Vipers are critically important components of the ecological communities from which they come.
Vipers are critically important components of the ecological communities from which they come. For a balanced and healthy wildlife community, these snakes need to be present. Further, they often feed on rodents, which can be associated with a wide variety of human pathogens. Vipers may well serve as components of a control mechanism of rodent populations. By consuming rodents, and the parasites on them, vipers may also be part of a control mechanism of tick-vectored illnesses, including lyme disease (see citations in the comments below). Many more people are sickened/killed every year by diseases associated with rodents, and the parasites that feed on them/spread disease, than are injured or killed by venomous snakes in the US annually. Lyme disease alone inflicts over 300,000 people in the US per year. Rodents often serve as hosts for the bacterium. For example, forty to ninety percent of white-footed mice in a given population carr...