Freek Vonk gets his own show on Discovery Channel
Biologist Freek Vonk had already appeared in the Time Warp programme, where he was shown milking a snake for its venom, which he needed for his doctoral research. On Friday 18 September, he explained his fascination for snakes to Matthijs van Nieuwkerk in ‘De wereld draait door’, a Dutch news and entertainment programme.
Watch the clip from ‘De wereld draait door’
Vonk has recently signed a contract with Hollywood film company Creative Differences.m nominated earlier this year for an Oscar nomination for its production by Werner Herzog. The programme Vonk will be presenting is Ultimate Predators: King of Kings. He will be travelling to Indonesia for the programme, looking for the biggest and most venomous snake of all, the King Cobra. He intends to track the whereabouts of the species by catching them and fitting them with a transmitter.
Of course, Vonk also wants to milk the snakes to collect venom for the research he is carrying out funded by a Top Talent subsidy from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Creative Differences is also working on another series, Venom Quest, in which Vonk travels the world looking for poisonous animals to milk, including snakes, spiders, scorpions, fish and many more. As yet, we have no firm information about when the series will be broadcast.
Freek Vonk's website