A Real Smart Asp: Snakes Show Surprising Ability To Learn

[Bogertophis]

I feel like a lot of animals are more intelligent than most give them credit for, and the reason we don't is because for many species (like snakes), they're hard for us to "read" compared to others. With more expressive animals such as dogs it's a lot easier for us to get an idea of what's going through their heads and gauge their smarts accordingly. That and like the study demonstrated, not every species can be tested in the same manner and experiments need to be adjusted for different lifestyles.

Yes, exactly that. Snakes are stoic & silent, not social & not easy to motivate- it's been a huge challenge to find humans that want to work with them at all, much less to find ways to test them, but I'm so glad that some have tried their best to do so. All creatures deserve to be understood & not maligned out of human ignorance.

And not only that, but as in this case, scientists may look for & can sometimes discover new things that may have implications for human health as well. One reason that having various life forms go extinct is bad for human life is that those animals or plants are no longer around for us to learn things from- there's always more that we don't know, besides the impact that their loss may have on other existing plants & animals.