Snakes ARE affectionate

[sophiedufort]

Originally Posted by prairiepanda

I feel a better understanding of the function of the limbic territory would contribute to this discussion.

Thank you so much for your detailed and valuable research.

[jjhill001]

I really hate how cool studies like these cost money to look at.

[prairiepanda]

Originally Posted by jjhill001

I really hate how cool studies like these cost money to look at.

If anyone has specific questions I can pull up excerpts, but unfortunately I can't share the full articles. Hopefully there are other students or university-associated users here who also have access to this literature and can add their own input.

[Rattlehead]

Awesome research Prairiepanda! Gotta read it with calm.

[jjhill001]

Yeah, I was trying to pull some research on Baird's rat snakes. They wanted like 12 bucks to look at a 40 year old study.

[SoPhilly]

"What I’d really like to see is a study monitoring the brain activity of rattlesnakes carrying out maternal care tasks and comparing it to brain activity during activities such as “kissing” when interacting with handlers. Would the same regions of the brain light up? How would the results then compare to acts of affection in birds or mammals? But the biggest question is; who would pay for such research?"

Yo, I absolutely would, let's get a kickstarter going .

Honestly, I think a bigger question is how you would get a rattlesnake to engage in maternal care tasks while in a functional MRI scan. You'd then have to get in there with it and let it kiss you, no fair using some other species of snake.

I all seriousness, good on you for researching, and if you stumble across anything free you can link to for those of us outside the ivory tower, please do! I was actually trying to read about the limbic system of reptiles earlier today because of this thread.

Excerpts and price tags. Boo.

[SSSSnakes]

Half the people in the world don't know how they feel or if they love something. They have to go to a psychiatrist to try and understand what they feel. How are we to really expect to learn what a snake is feeling.

Can a snake love something? It's like the age old question. How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop? The world may never know. LOL

[MDT]

Originally Posted by ssssnakes

it's like the age old question. How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop? The world may never know. Lol

142.........

[prairiepanda]

Originally Posted by SSSSnakes

Can a snake love something? It's like the age old question. How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop? The world may never know. LOL

That question is easy to answer, if you've got $100 kicking around and are really curious. Challenge a high school robotics club develop a licking simulation machine for "a chance to win" $50. Then spend the other $50 on tootsie pops and have the machine lick all of them to the core, counting each lick(this is a feature that can be programmed into the robot so it wouldn't even need to be monitored closely). Get yourself a free trial of JMP or learn the language of R to analyze your data, and you have your answer

Tootsie pops aside, you're right that we might not ever know for certain whether snakes can love. It might be impossible to test directly(although the Ledoux paper I found has some suggested directions of research that could be a starting point). But we can do as we do with many of the mysteries of nature and formulate theories with high potential of being true based on collected evidence. After all, gravitational radiation has never been observed directly but we deduce that it must exist based on the effects we observe on mass. It could turn out that the theory is entirely wrong, but the likelihood of it being correct is reasonably high because it fits our observations and the model makes accurate predictions. I would never seek to "prove" anything in science, but we can all search for compelling evidence of what is true.

[RAD House]

Read prairie pandas findings. If you still don't see an answer I can not help you.

[RAD House]

Peer reviewed paper about snakes being capable of love.

Here's What Happened When a Florida Man Tried to Kiss a Cottonmouth Snake

[MDT]

Originally Posted by MesoCorney

Peer reviewed paper about snakes being capable of love.

Here's What Happened When a Florida Man Tried to Kiss a Cottonmouth Snake

you're kiddin', right?

[EL Ziggy]

ANYTHING is possible no matter how infinitesimally small the probability. We may NEVER KNOW with absolute certainty a snake's propensity to feel or display LOVE as WE subjectively define it but the science so far overwhelmingly says snakes do not have that capability. Based on science, my personal experiences and observations, and the vast majority of keepers that I know, I'm going to stay in the snakes don't love camp. I still LOVE SNAKES and I hope my snakes "feel" or sense that they are safe and well cared for.

[grapefruit]

Damn, i just spent atleast an hour reading all these posts

[SSSSnakes]

Originally Posted by grapefruit

Damn, i just spent atleast an hour reading all these posts

That's an hour of your life you will never get back. LOL