Snake for Supper?

Despite their scary reputation, pythons may be one of the most Earth-friendly meats to farm on the planet.  A group of researchers studied two large python species over 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 livestock.

Their research (published in the journal Scientific Reports) suggests that python farming could offer a solution to rising food insecurity around the globe, exacerbated by climate change.  The researchers, who studied more than 4,600 pythons, found that both Burmese and reticulated pythons grew rapidly in their first year of life, and they required less food (in terms of what’s known as feed conversion: the amount of feed to produce a pound of meat) than other farmed products, including chicken, beef, pork, salmon — and even crickets.

The snakes were fed a mix of locally sourced food, including wild-caught rodents, pork byproducts and fish pellets. They gained up to 1.6 ounces a day, with the females growing faster than their male counterparts. The snakes were never force-fed, and the researchers found that the reptiles could fast for long periods without losing much body mass, which meant they required less labor for feeding than traditional farmed animals.

“They need very little water. A python can live off the dew that forms on its scales. In the morning, it just drinks off its scales and that’s enough,” said Daniel Natusch, a herpetologist and biodiversity expert who was involved in the research. “Theoretically you could just stop feeding it for a year.”  In a world where scientists predict climate change will lead to more extreme weather and environmental shocks, a species that is heat-tolerant, resilient to food shortages and able to produce protein “far more efficiently than anything else studied to date” is “almost a dream come true,” Natusch said.

During his research, Natusch ate snake barbecued, sauteed on skewers, in curries and as jerky. He described the taste as similar to chicken, but a little more gamy. Because snakes don’t have limbs, very little is wasted in butchering, he said. And it is remarkably easy to fillet: “You just bring your knife along that backstrap and you get a four-meter-long piece of meat.”

A python’s needs are fairly basic. They’re sedentary by nature and coexist happily with other snakes, displaying “few of the complex animal welfare issues commonly seen in caged birds and mammals,” the researchers said.  Although some conservationists have expressed concerns that commercial snake farming could lead to the illegal harvesting of wild populations, Natusch — who chairs a group of snake specialists for the International Union for Conservation of Nature — argues that the opposite is true: It gives local communities a financial incentive to conserve wild populations and the habitats on which they depend.