They have scaly, forked tongues and can measure up to 20 feet long. Pythons may also be some of the most Earth-friendly meat that can be raised on the planet.
A group of researchers studied two large python species for 12 months on farms in Thailand and Vietnam, where snake meat is considered a delicacy, and found that they were more efficient to raise than other animals.
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Their research, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests python farming could offer a solution to rising food insecurity around the world that is worsened by climate change.
Studying more than 4,600 pythons, researchers found that both Burmese and reticulated pythons grew rapidly in the first year of their lives and required less food (in terms of what is known as feed conversion: the amount of feed needed to produce one pound of pythons). meat) than other farm products, including chicken, beef, pork, salmon and even crickets.
The snakes were fed a mixture of locally sourced foods, including wild-caught rodents, pork byproducts and fish pellets. They gained weight by up to 1.6 ounces per day, with females growing faster than their male counterparts.
Snakes were never force-fed, and researchers found that the reptiles could fast for long periods of time without losing much body mass; This meant they required less labor to feed than traditional farm animals.
“They need very little water. A python can survive on the dew that forms on its scales. “He just smokes his flakes in the morning and that’s enough,” said Daniel Natusch, a herpetologist and biodiversity expert who participated in the research. “Theoretically you could stop feeding it for a year.”
In a world where scientists predict climate change will lead to more extreme weather and environmental shocks, it is “almost a species” that can tolerate heat, withstand food shortages and produce protein “much more efficiently than anything studied to date.” dream come true,” Natusch said.
It tastes like chicken
Snakes have long been valued in Asia, where they are used in traditional medicines and dishes such as Hong Kong’s famous snake soup. Snake farms have emerged in Southeast Asia and China in recent years, meeting the growing demand for snake meat and skins used in luxury leather products.
During his research, Natusch ate snake barbecued, sautéed, curried and dried. He stated that it tasted like chicken, but a little more delicious. Because snakes have no limbs, little is wasted during butchering, he said. Filleting is also extremely easy: “Just move your knife over the backstrap and you’ll have a four-foot-long piece of meat.”
Even so, Natusch concedes that snakes are unlikely to make up a large portion of Western diets any time soon. In his native Australia, he said: “The only good snake is a dead snake. People are quite afraid of them.” (Pythons are non-venomous and generally slow-moving, but they have large teeth and can bite if provoked. They have been known to eat small pets, including cats and dogs.)
In the United States, Burmese pythons are considered an invasive species because they proliferate in Florida’s Everglades, where they are hunted to decimate the population. In a study last year, the U.S. Geological Survey described Florida’s python problem as “one of the most challenging invasive species management problems worldwide.”
Because store-bought meat is relatively inexpensive and easier to find than catching these slippery creatures, Natusch doesn’t envision a future where snake farming will be the answer to America’s python problem. But he sees snakes as a potential climate solution for farmers in places like Africa, where food insecurity is a growing problem as climate disasters outpace any innovation in farming techniques.
“At discretion [farmers are] “If you’re happy to catch a few pest rodents in their corn or maize and feed them an occasional python, you’ve got a high-quality, durable protein right there,” he said.
The needs of a python are quite simple. They are inherently sedentary and happily coexist with other snakes, displaying “several of the complex animal welfare issues commonly seen in caged birds and mammals,” the researchers said.
While some conservationists have voiced concerns that commercial snake farming could lead to the illegal harvesting of wild populations, Natusch, who leads a group of snake experts for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, argues that the opposite is true: It helps local communities protect wild populations and the habitats on which they depend. financial incentive.
The barriers to entry for snake farming are low compared to laboratory-grown meat, which carries significant costs and requires technical expertise. In Asia, snakes are kept in simple enclosures in warehouses. Even without the genetic engineering that has been applied to domesticated animals such as cows and chickens over the years, snakes still stand out, he said.
“We’re just scratching the surface here, basically the basic product: The animal in its natural state without any domestication or anything, it still outperforms all the other taxa.”
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