"Less than seasoned" snake owners

[Lizardlicks]

New snake owners are already nervous that they're doing it wrong, any pet owner is that way, so when giving advice, give it in a friendly manner. I just read a post asking if snakes are ticklish, and instead of giving actual answers, people were just smartasses.

I think where the conflict is coming here is not clashes in husbandry methods, but new snakes owners, who've never owned a reptile before, reacting to things their snakes do as if it were a mammal, with the same kind of emotional response as higher brained animals. They are not mammals though, and I think the more seasoned keepers are just generally, gently amused by newbies' rampant propensity toward anthropomorphizing. Snakes do not have the emotion processing centers in their brains that most mammals and even some other reptiles do. That isn't to say that the animals don't express themselves at all, whether they are comfortable and relatively stress free in their environment, but learning those cues when you're used to how, say, a dog or cat would deliver them, can be an on going process. For an example: something like, "Oh, he's so curious, he loves to explore!" could actually mean for a snake that likes to stay still and hidden, like a BP, that there is something in its environment that is causing it discomfort, and it's looking for a means to get away from what ever that is.

Doing a little research and learning about the animals behavior in the wild can go a long way to deciphering what its captive behavior is actually trying to tell you, but it's still a trial and error process. New owners just need time and patience. In the mean time, reading things like "he loves me, so he gives me kisses!" is still going to be funny.