 miles from Dallas, are heavily defined by the oil industry’s cycles – recently boom, now threatening bust.

But what is billed as the world’s largest rattlesnake roundup has been an annual tradition for 57 years. And since 1960, Miss Snake Charmers have been the pretty faces of a gore-steeped festival that is important to the town’s economy, vital to its identity and increasingly drawing the venom of environmentalists and animal rights activists.

Last year, 3,890lbs of rattlesnakes – the largest measuring 76in – were unwitting participants in the roundup, held in the Nolan County Coliseum’s rodeo arena. That translates to about a thousand snakes, captured by hunters in the region and transported here, where they fetch $10-$12 per pound and become bags, boots, ornaments and food. The coliseum’s cafe offers snake and fries for $6. It tastes like chicken.

Rattlesnake roundups in the US date back to 1939, and Sweetwater’s is the most famous, attracting about 30,000 people – nearly three times the town’s population.

“It’s the granddaddy of them all,” said Peggy Garner Romanowski, a retiree who made a two-day drive from Atlanta with six friends to attend. “This is on my bucket list. I’m so deathly afraid of snakes, but I find it fascinating to be around them.”

The three-day event, which ends on Sunday, is part family-friendly fair, part horror show. The milking pit, where rattlers have their jaws forced open and their venom squeezed into a funnel by bare-handed wranglers wielding metal poles with hooks, is next to a children’s face-painting booth and stacks of boxes filled with complimentary copies of the New Testament. Other stalls sell jewellery, clothes, puppets, refreshments … and rattlesnake heads, fangs out.

The milked snakes are put in bright yellow plastic bins and taken to the skinning section. Here, on a tree stump, they are stunned with a bolt gun and beheaded by a machete-wielding man in a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. Their still-writhing bodies are then strung up, sliced open and gutted. Visitors can skin their own snake and get its head in a jar for $12.

Young children queued to hold their hands under headless diamondbacks. A wrangler pinched the squirming corpses, squirting blood on to the kids’ hands. They then made red handprints on a wall. “Nice!” one father said, taking photographs. “Ew!” exclaimed a boy as he helped to fillet the entrails from a recently deceased four-footer.

For a man standing in a pit piled high with several hundred rattlesnakes, Keith Willmann was surprisingly cheerful. The 62-year-old is a volunteer with the Sweetwater Jaycees, who organise the event.

“They’re not really aggressive. If I move real fast they’ll attack me. If I just stay real slow they won’t do much of anything,” he said above the sinister noise of the snakes shaking their tails, a din like a thousand mobile phones vibrating furiously.

Every few minutes a wooden box of snakes was perched on the edge of the pit, opened and more snakes tipped in. Wearing chaps wrapped tightly around his legs with duct tape and using tongs, Willmann poked and pushed the twisting mass of reptiles, spreading them evenly around the floor as if he were picking up litter.

“We added a fence after a spectator leaned over and got bit,” he said as a viper bent its body to make a U-shape over his right, cowboy-booted foot, its forked black tongue flapping like a slender ribbon in the wind.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One one or two people of snake bites per year in Texas. Photograph: Matt Herzberger/flickr

“We just try to teach safety and how you live with them,” Willmann added. “They started this round-up because the snakes were coming into town for water. We still got snakes coming into town.”

On average only one to two people per year die from snake bites in Texas, but locals said that serpents are a persistent pest.

“Last year in Sweetwater there were three snake bites in town. They’d walk out on their front porch and get bit,” said Chris Soles, PR co-director for the roundup and a snake hunter.

“We haven’t had a severe bite in a long time, but we’ve had some close calls. Around town you get more animals bitten than humans,” said Clint Parks, Jaycees president in 2014.

Organisers are sensitive about the image of the roundup and eager to depict it as educational, respectful towards the reptiles and a useful form of population control. But animal rights proponents have criticised it as cruel and some environmentalists are concerned that the preferred way of flushing the snakes out of their dens – using gasoline fumes – is harmful to the ecosystem. The Texas Parks and Wildlife state agency is mulling a ban on gassing, which might reduce the number of snakes caught and make it harder to stage the roundup.

“Our deal is, we don’t necessarily argue against them. We agree that [gassing] could have some impact; we haven’t seen a study that has backed that. We’ve been trying to talk to Texas Parks and Wildlife to do a study just to show us exactly what damage is happening,” Parks said.

“You always think in the back of your mind one of these days we’re going to take a hit and people will lose interest, but it hasn’t happened yet … We would gladly change our means if they can help us find another way to do it. The snakes are still there, the people are still afraid of them and they want us to get them.”

Foust was raised on a ranch. Her father, Richard, said he often deals with snakes on his property and was confident that his daughter would be completely fine during her various reptile encounters this weekend. She said she was “excited to get in the pit and see that dirty part of the pageant”.

Watching as a half-dozen carcasses were tied up and slit, circulating the arena and posing for photographs with children, she said she planned to do some snake-skinning herself. Then she climbed to a gantry above Willmann’s pit and regaled the crowd with a powerful performance of the Etta James standard At Last. She had sung it to great acclaim in front of a thousand people during the pageant’s talent contest, where she had also urged her fellow young women to be strong and seize all life’s opportunities, and declared an interest in majoring in physical therapy at college.

Foust’s predecessor, Hannah Smith, said that serpent-related activities were not obligatory but an expected part of the role.

“That’s part of what you sign up for,” she said. “People who grow up here are used to dirt and blood and animals … there was never a second where I felt uncomfortable.”

She will study nursing at Abilene Christian University later this year and used her valedictory address to the pageant audience on Thursday to offer a piece of advice gleaned during her 12 months as Miss Snake Charmer: “The important lesson I have learned is not to leave a rolled up snakeskin in a Ziploc bag for four days in a row in your purse. The smell is disgusting.”

