Reptillian Theories

[Gravelanche]

i think of life as far as intelligence in 4 different dimensions,

The first dimension is simple life, plants, the most minute of insects, and jellyfish. they operate at best on an axis of pain vs comfort.

The second dimension encompasses the majority of the animal kingdom and basically includes the capacity to learn anything and adapt to that information. i don't think anyone here doubts that their snakes learn in some form, they recognize our smells and know we aren't food, they learn that F/T is acceptable food and most importantly they feel stress, the basic concept of stress is to be outside one's comfort zone so one must be aware of it's surroundings to be comfortable. Most snakes can be taken out and handled and not be overly stressed which means to SOME degree they overcome the basic genetic instinct that being picked up is bad. So it could be said they operate based on an X-axis of pain vs comfort with a Y axis of instinct vs conditioning.

then to round it out we have the third dimension which adds consciousness or awareness. best examples are dogs and similarly intelligent animals, the ability not only to learn and remember, but recognize and feel based on experience. no one doubts a dog loves their owner if it was well cared for and may well fear them if treated poorly. Add the Z axis of emotion.

Then of course the highest intelligence in the 4th dimension, which simply means the understanding and awareness of the other dimensions. The ability to feel one way and choose to ignore it and act another for any motivation we choose for example placating your boss when stress emotion and instinct tell you to sucker punch the *******. it is also the awareness of consequences. that cheesecake smells good but if i eat the whole thing i will get diabetes.

do my snakes love me? i believe so, but i believe it is a love in a form their axis can support, ie they are relaxed around me and allow me to hold them which their base instincts would not like

[Aaron_S]

Originally Posted by MH4C

Sorry for bumping up this 3 month old topic, but as a neuroscientist I find the topic of 'awareness/emotion' in all animals interesting, and as a snake keeper especially in snakes. The whole problem with thinking your snake is happy/sad or any other human emotion is that we project our own view of an experience on the snake. When your snake, or any other animal for that matter, is happily dozing away after eating a meal, we would call it content with it's position, because that is what we would be when placed in that exact position.
We don't know what, or even if, an animal feels the same way. Only for mammals we have an indication that something is going on at the emotional level, as extensive research has been done on brain activity during 'emotional' tasks or settings like relapse to an addicted state in rats or social interaction by rats that have been made 'depressed'. There are even what you could call 'clinical symptoms' for these conditions, which don't diverge that far from what we see in addicted or depressed humans.

To my knowledge there have not been any studies regarding emotional awareness or pathological emotional states in reptiles, however, my knowledge on this is still limited (thanks falconeer999 for the website...will be spending quite some time there ). What I do know is that many reptiles can learn and that snakes, widely regarded as the simplest of reptiles, can be trained to recognize spatial cues and efficiently navigate 3D space. This research group trained cornsnakes on in a round chamber with 8 evenly spaced holes in the floor around the rim. 7 of these holes were cover from underneath so the snake could not climb in, but the cover was only visible when the snake reached the hole, and a white card was placed on one side of the chamber. similar setups have also been widely used with spatial recognition training in mice and rats this is generally called the 'Barnes maze'. After training (placing the snake in the maze in the same orientation each time, leaving the same hole as an escape hole) the snakes became more efficient and goal-directed towards the escape hole, showing they can recognize environmental ques to efficiently navigate a familiar environment.

Although this doesn't answer anything about the question 'do reptiles have emotions or feelings' it shows that they have a complex brain which can learn and integrate somatosensory and behavioural patterns. Who knows what else we can learn about reptiles and cognition. I'll keep digging, this is pretty interesting stuff and I didn't know there was this much research about it out there, and let you guys know if I find something worthwhile to maybe answer this ever ongoing discussion .

You make some good solid points.

I got some resources some months ago for this thread that I haven't quite sifted through yet. I'll post them when I do.


Without that experiment on corn snakes we all knew they have behaviour patterns. Some snakes learn that when their door or tub is opened that food comes from that opening. I would suggest that this is a pattern with them being familiar with it.

I do have a further question about the experiment you mentioned. Did they sterilize or make an attempt to remove the smell of each snake after trial? It could be presumed that the snakes followed the scent of another one through possibly for mating purposes even. If you have the report I'd be interested in reading it.

[bcr226]

Do snakes have emotions? I believe they do. They may not be able to convey their emotions with us in a manner we understand but let's look at a few points.

1. It has been proven that snakes have memory. Tests show that snakes can recognize duplicate structure on sight without input from smell.

2. Snakes are curious animals. They will investigate new things and explore things unknown to them. I see this if I change up or add something to any of our enclosures.

3. Snakes process information. It may be basic information but they do it and they learn from it. Case in point, teaching a snake to recognize rats as food over mice.

