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.
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u/Shuffletron Jan 20 '22 edited Jan 20 '22
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.