I’ve stumbled across videos on YouTube that show snake owners feeding them a live rate or rabbit or whatever. Some people in the comments say well that’s just nature, others say it’s animal abuse. What do you think?
On reddit I saw a snake owner saying what they normally do is kill the prey beforehand with a CO2 chamber and freeze it, and that there’s no reason to feed live. Like the snakes don’t need it. If that’s true I guess it’s needless suffering then. Weird that these videos are so available on YouTube then.
There’s no way this is going to end well.
Here’s an ugly truth.
If a person is going to take on the responsibility of caring for an animal, they are supposed to give it all the care it needs. No limits to that.
Snakes as pets are a horrible idea. They can’t be domesticated, the best you can hope for is a snake that’s not aggro. This isn’t to say they aren’t just as wonderful as domesticated animals, they are. But there’s really no such thing as a pet snake, only a captive snake.
That’s not a value judgement. I’m not saying that it’s bad or wrong to keep reptiles, IDGAF as long as they’re being kept healthily in all respects.
Which means that nothing involved in keeping a snake is “natural” at all, because the snake would never strike up a deal with a human to exchange food for company. Again, natural doesn’t equal good or better, I’m using the term in the limited definition here.
Trying to pretend that feeding a snake live animals is better for the snakes is, frankly, bullshit. They’re in an enclosed space, so the truth is that the risks outweigh any rewards in terms of the snake’s well being. Even if live food provides them with some degree of mental health benefit, small mammals fight if they’re alive and awake. Snakes get injured this way, regularly.
Since there’s other ways to stimulate them into eating dead mammals without that risk, it’s a pretty shitty caregiver that opts for live feeding.
Has nothing to do with the idea of animal abuse because before you even get to the question of that, the practice falls short of its stated goal: giving the snake the best overall care while captive.
As far as why they’re available on YouTube, the platform allows a wide range of stuff that’s not necessarily in line with YouTube’s stated criteria. The company doesn’t give a fuck about animal welfare, it cares about selling ad space. It doesn’t care about anything else. That’s because it’s a company being run by yet another dickhead ceo that, by choice or by necessity of fiduciary duty, does not give a fuck about anything other than stock values. That’s always the answer to anything “why does YouTube X?”
For real, if YouTube’s owners thought that videos of decapitation and rape wouldn’t lose them ad sales, they would not care.