wilomn - I see what you are saying and here's my thought. You're right to some extent. You mentioned dogs being bred to be aggressive so I'll use dogs as an example in what I'm going to say.

When breeders started to produce the lineage that was to become the American Pit Bull Terrier they had a few things in mind. Fearless, tenacious, drive, desiring to please no matter the cost and 100% docile towards humans. They used to give the pups something commonly known as a bite test. Which essentially was to see if they could get the animal to bite out of anger or fear. Any that did were immediately culled (that is killed) so they couldn't infect future dogs with a gene that might cause aggression.

In the fight and bull baiting rings any dog that snarled or snapped or bit a human was killed on the spot. The people promoting APBTs had a very strict standard of the type of animal they wanted and selective breeding and a willingness to kill those animals that didn't meet that standard got them exactly what they set out to get.

Can you for one second imagine today someone doing anything similar with their snakes in an effort to insure that only the "best" genes were passed on? I can't. I mean imagine you stick you hand into a tank with a few baby retics and all but one strikes and hisses at you. You kill all but the one and set it aside to be used in bringing in future generations of snakes. I absolutely don't see anything like that happening with snakes and that's one reason I don't see them becoming domesticated.

Beyond that we have the backyard breeders. Just like they've all but destroyed the Pit Bull breed I can easily see that happening to snakes. Hell people are all but giving away burmese and retics even freshly hatched because everyone and their mother saw dollar signs when it came to breeding snakes. How often do you hear a hobbyist breeder say "You know there's too many retics out there right now so I'm going to take this breeding season off and maybe next."? Pretty much never or if they do it's a financial consideration more than anything.

But I digress. A woman is dead, killed by a wild animal that lives in a cage and she did something stupid. But how stupid are the rest of us for keeping wild animals in cages just a few feet from where we sleep?