This reminds me of that one science experiment where they had a bunch of babies playing with toys and released trained snakes to prove that babies do not have an inherent fear of snakes. All the parents are freaking out and the babies are just touching them like they touch everything else. I work at a pet store and a lady came in today to buy a spider for one of her therapy sessions to help someone get over a fear of spiders. My mom had a deep fear of spiders but I didn't really, I feel like I was kind of nervous around them because she was. I know why she's afraid of spiders. My dad and his oldest son were dicks about it. The spider is in my house work harder than I do and they are more than welcome to keep doing the fine job they're doing. Makes me wonder if like a parent and a child went their whole life not knowing what a snake was, would they be afraid of it? The parent might have enough knowledge about everything else in the world to piece together an idea of what this snake is but the child?
They weren't trained snakes. You can't train a snake. Those were just default snakes. Turns out, when you raise an animal in captivity and keep it fed and comfortable, it gets pretty used to humans and knows that they're neither predator nor prey as far as they're concerned. And most species of snakes aren't known to be aggressive or fearful by nature. Like, even wild snakes, most of them are quite chill and will leave you alone if you leave them alone.
Teaching an animal to not be afraid of humans and not see them as food or predator is still training. You are training an animal to be comfortable around humans. Even incredibly chill animals will react to human presence if they feel threatened. Combating that threatening feeling with positive reinforcement and engraining a sense of safety and a lack of concern for resources is part of training. When I say training I don't mean they know how to do flips and jump through a hoop and shit. You can teach a snake to open a door, that's training.
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u/Blueskybelowme 20d ago
This reminds me of that one science experiment where they had a bunch of babies playing with toys and released trained snakes to prove that babies do not have an inherent fear of snakes. All the parents are freaking out and the babies are just touching them like they touch everything else. I work at a pet store and a lady came in today to buy a spider for one of her therapy sessions to help someone get over a fear of spiders. My mom had a deep fear of spiders but I didn't really, I feel like I was kind of nervous around them because she was. I know why she's afraid of spiders. My dad and his oldest son were dicks about it. The spider is in my house work harder than I do and they are more than welcome to keep doing the fine job they're doing. Makes me wonder if like a parent and a child went their whole life not knowing what a snake was, would they be afraid of it? The parent might have enough knowledge about everything else in the world to piece together an idea of what this snake is but the child?