Last month, a team of scientists from Macquarie University, the University of Oxford, and several other academic institutions around the world published an article in Scientific Reports that proposed python meat as a potentially sustainable way to feed the world. (Fast Company covered the report as well.)
By studying commercial python farms in Vietnam and Thailand, the authors compared the efficiency and potential environmental impacts of python farming to that of other animals, like cattle and salmon. Noting that the pythons grew quickly, required few resources, and were able to withstand long periods of fasting, the authors concluded that pythons could be an eco-friendly and reliable meat source. But this takeaway is built on several false assumptions and omissions, and misses a glaring key point: Plant-based foods are a much better alternative.
For context, python farming seemingly has some advantages over the livestock farming that’s more common in the global north, like cattle and pig farming. Per pound of edible meat produced, pythons require less land, less food, and hardly any water. They coexist with each other peacefully, and are seemingly less prone to illness than other livestock species.
Introducing an invasive (and dangerous) species
The problem is that the report’s authors fail to demonstrate that python meat would in fact be a sustainable option, and several glaring concerns go unaddressed. For one thing, pythons are not native to North America, and they can be a threat to foreign ecosystems. South Florida, for example, already has a Burmese python problem due to escapees from the exotic pet trade. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, they’re “one of the most concerning invasive species in the Everglades.”
If escaped pets pose such a major threat to the environment, we can only imagine what an entire industry built on the invasive species could unleash. After all, in places that do farm reptiles, snake escapes are pretty common. It may sound dramatic, but if we become a snake farming country, we should be prepared for the possibility of rogue pythons on the loose, eating whatever other animals (farm or pet) they come into contact with.
To meet wide demand, python farming in the U.S. would have to go the industrial agriculture (aka, factory farming) route, and that’s guaranteed to have negative ecological consequences. For instance: snakes may mostly eat “waste” animals, like rodents that we consider pests and want to exterminate anyway, but that will cease to be practical if an entire snake meat industry crops up where there wasn’t one before. (In fact, there’s already an entire mouse farming industry dedicated to feeding pet snakes.)
Sustainable food researcher Kajsa Resare Sahlin, speaking to New Scientist about this study, raised the point that “if a whole industry develops around this as a feed source, it will create perverse incentives to maintain ‘rat problems’—and the implications for local communities could of course be vast.” I think the last thing many of us want to see would be even greater populations of rats on our city streets.
Then there’s the fact that python farming is, as you might predict, a dangerous job. The reticulated python, one of the types discussed in the study, is capable of killing a human in minutes and swallowing them whole within an hour. This exact thing happened to a snake farmer in Sulawesi, Indonesia, in 2017, and if we had a sizable python farming industry in the U.S., we would be putting our laborers at the same terrifying risk.
Even career snake farmers live with the risk of dangerous, sometimes lethal snake bites. While pythons aren’t venomous, a python bite can cause serious harm to handlers, especially if they become infected with bacteria. The python study even acknowledges that feeding can be “labor-intensive,” as pythons need to be removed from their enclosures and fed separately so that they don’t attack each other, and for this some technical expertise is required. Given that in the U.S., animal agriculture workers are already some of the most at-risk and least protected laborers, introducing giant snakes certainly feels like cause for concern.
Inviting even more cruelty
Introducing a new kind of cruelty to our food system is both immoral and completely unnecessary. In the U.S., we torture and slaughter nearly 10 billion land animals every year for food. We have more technology and cultural literacy than ever enabling us to eat more plant-based meals. Why would we create a whole new industry of animal suffering? Consider that this would mean systematically imprisoning and killing living beings who are capable of experiencing pain and forming social relationships.
The study makes some vague gestures toward animal welfare, but little is said about how cruelty-free the day-to-day farming practices actually are. The authors even admit that “the biology and husbandry requirements of pythons are poorly understood relative to many endothermic taxa,” implying that we can’t always know what is humane or inhumane treatment of a python.
And while the study focuses on reticulated and Burmese pythons, investigations by animal activists into the Ball python trade have highlighted serious ethical issues and disregard for the standards of care that do exist. A report from World Animal Protection went as far as to say, “ball pythons have complex and specific requirements to meet even their most basic needs in captivity—including the ability to extend to the full length of their bodies. The only place where these behavioral and biological needs can be fully met is in the wild.”
Plants not pythons
The authors of the study note that pythons could be a saving grace for people in parts of the world stricken by severe protein deficiency. But experts caution that we already have the solution on our hands, and it’s not a whole new industry. Lin Schwarzkopf, head of zoology and ecology at James Cook University, expressed this to The Guardian in no uncertain terms: “What we should be doing is feeding the world with plant material if we want to support large numbers of people.” Plant-based proteins are generally some of the most cost-effective and accessible options we have—there’s no good reason to turn to a method that’s destructive, dangerous, and cruel.
And while python farming as it currently exists seems to be pretty resilient to zoonotic diseases, at least according to the authors of the study, there’s no telling if a more built-up, industrialized snake industry would be quite as impervious. Pythons are vectors for illnesses like salmonella, campylobacteriosis, and chlamydia, which can be transmitted via snake excrement, open wounds, and perhaps most insidiously, contaminated water. Young children are at particularly high risk of contracting illnesses from invasive pythons, sometimes experiencing meningitis, sepsis, and infection of the bones and joints.
There’s no guarantee that snakes would remain disease-resistant if kept in even more cramped conditions, possibly even coming into contact with the water supply. Keeping animals in close confinement has led to the rise of several diseases that end up being transmitted from one species to another, even in ways we didn’t previously think possible—just days ago, for instance, it came out that a cattle worker in Texas is believed to have contracted bird flu from a sick cow. If we keep trying to work and rework conventional animal agriculture, we’re just going to see new—and potentially worse—versions of the same life-threatening problems we’ve always seen.
If we’re going to revolutionize our food system, we need revolutionary ideas, not Band-Aids. Snake meat doesn’t deserve an “eco-friendly” halo. Even if it turns out to be marginally better than other kinds of animal meat on a few metrics, it’s more ecologically harmful in other ways, and nowhere as sustainable as plants. Furthermore, raising snakes for food is dangerous for farmers, and filled with the ethical pitfalls inherent in any kind of industrial animal agriculture.
Whole plant-based foods like beans and lentils have always been a viable option. And these days, plant-based meat—from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods—that looks and tastes increasingly like the real thing is available. Others like Upside Foods and Good Meat are even learning how to grow actual meat without having to kill an animal. We have bigger guns in the fights against hunger and climate change than simply adding a new animal to our menus. Let’s use them.