Are Snakes Dumb?

As a scientist, I automatically know more about reptiles than you do.

Can snakes get bored? Should you bother decorate their setups at all or is that a waste of time and money? Is snake enrichment a thing or are we just morons trying to treat them as though they were human beings? Owning a new pet means I get to worry about all sorts of weird new shit.

So the other day I went and got myself a snek and he looks like this:

♥

I know nothing about snakes. So I tried and do my research in order to become a responsible snake owner and what do you know - nobody knows shit about snakes! And that's because snakes are weird. They're scaley flesh tubes with one hole at the top and one hole at the bottom. They don't express themselves. Can a snake be happy? Can it be sad? How the fuck would anyone know? They're not cats, after all.

You see, mammals are easy. They're social by design, because they have to be. When you get a newborn kitten, it's basically like a computer with an empty hard drive. The mother of our clever cat taught her how to eat, play and shit in a box, which ultimately installed the kitten's operating system. Cat 10, basically - it gets the job done, but the cat requires 18 hours of standby mode each day in order to download updates. Meanwhile, there weren't enough resources left for our dumb cat, so she got stuck with Cat95 and you have to reboot her every 20 or so minutes.

She's legally retarded.

They're basically worthless until you install all the drivers for eyesight, hair, basic walking animations and so forth. They get most of their basic programs and day-by-day software via LAN from the other mammals around them. Monkey see, monkey do.
Meanwhile, most reptiles are like something you order from Dell. Or Alienware, if you shell out for some overpriced colour morph, what do I care. They come with their OS pre-installed. When a snake hatches, it immediately knows how to snake. It can see, it'll strike at you, it'll eat a cheeseburger if you offer it politely. A snake immediately snakes. A snake doesn't have to play or watch its mother in order to learn how to hunt. Snake just knows. Snake won't watch you and try to understand what you're doing, it won't imitate anyone.

And unlike barking, growling, waggings doggos and purring and hissing kitties, the antisocial snakes don't do an awful lot in terms of communication. Yeah, they'll hiss a bit as a warning signal, but that's about as good as it gets. They don't display any sort of mood, because they're not designed to be social in that way. So it's tempting to say they're simply very primitive and unfeeling. It's a bit difficult to find proof to the contrary.

Asshole and proud.

There's an interesting discussion going on among major breeders in the US, where people argue about whether or not it's okay for a snake to be kept in a drawer. Basically, imagine something like a sock drawer but warmer, with a bit of paper on the floor, a water bowl, a warm spot and absolutely nothing else. Behold:

Does the snake feel happy in there? Or claustrophobic? Can it feel anything at all?

Some breeders say that you could put a hidey spot or a decorative plant in there, but that the snake probably wouldn't care. If a snake lived inside a hollow tree, it wouldn't start decorating or have an extra hiding spot inside of its tree, either. Their words, not mine.
The thing is, though - that snake inside its tree can leave. It has an entire forest around itself. It does have actual plants everywhere, spots to hide, places to climb and all that sort of thing. Hell, I don't know enough about snakes to tell you whether or not that snake inside its tree would even care. Does it come out and explore? Climb on shit for the heck of it? Or does it just stay inside its tree all night and day, look at nothing, do nothing, interact with nothing? If nothing else, this video suggests that some snakes actually quite enjoy having a bit of a stretch by climbing on things.

The thing is - we don't know. Nobody knows for sure. Based on that, it's apparently okay to stuff them in a tiny drawer with absolutely nothing inside, because the snake *probably* doesn't care. I don't find that very satisfying. Yes, it might not care. It's unlikely. But that automatically means the snake just might care more than we can tell. We don't know whether or not snakes are even intelligent enough to get bored, but for as long as we can't rule it out 100% - isn't it a bit cruel to just put them away like wanky tubesocks?

One of these things is not like the others.

Now, in order for a snake to get bored or crave some sort of activity or entertainment it would have to possess a certain level of intelligence. Snake observes or experiences something and alters its behavior based on the acquired knowledge. Learning. I've seen something like that in our pet snakes three times, so I'll go ahead and list them from 'meh' to 'okay, that's pretty neat':

- I would occasionally feed Claire's garter snake a small cube of fried beef when preparing dinner. Eventually, the snake would come to the front of her vivarium and wait for a treat each time I cooked beef. To be fair, she may just have been excited about smelling food in general and would have come out one way or another. But whenever there was beef on the hob, she'd be out and about, waiting for her share. It seemed as though she had learned that certain smells from the kitchen meant she was about to be fed.

- Our royal python lives in a translucent box, meaning he can see you when you approach him from above. His natural reaction was to hide and completely lose his shit, because when you're a medium-sized snake, most predators will come from above. Being the asshole that she is, my cat would repeatedly jump on the python's box and scare the crap out of him. This worked for about two or three days. Nowadays, the cat can sleep right on top of his box and the snake is no longer afraid. It appears he has learned that the cat is not a threat.

- Our carpet python has a little cave inside her vivarium, where she curls up and goes to sleep when she's shedding or generally not in the mood to put up with us. The cave has to be placed *perfectly* underneath her heater at all times. If you move it anywhere else, she will put it right back where it belongs. She knows where the warmest spot in her tank is and places her favourite hiding and sleeping spot accordingly.

None of these examples are groundbreaking in any way. Our snakes don't help us file our taxes, they don't know how to operate heavy machinery and I reckon our garter snake never even understood French and just faked it when we asked her to pick the wine for her dinner. But - each of them displayed habits and changes in behavior, which wouldn't be of any use to them in the wild.

Utterly useless: My cat, two weeks after she was born.

I believe it's a safe bet that most snakes living outdoors won't come across a great deal of cooked dinners or somebody hand-feeding stuff to them, so a snake anticipating a treat based on a scent coming from the kitchen seems pretty remarkable to me. A snake which just stops going into full defense mode when something approaches from above probably won't get very old in the wild. I'm also not sure how to imagine a wild snake reliably moving its favourite hiding spot to a permanent source of heat. These are all things these animals started to do as they adapted to their lives in our house.

Assuming my observations are accurate and I'm not reading a whole lot of nonsense into these situations due to some form of confirmation-bias, I believe it's possible that these snakes are aware of their surroundings to at least some extent that goes beyond sleeping, shitting and lurking for something edible. It looks as if their programming may be suitable for more than simply striking at anything vaguely rodent-shaped. And if that's true, then maybe, just maybe it isn't such a nice thing to put them in some dark drawer with nothing but a bit of water and a newspaper and absolutely nothing ever happening around them. I've seen what sitting in a dark room with only the TV on day after day can do to some people. Most of these snakes can't even read their newspapers. I know, snakes aren't people. But based on what I've seen, I find it a bit reckless to simply go ahead and assume they can't get a little bit dull if you keep one like a sock. Don't do that to your snake. Don't keep it like a sock. You may most certainly keep it in a sock, of course.

A snock, if you will.