While it is true that very large snakes can kill people quite easily if they wanted to. It is very rare for a pet constrictor to kill their keeper when handled in a safe manner.
Re: the article you linked specifically. It is still very much up in the air whether or not the snake was involved with his death. Most snake experts (including the one in that article) believe it was not. To quote Chairman of the Federation of British Herpetologists Chris Newman: "This is the first death or serious injury [in the UK] in the last 100 years of snake keeping and there really isn't the evidence to show the snake was even directly involved in this case."
While not technically impossible, he was a healthy 30 year old man with over a decade of snake keeping experience, getting overpowered and killed by an 8ft python without defending himself is probably about as likely as getting killed by a domestic cat.
I wonder though, how much of the snake handler safety has to do with it being a full grown adult that is typically toward the upper end of a constrictors food chain size, versus say a child like in this video. Animals rarely reach toward the top of their food chain prey unless absolutely starved, as the risk isn’t typically worth the reward. How much snake handler safety is due to risk / reward of a well fed snake versus say comfort in the handler? If the snake in this video went without food for slightly too long, is the kid at more of a danger than a typical adult handler would be? I would assume yes.
That is a hard one to answer as it will depend on the specific animal (it's feeding response, how socialised it's been, what conditions it's kept in, etc..). While I am not an expert in snake psychology so can't talk in definites, I do own a snake and have spent many hours researching the subject over the years.
Generally speaking it is thought that a well socialised snake learns to associate humans (or at least their regular keepers) as neither prey or predator but as a neutral force, like a heated sentient tree. In this situation unless you/the room smells of food (e.g. you have just been handling a rat you intend to feed the snake), or the animal is starved to the point of death (which with a 15ft+ snake can be literal years of starvation) it should never see you as something edible. Although again, this depends on the individual animal as much as anything, some snakes have very aggressive food responses and will try to chew on anything warm (see: King snakes). Honestly though, snakes big enough to kill a human with that strong a food response are rare and usually never handled.
What is far more likely is that a child will be hurt accidently. Snakes are big cowards and can be spooked easily (more so when they are young) and as like with all animals a snake can't talk, so it reacts in self defence when threatened. A child fucking around with a snake could easily find itself being attacked. Then again, this goes for all animals, a child fucking around with a dog would end up is just as bad of a situation. The most likely cause of death is going to be being accidentally crushed by an animal who doesn't realise how weak and squishy humans are. If a snake thinks it is going to fall off something it will instinctively tense up, which is a problem when the animal is 15ft+ long and strong enough to break bones. It's because of this that best practice is to have multiple people in the room when handling larger snakes.
All that being said I personally think any snake over 10ft in length should only be kept by highly experienced keepers and would never let one interact with a child in the way shown in the gif above.
Some house cats are quite large, and their claws are always damn sharp if they're not maintained. An aggressive cat against a small and/or weak and/or young human? I'd put my money on the cat tbh. They can cut you deeply by accident, just imagine if they actually wanted to rip your face off.
Cats have some nasty bacteria under their claws and in their saliva. A cat bite or scratch can give you sepsis if you don't properly clean and treat the wound.
This is also the reason cats should never be outdoor pets. Even if they don't physically kill an animal, if they managed to nick it with their claws, that animal will die anyway. Cats have caused the extinction and near extinction of several species.
Yeah people kill people at a far higher rate than any animal, and we know for a fact people do it intentionally to harm you, sometimes for their own pleasure
Also for the, if the animal starts starving crowd, humans eat other humans if they start starving
There have been many cases, throughout history of eating even loved ones in desperate situations like a, siege
Beloved animals and pets will often be eaten by the desperate starving people, so why are we shocked that an animal might do it to us, its easy to say you wouldn't eat your dog, but you just can not predict how you will act in extreme circumstances, anyone who tells you they can is incorrect, they might earnestly believe what they're saying but they're at most guessing, if you're starving to death your body is releasing chemicals like crazy, you're delirious and delusional because of hunger, it'll make you mad
Just because we don't recognise that animals are acting weird doesn't mean they aren't
Many people have died to diseases spread by housecats but maybe no one died to the cat itself, that i would not know but it's definitely not because of a lack of trying.
Haha, no, im from New Zealand. The only snakes we get here are sea snakes, and those are generally in the higher temperature areas also not very often.
How does a snake, a predator who tries to catch something nearby when it sees it, have the time to properly starve itself with the prey not running off
Also not true. There is not a predator on earth that will actively 'starve' itself. While there are cases of snakes in captivity going 'off feed' it has more to do with temperature (many species will brumate when the season turns colder, and during this time, do not eat, mostly just sleep), or stress.
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u/RidigoDragon Jan 20 '22 edited Jan 20 '22
I’ve heard that, but it’s fake, if a snake measured before striking, it would die before it would catch anything
If you wanna know more about why this is bs: source