• Question: do ophidians feel any emotional attachment?

    Asked by to Thon, Catherine, James, Natalie, Shaylon on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Shaylon Stolk

      Shaylon Stolk answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Current research indicates that snakes and other reptiles may not have the brain chemical oxytocin. That’s the chemical that allows us to feel love and attachment. However, this was a small study, so it might not be true for all ophidians or that particular study method might have missed the chemical. Also, it’s possible that reptiles feel attachment, but their brain chemistry is different. In the end, I suppose you’d have to ask a snake.

    • Photo: James Bell

      James Bell answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Interesting question, not being a reptile biologist I have to confess that I had to look up what species count as ophidians – snakes (modern and fossil) and snake-like lizards as it turns out.

      Do snakes form attachments to their keepers? There’s a lot of argument, particularly on the forums of snake owners, that how attached your snake to you depends on how many you have. People who have 1 or 2 snakes and spend lots of time petting them etc. argue that their pet snakes do respond specifically to them and people that have lots of snakes (and so spend less time with each one) think that no, snakes don’t learn attachment. I’m wary of this kind of evidence because it’s very ‘anecdotal’ (i.e. the ‘evidence’ can be really swayed by personal experience and might not really represent the real world). Just because you spend lots of time with your pet snake and bond with it, doesn’t mean it really bonds with you.

      There’s no argument that reptiles have more primitive brains than mammals and that means that much more of their behaviour is governed by instinct than what scientists would actually call learning. This isn’t to say that they can’t feel anything beyond basic needs like hunger or fear but certainly their emotions will be a great deal less complex than our own. There’s some evidence that snakes feel stress and poor living conditions for pet snakes can really influence their behaviour, so perhaps you could say that good conditions will show a benefit to their behaviour (but again, that probably isn’t the kind of affection-type emotion you might expect from a pet dog).

      I can’t seem to find a really definitive answer to this one and perhaps one of the other scientists might know but my conclusion is that people who think their snakes have emotions and form attachment are people who devote a lot of time to their pet snakes and thus think their snakes are emotionally attached to them. I haven’t seen any actual evidence of any sort that snakes can express an emotion like affection (or even that they can feel it at all) so I’m going to have to say no. This doesn’t mean I think they’re rubbish pets or anything but I don’t think for instance a snake would miss its owner if they went away and somebody else looked after it.

      Hopefully someone else knows some more of the facts that I’ve probably missed

    • Photo: Catherine Offord

      Catherine Offord answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Shaylon and James have done a pretty thorough job here – but I just wanted to add that these sorts of questions are some of the most difficult that animal behaviour scientists study. Because humans are animals and show all sorts of behaviours, it is often tempting to use our experience to try to understand more about other animals. (We don’t have this attitude towards plants or bacteria, for example.)

      However there are many things that we don’t fully understand even in humans – like emotions, ‘consciousness’ and ‘intelligence’. We may all have a few thoughts about what these things are, but we don’t really know how they work. That makes it very difficult to test for them in other animals. The challenge for a scientist in animal behaviour is both to work out what we mean by these words (e.g. as Shaylon said, we think ‘attachment’ has something to do with the chemical oxytocin), and then work out where we see them in the animal kingdom. Fun stuff!

    • Photo: Anthony Caravaggi

      Anthony Caravaggi answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I’m going to give a cop-out answer here I’m afraid as there’s little additional information I can add to the excellent answers given by the others.

    • Photo: Natalie Pilakouta

      Natalie Pilakouta answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Like others have already said, it is still unclear whether ophidians can form emotional attachment as the evidence is not conclusive. The vast majority of studies on neurobiology and on the neural mechanisms of behaviour has been done in mammals (and within mammals, these studies are mainly done in rodents, like mice and rats, which are the most commonly used mammals in laboratories).

      But there is still a lot we don’t know about these mechanisms and neural pathways in other groups like reptiles and it is entirely possible that the neurotransmitters and hormones in other species are not identical to those in mammals. This is an “open” question in science and we really do need to do more research to investigate these kinds of things, because it’s very interesting.

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