Watch These Guys Handle a Pissed Off, 12-Foot King Cobra

Whether they're hiding in toilets or chasing baby iguanas, snakes can instill fear in everyone, even Indiana Jones. So it's not surprising that professional herpetologists like Kevin Torregrosa, featured in Animal Planet's new series The Zoo, exercise extreme caution when transporting a cornered, aggressive king cobra.

The video above is a hair-rising record of that encounter. As Torregrosa explains, "The problem with him is that he's a big snake. He's over 12 feet." Torregrosa and his associate have to coax the snake -- which has been cooped up in a quarantined box -- out of that box, into a small room which isn't nearly that wide, and eventually into a bag they can use to put it in their zoo's reptile habitat.

"The way the room is oriented, the snake in one charge can cut off all your exits," Torregrosa says in the video. That makes using poles to move the king cobra -- the longest venomous snake species on earth and extremely dangerous when provoked -- an especially tricky enterprise.

First, the two men have to reorient the cage to another side of the room, to give them more space. When that doesn't work and the snake rears up and charges at them, they decide to move the cage to the floor. That allows them to coax the snake out of the cage, eventually get a hand on its tail, and hook its body into a bag -- before the snake slithers out of the bag and back onto the floor. Torregrosa and his pal then have to then figure out how to do it over again, and fast.

We won't spoil the rest of the sweat-inducing, spine-tingling video for you. Luckily no one got bitten.

h/t Animal Planet

Eric Vilas-Boas is a writer and editor at Thrillist. Follow him @e_vb_.