omg-snakes:

Current mood: being held by your humansperson for twenty minutes without incident, dozing off on their lap while they looked at their phone, and then biting the crap out of their hand and musking on them because they moved their arm and it startled you awake and you forgot where you were for a few seconds.

Can snakes feel emotions? Ive always wondered and never saw any scientifical proofs of it, so if you have some, i would like to see them. Because i love snakes but I dont want to adopt one if Im not sure they can feel happyness (an empty shell would be sad).

omg-snakes:

Hi there!

The answer is yes, but not the way mammals do. Reptile emotional responses are fairly basic and are usually observable as aggression, fear, hunger beyond immediate biological need, trust, and pleasure (like an iguana that likes their cheek spots being rubbed).
Alligators will even protect babies that aren’t their immediate offspring, which is evidence of some complex emotional intelligence but still nothing close to the emotions displayed by birds and mammals.

We do know that snakes can identify the people who feed and handle them regularly and distinguish them from strangers, and they may be more calm when being handled by people they know versus new people.

Remember also that while feeling “happy” may be important to you as a human, what you consider happiness is much simpler for a snake. It’s more important that they feel physically comfortable in their environment, safe to engage in species-typical behaviors, and able to occasionally explore new opportunities in the form of enrichment. Safe, comfortable, and engaged are the snake equivalents of happiness and it’s not a lot but that’s still a million miles away from being an empty shell devoid of feeling.

We reptile keepers do personify our pets A LOT and this is to help others see them as relatable and cute and desirable companions and deserving of more than a tiny barren prison cell in which to barely exist and produce babies for the profit of their keepers.
The truth is that our snakes don’t love us back, and that’s very okay. It won’t stop us from loving and caring for them as best we can. Their snakey versions of happiness, simplified though they may be, make us happy without needing to feel appreciated or loved. And ultimately, isn’t that the point of keeping reptiles pets in the first place? If you want something that loves you and can display that love, get a mammal or a bird as your companion animal.

A snake won’t love you the way you’ll love them, but they may come to trust you. Trust is the instinctual core of love, and that’s enough reward for those who choose a reptile as a pet.

There are actually a few scientific articles that explore the emotional responses of reptiles and they seem very interesting but they’re behind paywalls (boo, academic elitism) so you may not be able to access them. I listed them below so you can check them out if you’re really very curious.

I hope this helps!

A “How-To” Guide for Designing Judgment Bias Studies to Assess Captive Animal Welfare  
Emily J. Bethell
Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 
Volume 18, 2015 – Issue sup1: Advancing Zoo Animal Welfare Science and Policy: Selected Papers From the Detroit Zoological Society 3rd International Symposium (November 2014)

Melatonin Levels in the Gastrointestinal Tissues of Fish, Amphibians, and a Reptile
George A. Bubenik Shiu Fun Pangb
General and Comparative Endocrinology
Volume 106, Issue 3, June 1997, Pages 415–419   

Characterization of the raphe nuclei of the reptile Ctenosaura pectinata
Fructuoso Ayala-Guerrero, Salvador Huitrón-Reséndiz, Raul Mancilla
Physiology & Behavior
Volume 50, Issue 4, October 1991, Pages 717–722

Emotion: An Evolutionary By- Product of the Neural Regulation of the Autonomic Nervous System
STEPHEN W. PORGES
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 807, Integrative Neurobiology of Affiliation, The pages 62–77, January 1997