Some of our snakes react differently to different people in a consistent manner. One of our ball pythons will curl up under my shirt and stay there for hours while this same one will constantly cruise around on my wife trying to get into trouble. This shows at least to a minor degree a level of recognition of different people.

So, the basis of developing emotions is certainly there. Are they there? I only have my own observations which can be interpreted in various ways.

Our BCI breeding pair definitely have a bond of some degree. The male does not like the female being out of his sight. He will actively look for her until he can see her again. He'll become tense and agitated, not aggressive in any way but there is definitely a change in posture and stress. When he sees her, he relaxes.

But, that's observation. How does one test for emotion outside of observation?

No matter what, we're dealing with base level intelligence and mental activity. We know that most if not all animals have at least one emotion which is fear. How do we identify other emotions?

I'm game to experiment on this with the caveat that I will not harm or intentionally cause fear in any of the test subjects. But again, how do you test for it?

[Aaron_S]

Originally Posted by bcr226

Do snakes have emotions? I believe they do. They may not be able to convey their emotions with us in a manner we understand but let's look at a few points.

1. It has been proven that snakes have memory. Tests show that snakes can recognize duplicate structure on sight without input from smell.

2. Snakes are curious animals. They will investigate new things and explore things unknown to them. I see this if I change up or add something to any of our enclosures.

3. Snakes process information. It may be basic information but they do it and they learn from it. Case in point, teaching a snake to recognize rats as food over mice.

Some of our snakes react differently to different people in a consistent manner. One of our ball pythons will curl up under my shirt and stay there for hours while this same one will constantly cruise around on my wife trying to get into trouble. This shows at least to a minor degree a level of recognition of different people.

So, the basis of developing emotions is certainly there. Are they there? I only have my own observations which can be interpreted in various ways.

Our BCI breeding pair definitely have a bond of some degree. The male does not like the female being out of his sight. He will actively look for her until he can see her again. He'll become tense and agitated, not aggressive in any way but there is definitely a change in posture and stress. When he sees her, he relaxes.

But, that's observation. How does one test for emotion outside of observation?

No matter what, we're dealing with base level intelligence and mental activity. We know that most if not all animals have at least one emotion which is fear. How do we identify other emotions?

I'm game to experiment on this with the caveat that I will not harm or intentionally cause fear in any of the test subjects. But again, how do you test for it?

1. Where's the report?

2. Great. Your animals are leading causes and is a definite source for all animals in captivity.

3. Actually, we don't do that. They will eat both animals. It isn't one over the other. We don't teach them anything. We just get them to eat what we're offering because it's simple prey for us to use.

Snakes easily recognize things we don't. Confidence,fear or whatever may be underlining and that would cause for concern. I'd venture to say they are less comfortable because they use your shirt as a hide to hide from the world (stress in my opinion) and two, if it's cruising looking "for trouble" then it could be trying to escape.

Observe? Yes that's how you learn. You have yet to truly observe though. You presume your boas have a bond due to a 5 or 10 minute experience of "lost" between the two snakes. Have you housed them completely the same but in different enclosures and see how they behave over a week? 4 weeks? 4 months?

You have this caveat but with it you believe separating the boas to be harmful to their psyche or fearful of separation so you're only left with what you deem as a bond.

[stephanbakir]

Originally Posted by Will0W783

Snakes are deaf to airborne sounds, aren't they? They have no external ears.

I do not think they can "love" or even form real bonds like a dog or cat would. They can, however, learn that we are not a threat and be calm around us. I have heard of people who own king cobras for years, and the snake follows them around or sits quietly with them. I personally would not risk it...it's still an instinct-driven creature.

http://www.ssnakess.com/forums/gener...ar-stereo.html

[bcr226]

Originally Posted by Aaron_S

1. Where's the report?

2. Great. Your animals are leading causes and is a definite source for all animals in captivity.

3. Actually, we don't do that. They will eat both animals. It isn't one over the other. We don't teach them anything. We just get them to eat what we're offering because it's simple prey for us to use.

Snakes easily recognize things we don't. Confidence,fear or whatever may be underlining and that would cause for concern. I'd venture to say they are less comfortable because they use your shirt as a hide to hide from the world (stress in my opinion) and two, if it's cruising looking "for trouble" then it could be trying to escape.

Observe? Yes that's how you learn. You have yet to truly observe though. You presume your boas have a bond due to a 5 or 10 minute experience of "lost" between the two snakes. Have you housed them completely the same but in different enclosures and see how they behave over a week? 4 weeks? 4 months?

You have this caveat but with it you believe separating the boas to be harmful to their psyche or fearful of separation so you're only left with what you deem as a bond.

