Welcoming the Year of the Snake – But Should Snakes Be Pets?

As we celebrate the Lunar New Year and step into the Year of the Snake, Animals Asia’s Global Director of Animal Sentience and Welfare, Dave Neale sheds light on a growing and concerning trend: snakes being kept as pets.

In December 2024, The South China Morning Post reported that snakes had become ‘vogue’ and were now being increasingly kept as ‘pets’ within Hong Kong with many people choosing snakes as companions as we welcome the ‘Year of the Snake’.

Increased urbanisation, changing lifestyles, and growing disposable incomes within mainland China, has also led to a burgeoning interest in the keeping of exotic pets with species such as the ball python reportedly becoming one of the most popular in recent years.?

In contrast to keeping high energy animals such as cats and dogs that require a lot of our time, snakes are often seen as an ‘easier’ pet to have within the home due to their apparent independence and a misunderstanding as to their basic needs. Attracting people that wish to have a house pet but do not have the lifestyle to meet the more demanding needs of a dog.

Unfortunately, alongside this rise in the demand for companion snakes comes a rise in their suffering, with many snake ‘owners’ having little understanding of the complex nature of their new purchase and how to meet their needs.

This is of course nothing new, snake keeping has been popular around the world for many decades and sadly many millions of individuals have suffered at the hands of keepers that have little knowledge with regards to their proper husbandry, diet, and veterinary care. Keeping snakes in highly unsuitable living conditions with little room for them to stretch out and void of stimulating features to replicate their natural environment.

Due to common misconceptions regarding their needs and their capacity to suffer, captive snakes often live in grossly inadequate conditions far removed from their wild environments, and severely impacting upon their welfare. Research has documented that captive snakes display over forty stress-related behavioural problems and suffer from diseases as a result of confinement, maladaptation, and poor husbandry practices.?

Despite this evidence of suffering, very little legislation is in place to ensure that the complex needs of snakes are met if they are to be kept within our homes.

In the wild, snakes live complex lives, within rich and varied different habitats. A number of species are highly social by nature. Grouping together to keep warm and to stay moist. Living in a group giving each snake better odds of escaping if attacked by a predator, and offering individuals the opportunity to develop individual relationships.

Social living and the development of relationships in rattlesnakes has been shown to provide snakes with psychological support when an individual has experienced a stressful situation, with the presence of a second snake significantly reducing a rattlesnakes' change in heart rates after they have experienced a disturbance, a phenomenon known as 'social buffering'.

And rather surprising to many, several snake species are also caring mothers, exhibiting impressive parental care for their eggs and defending and caring for their young after hatching with relationships developing between mothers and young after the young have left the nest.

Southern African pythons demonstrate caring qualities towards their young, and aggressively defending them from potential predators.?

Young Arizona black rattlesnakes are known to visit their mother’s den and associate with their mother in the first year of their life. Mothers defend their young from possible predators and observers have witnessed an adult snake actively deterring a baby from exposing themselves to a human predator, even though they were not the baby’s mother. Mothers have also been seen to stay close to their young as they first begin to explore their surroundings and herding them to safety if they move too far away.?

In 2024, researchers found evidence that Garter snakes are self-aware, demonstrating significantly different reactions when presented with their own scents as opposed to other scents, suggesting a level of self recognition, a cognitive capacity that until recently was thought to belong solely to ourselves.

Whilst many of these observations of emotional and cognitive abilities may involve species that are not commonly kept within the pet industry, their implications can be projected onto those that are. And as more research is carried out into snake cognition it is likely we will discover even more evidence of their complex emotional and cognitive lives.

It is clear from the evidence that does exist that snakes are sentient animals capable of experiencing complex emotions and such capabilities must be taken into consideration when they are being considered as companion animals in our homes.

Despite the recent increase in their popularity, snakes continue to represent a very mis-understand and poorly characterised group of species, often leading to little empathy within the public eye for their personal welfare.?

Snakes are in fact emotionally and cognitively complex animals, we owe them our respect and must do all we can to keep them out of the pet trade, out of our homes and in the wild where they belong.