As people around
the world prepare to ring in the Year of the Snake, here's a simple way to honor
these mysterious, misunderstood animals: Keep them out of your wardrobe. Snakes
and other reptiles should not have to suffer and die just for our cold-blooded
vanity.
According to a
recent International Trade Centre (ITC) report, the global trade in python skins--which
is poorly regulated and often illegal--is threatening these animals' survival. Half
a million python skins are exported each year from Southeast Asia to be turned
into designer handbags, boots and other accessories, and the extent of the
illegal trade is thought to be on a par with the legal trade. Many snakes are
illegally caught in the wild--and killed before they are able to
reproduce--because it takes so long for farmed snakes to grow large enough for
their skin to be usable.
Of course, for the snakes, who are beaten to death,
decapitated or suffocated,
it hardly matters whether the trade in their skins is "legal" or not.
In either case, it is unethical. In Vietnam, for example, snakes are commonly
killed by being inflated with air compressors. This "is functionally the
equivalent of suffocating them " they inflate and suffocate and it kills them,"
says Olivier Caillabet, coauthor of the ITC report.
Other snakes have hoses
inserted into their mouths, and they are pumped full of water, which causes them
to swell up like balloons, loosening their skin. Workers then impale the snakes
on meat hooks, rip their skin off and toss the animals' peeled bodies onto a
pile. After hours--or days--of unimaginable suffering, the snakes finally succumb
to dehydration or shock.
"Snakes are
never killed in a good way," says Dr. Clifford Warwick, a specialist in
reptile biology and welfare. Neither are the other animals who are killed for
the exotic-skins trade. Farmed alligators are bludgeoned to death or have a
chisel smashed through their spinal cord with a hammer. Lizards writhe in agony
as they are skinned alive. Crocodiles poached in the wild are caught with huge
hooks and wires then reeled in by hunters when they become weakened from blood loss.
These animals are
not unfeeling automatons. Snakes can feel pain, and they are keenly aware of
their environment, thanks to their ability to sense chemical stimuli with their
super-sensitive tongues and to feel vibrations. They may also have richer
social lives than we ever imagined. Female snakes separated at birth can
recognize relatives when they are reintroduced years later. One study found
that female timber rattlesnakes, who often cluster together in groups of six or
more in rookeries, prefer to associate with relatives than with strangers. Rulon
Clark, a behavioral ecologist at San Diego State University, says that snakes
are "so cryptic and secretive that, for many species, we really only have
brief glimpses of their lives."
We are also
discovering more about the other reptiles who are cruelly killed for their
skins. Researchers from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee found points along
the jaws of alligators and crocodiles that are more sensitive to touch than
human fingertips. This makes sense because mother alligators use their jaws as
we might use our hands--to gently crack open their eggs and carry their babies. Alligators communicate with one another
through hisses, yelps, coughs and other sounds, and crocodiles can recognize their
own names, as a pair of dwarf crocodiles at a facility in England have
demonstrated.
Reptiles might not
win any popularity contests in the animal kingdom, but no sentient being
deserves to be killed for something as frivolous as fashion. In the Year of the Snake and
beyond, please help save animals' skins: Don't wear them.
Paula Moore is a senior writer for the PETA Foundation, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.