Wow, talk about opinion. Tell ya what, when you come down off of your little holier than thou high there, and want to discuss it politely without the assumption and attitude, I'll be happy to explore this topic further.

I don't like it when people make assumptions and make up context out of what I post when they don't know better. Yes, I relayed some of my observations, I didn't go into great detail but you seem to "know" everything that happened so please, by all means, carry on.

Never seen someone troll their own thread so well before.

[Aaron_S]

Originally Posted by bcr226

Wow, talk about opinion. Tell ya what, when you come down off of your little holier than thou high there, and want to discuss it politely without the assumption and attitude, I'll be happy to explore this topic further.

I don't like it when people make assumptions and make up context out of what I post when they don't know better. Yes, I relayed some of my observations, I didn't go into great detail but you seem to "know" everything that happened so please, by all means, carry on.

Never seen someone troll their own thread so well before.

Actually it's not opinion. It's fact thus far.

When you actually have a response feel free to say it. I didn't take anything out of context. I responded to what I've read you've posted. If there's information left out that makes my response null and void then post it. It's your fault assumptions are made about you if you withhold information that's apparently important enough to change the entire context.

[MDT]

bcr226...i think where aaron is going with this is your sample population of your animals can't be strong enough to give anything other than opinion. mh4c could give more insight into this, but i really don't think the reptilian brain is developed enough in the appropriate areas to really produce emotions (i may be wrong). in order to really make a valid conclusion, an appropriately sized sample is needed with the hypothesis to be tested. anything other than that, it really is just speculation that "my snake loves to curl up on me"....not trying to stir things up, just keeping it real.

[bcr226]

Originally Posted by MDT

bcr226...i think where aaron is going with this is your sample population of your animals can't be strong enough to give anything other than opinion. mh4c could give more insight into this, but i really don't think the reptilian brain is developed enough in the appropriate areas to really produce emotions (i may be wrong). in order to really make a valid conclusion, an appropriately sized sample is needed with the hypothesis to be tested. anything other than that, it really is just speculation that "my snake loves to curl up on me"....not trying to stir things up, just keeping it real.

Agreed, what I was saying in my post and postulating was how do we test for emotion? I've seen glimpses of what could be construed as emotion on a simple observation basis. No offense to Aaron but he's more interested in trying to dispel discourse vs. finding an acceptable method to discern emotion or not in an animal. I gave my simple observations to establish that the base line factors for development of emotion are there in reptiles based upon similar base line studies for certain primate mammals.

I've looked on the web and I've come to one conclusion. Its is ASSUMED that snakes and reptiles do not have emotion but as far as I can tell, it's never been tested in any publicly released study or evaluation.

So, once again, I pose the question... How does one test for emotion. Separation may be one possible way but I see enough problems with this that make it less than probable to formulate any kind of conclusion. There are simply too many factors that make it unworkable such as establishing a base line between several sample pairs of animals. How do you establish a control group when you have the margin of error based upon past experience differences between every animal having a major effect on the possible outcomes? To over come this, the test sampling would have to be enormous to minimize these factors with percentage based outcomes.

We need to devise a way to test emotion in reptiles on a smaller scale, that precludes the need for bonded pairs of animals, and can establish a base line of variation in responses to filter out instinct vs. possible emotional response. We also need to target which emotions to look for and establish a means of identifying them.

This is no easy task. A question has been raised and I believe it's a very valid question either way it goes. We also need to consider instinctual emotion vs. learned emotion. Fear is instinctual. Love is not... it's learned.

Thoughts?

[MDT]

i would imagine neuroimaging with radio tagged markers to see if certain ares of the brain light up with different stimuli (like showing a picture of a cute puppy to a snake while in a PET scanner to see if the "love" lobe of the brain lights up). again MH4C could speak much more about this than i. however, instinct is not emotion. i'm kinda going out on a limb to say my snakes couldn't care less about me, their cage, whether they have apsen or husk substrate. i am tolerated by my animals and i derive much more pleasure from them than they do me.

[bcr226]

Maybe. I'm not so much concerned with their feelings or lack thereof concerning us as their keepers and handlers, I'm more interested in do they have emotional responses at all. Once we establish that base line, then we have to see how far it carries. Heck, maybe they see us like cats do... as slaves to be punished and rewarded. LOL

Seriously though, the more I think on this, the more I'm wondering how it can be done. neurotic response imaging is a possibility but its used more for mapping electro-chemical responses.

I think the best solution is part of what you suggest. Response factors to stimuli. Take 100 snakes of the same species, expose them to various non-standard types of stimulation. See what happens. Take those same snakes and expose them to the same 10 people repeatedly. See if a pattern of response develops that is unique to each person.

