Which snake is the smartest?

[Luvyna]

And funnily enough, I've heard the statement from more than one person that "retics are DUMB". I guess it really depends on your snake and what your criteria for intelligence is. I personally would call the king cobra the "smartest" snake, but that could just be because personality in a snake indicates smarts to me, and kings have that in spades. If you love your snakes and they work for you, it doesn't matter how "smart" or "stupid" they are. We gotta love 'em because they're amazing animals!

Haha that's fair, I've certainly also seen videos of derpy retics And very true, snakes are wonderful pets regardless of whether they're smart or not.

Great topic- It's hard to say which snakes are the smartest, because just like humans or dogs, not every member of a given species is equally-cognizant. My short answeris rattlesnakes & rat snakes, but it will take some time to explain, & some things, I'm not sure that I should, but in any event I'm busy right now & I'll have to come back to this.

I've never met any King cobras so I cannot offer a personal opinion about them, but there was a lady many years ago who free-handled them & lived relatively unscathed until well into her 60's, when a bite from a small young & newly-acquired cobra (not a King) managed just enough of a bite when she was distracted for an interview, and that's how she died...Grace Olive Wiley under-estimated that deadly little thing, in part because it was too small to get its mouth around her hand (they have fixed fangs, not retractable & longer fangs like rattlesnakes do). Anyway, King cobras are known to have been reliably tamed- Wiley is the one I know most about- & that ability of a snake to recognize & remember a human handler as being no threat & without ever trying to bite is surely a sign of their intelligence.

I would love to hear your stories about rattlesnakes and rat snakes! I remember that story you told about one of your rescue rattlesnakes trying to follow you after you released it back into the wild, which was really amazing. I've heard people who work with rattlesnakes for venom extraction also say that rattlesnakes are incredibly intelligent and also harder to work with to extract venom compared to snakes like black mambas because they really understand what's going on.

Wow that story about Wiley is incredible! I'm always amazed to see people free-handling King Cobras. Definitely not something I would dare to do. Sad to hear she passed away Accidents can happen easily. It's very common for bites to happen when handling animals during interviews, many people have also been attacked by dogs in similar situations.

If the standard for smart = capacity to learn then I'll go with my retics. I have two in enclosures with sliding doors, and I had to buy jeweler's locks for the doors because both figured out they could slide open the doors by scraping along the door from the inside. I watched one do it after putting him back when I thought I left the door open by accident, and when he thought I wasn't looking he did it again.

Sounds like you have some very mischievous retics! I'm impressed they figured out how to open sliding doors without hands haha.