:bash:he put them in a blender thats awful!! sorry i dnt agree with research where the animals die but it is very interesting that they can eat their own hearts and widen their heads
Although very interesting I don't really think that the scientific interest justified starving and then killing 68 snakes, as there is no real medical benefit to the information aqcuired, it's just an interesting fact. If a scientific organisation was actually starving dogs or primates to their breaking point before killing them, you'd have many animal activist groups screaming cruelty.
Totally agree! Whilst it was interesting reading, I couldn't help but feel sick that anyone could actually do that and observe to that extent. It made me feel sick to be truthful!
Can't help but find it unfortunate and slightly bizarre that in the middle of a perfectly sensible scientific article they suddenly throw in the phrase "pureed it in a blender"...... puts very nasty images into your head and shifts focus away from the adaptations discovered. Why not just leave it as "chemically euthanised each snake and conducted chemical analysis"??
I was only interested from the scientific point of view, with non feeders being my bag understanding the snakes biology helps me help them.....the blender terminology is a very poor choice of words and the concept of blending snakes is horrific, but the results of the experement, while not condoning it, are fascinating
I found it quite interesting. I believe its the same with fish, if starved they will digest all internal organs until only the reproductive organs remain, just in case there is that one last chance to reproduce before death.
didn't see the point in killing then blending them. o.k he wanted to conduct tests but what tests? the outcome of these tests wasn't even mentioned. don't bother telling me you're gonna blend a snake unless you tell me the outcome.
why didnt they just put make up on them? or make em smoke 60 bensons?
all this makes me sick.....
there was not really a positive outcome, they all died...
yes thats research hey?
i thought most people as humans try and conserve life....
man you might as well just put a hand grenade in with em and seen how far the bits fly.....
or get the lads off dirty sanchez to drink the snake smoothie....
sad as :censor:...
im sorry folks i hate this kind of thing......
it makes me sad as i love all animals.....
sorry for ranting.....:censor:
I agree that the research may not have been necassary, but, in ALL animal research, all animals die: they are almost always euthanised at the end. Thats how you know the parecetamol you took for your headache wasn't going to kill you... or any other drug: thousands of animals were killed to find it out.
Its a bit interesting, but it is bad too. I mean, you'd never read an article about a scientist starving a load of dogs and putting them in a blender. You wouldn't even hear it about mice or rats, cos people don't wanna hear about tortured animals. but when it's snakes it's fine cos the general public don't like em. The only people who'd say anything about it is people like us, but we can be ignored because we're all "snake weirdos".
Very interesting article, thanks for sharing. Pitty about the blended snakes... but I guess we would never know about this if it weren't for it. My only quarm is: did we need to know this information? Bit weird.
i think part of the point is that they weren't "starved" in the way a mammal would be - i.e. they survive incredibly well with no food and it would have had little or no lasting impact on their health if it happened in the wild.
If* there is scientific benefit to be gained from an understanding of what snakes bodies can do and how they do it then fair enough, i just wish they'd worded it better. The snakes were euthanased, what happened to the bodies afterwards to facilitate testing would not have hurt them, but is being turned into the main point!!
*article seems a bit vague, and surely it would be better to improve world food supply than to improve food deprivation tolerance??
Don't human anorexics do exactly the same thing :roll: (digest their own heart I mean)...once you run out of fat then all that is left to digest is muscle tissue and the heart being a muscle and all is just as good a target as any. I don't find that piece of research particularly fascinating at all.
Isn't it common knowledge that snakes between feeds reduce their internal organs to a fraction of their "normal" size then expand them again when they break the fast and eat? It's one way how they lower their metabolic rate between meals. You guys want to get offline and watch the Animal Planet. :Na_Na_Na_Na:
Graham.
I am a relative newbie and even I knew that snakes did this through general research on them and I didn't have to harm any snakes finding it out, maybe he doesn't have internet where he is?!? I really feel that duplicate research is just inexcusable, if everyone would just be a bit more open and share their findings (purely test results, nothing top secret!) then a lot of animals would not have to go through the same procedures just to obtain the same results for different companies...
I honestly don't think that starving the snakes then killing them was justified. Who cares what happens when it starves to death, the idea is that pet snakes don't starve to death! This was cruel and the experiment was not needed to help conserve or protect snakes.
No they euthanised them first. The problem with science is that unless the tests are repeated over and over again and the same results observed they will continue to go on. This will probably not be the first or the last we've seen of articles like this I'm afraid. How many rats died painfully during the testing of penicillin? Only to discover that the penicillin was killing the rats!
It's not worth even thinking about the tests they will be doing that we don't know about!
Interesting experiement. But surely there was a better way of analyising the results than blending them? That turned my stomach thinking of that.
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