I know that our snakes respond differently to my wife as to me or my daughter. They are more cautious and careful around my daughter but that may be a physical response to her smaller hands holding them and making them feel less secure. I don't know but it's something worth looking at.

One of my customers might be able to provide some answers. He's a neuro surgeon with many years of experience. Maybe he can shed some light on some ideas on how to test this.

[Pareeeee]

I believe that Bearded Dragons can recognize a voice or phrase.

I used to have a beardie, who, when I put on the floor, would FREAK out (inflate body & beard, open mouth, sometimes hiss) when you'd walk toward her without saying anything. As soon as I would say "It's just me", she would 'deflate' and act calm.
I always thought that was very interesting behaviour.

[stephanbakir]

Re-the intelligence level of varanids... MAballs.net released a NERD video where Kevin proves that one of his old male albino varanid can differentiate between a human hand and a rat... the hand broke the feed response and the rat sent him back into a craze... not a full study, but interesting either way.

I don't think reptiles have the full range of emotion that we do... I think they are more or less purely instinct driven but I have no proof so my beliefs are my own for now and I base them on my personal observations... more then most can say about some of the things they follow in life *Cough* religion *cough*

[MH4C]

@ WilloW783, Indeed nice to see other sciency people in the hobby. You should really have the honors to make the calls on this subject, as I am 'just' a graduate student hoping to get a PhD position when I finish my masters around september. Nice to hear you've been doing developmental research even, as that is my topic of interest as well. At the moment I'm doing an internship on induced artifical network activity in the hippocampus.

Regarding many of the above posts: a lot of what we label as emotion in animals is, as Aaron aptly stated in many of his replies, what we see as emotion in ourselves. However, this does not necessarily mean that emotion is not there in these, by comparison, simple animals.
What we know for sure, and everyone that has ever had a snake with a skin wound can probably attest to that, is that snakes at least try to avoid pain. Of course there are also the examples where snakes burn themselves on their lightbulbs, but this can be explained by gradual heating instead of sudden pain. Of course pain is processed completely different from emotional stimuli, and what is known is that snakes, and other reptiles, have an increased heart rate upon handling (Cabanc, 1999, Emotion and phylogeny) which might be an indication of an emotional response. However, this could also just be the result of handling. This paper has also only been published in a very low impact journal, which makes its contibution to scientific knowledge low.

What we can say is that there are many snake species than can be trained to respond nonagressively to touch by humans, and primarly have a feeding response only in the presense of 'food odor'. It would be interesting to see if we can behaviourally train snakes to avoid food after initial food acceptance training by combining exposure to a food source with an aversive stimulus (much the same as they do with mice and freezing responses).
Mm...an interesting one would be if we could make a very 'docile' snake 'scared' of handling again when this handling is paired with a very aversive stimulus (I can imagine snakes also don't like low voltage shocks). If the snake then even with the aversive stimulus would not mind to be handled, up to some break-even point where the stimulus overrules the 'pleasure' of being handled, it would at least be a nice correlate of emotion in reptiles. Anyone has some money left? .

Brain imaging would be hard, as even in humans we are not really sure how and where emotions are processed. What is known is that the Thalamus plays an important role in information processing in the brain, probably information regarding emotional stimuli as well. Sadly, reptiles lack many parts or connections that our thalamus posesses, which makes it even harder to say how reptiles would process emotion if it exists. (Pritz, 1995, The thalamus of reptiles and mammals: similarities and differences)

Now as for my own opintion. I think snakes (and thus all other reptiles, as snakes are the simplest among them) have a very rudimentary form of emotion, in which the same tactile, auditive or visual stimulus can be interpreted in the brain in different ways to elicit different forms of behaviour. This is why some snakes already get a feeding response when put inside the feeding container on feeding day, but the feeding response is absent when put in the same container on any different day (works only when feeding on a tight schedule, personal observation).

Aaron, here's the title of the paper regarding training of cornsnakes: (Holtzmann et al. 1999, Spatial learning of an escape task by young corn snakes, Elaphe guttata guttata). They do not state that they cleaned the maze after each trial (I can't imagine they didn't). However to prevent this cue based behaviour you mentioned they moved the escape hole location to a different quadrant, meaning the new escape location for the next snake was at least 2 holes away from the one for the previous snake.

[ilovemypets1988]

pack animals such as cats and dogs use emotions to help communicate with there pack, even there "pecking" order has emotions involved and now ill get back to reptiles, most of which are solitary and live alone (except for breeding time) and as such, they dont need to evolve a way to communicate with each other.

that being said, they do have instinctual feelings such as fear, they just dont have the non instinct emotions such as love, being loves the most complex of all feelings, you need to be rather intelligent to have it like humans and yet we still dont actually understand love and how it works, so how can an animal where predatory instinct is there way of life