[LINK] "Even Snakes Have Friends—One More Reason Not to Slaughter Them"

[rfmcdonald]

National Geographic's Brandon Keim reports on how the increased recognition of the sociableness and intelligence of snakes may help save them from humans.

[I]n the words of Melissa Amarello, a herpetologist and founder of Advocates for Snake Preservation, "they're shy, gentle creatures with rich family lives. They can have friends. They take care of their kids."

Snakes may be limbless, cold-blooded, and separated from us by a few hundred million years of evolution, but they're similar enough that we should feel empathy for them, says Amarello, who has launched a campaign against snake roundups.

Not too long ago, Amarello's plea could have been dismissed as well-meaning anthropomorphism.

Even among people open to the notion that many animals think and feel in deep, often complex ways, snakes—and reptiles in general—weren't thought to have much going on upstairs. Yet that wasn't quite fair.

Their lack of facial expressions and vocal communication, the very traits that humans rely upon to make sense of one another, predisposed people to consider snakes unfeeling.

Snakes' perceptual world, attuned to temperature and smell rather than sight, is so fundamentally different from our own that it was hard to test their intelligence.

That wasn't the snakes' shortcoming, though. It was ours.

Slowly but steadily, evidence of unexpectedly sophisticated snake behavior has accumulated. Amarello's own research used time-lapse cameras to document social interactions of Arizona black rattlesnakes. Some proved to be loners and others social, with a distinct preference for the company of certain conspecifics—or, in a less fancy word, friends.

Other researchers have described the attentiveness of rattlesnake mothers to their young, as well as a long-unrecognized complexity of social interaction.

There is more, including video, at the website.