Are snakes intelligent?

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I can hardly find any information about the psychology of pythons. I wonder, can they learn things? Do they have feelings and emotions? When my python watches me intensely, with his head raised, what does he see? Is he consciously observing, learning and "thinking"? When he rests under my shirt, is he "cuddling" with me?

We already discovered that our pythons can recognise our family members in a crowd of strangers - probably by the smell. Does the fact that they find us in such a crowd and come to us mean that they have affectionate feelings like love or trust towards us?

Please tell me what you know about the psychology of snakes. Thanks!
 
Your snake doesn't love you, and its not cuddling you. They have no feelings and emotions as you put it.

They run off instinct, they may be more intelligent then we think though.

You're associating them with human behavior because that's what you're used to these things meaning.
 
Lol snakes are intelligent... They don't kill there own kind... Unlike us humans...

They are intelligent..... Unlike (some of) us humans lol... And some do kill their own kind... (For more fitting reasons than we do it, generally speaking... Cannibalism or combat are the 2 main reasons snakes do it.... ) us on the other hand, far more shallow, will kill for personal gain, anger, jealousy, scorn.... List is endless...
 

Thank you for the link, longqi - 395 answers! I have read a few of them, but I haven't found any really relevant answer.

Let me reword my question: How could we possibly find out whether a snake can feel love, trust, curiosity, insecurity, shyness, anxiety, jealousy, desire, hope or courage? All these are emotions which we generally attribute to highly developed mammals only, but with what right? How could we possibly find out whether a snake has dreams and visions, sets itself goals and I tries to achieve something worthy in its life? I know that reptile brains are generally smaller than mammal brains, but does size really matter? What I want to know - have any credible scientific research studies been done on the subject of the reptile mind and reptile emotions?
 
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Reptiles are amazing at adapting to their environments & certainly fascinate me, but intelligent... hmm
 

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I think they are intelligent, agreed with most people above in the fact that they have exceptional instincts and that they tolerate us handling them, they do not love it, nor do they cuddle you.
However most of the snakes I own, in my opinion, I think they are intelligent.
Some I can question, like the hatchie eating itself.
But I think there is intelligence in all animals.

Some dogs are meant to be more intelligent then others, I was a dog trainer, and let me tell you, some of the higher ended "intelligent" dogs were actually quite thick.
Just my honest opinion!
 
Of course they're not. My snake keeps stuffing up the chords when we play Mozart together.
 
Define intelligence. You could argue that a rock is more intelligent than a cat because at least when you kick a rock it has the good sense to stay away ;)

In my opinion, pythons are purely animals of instinct and often appear extremely stupid.
 
I think they are very smart, doubt any of them like humans...that is smart.
 
Some are smart.One of mine has been invited to join Mensa.
 
i believe snakes are smart and just because we dont want to acknowledge it or are to dumb to see it doesn't mean they are not.

some snakes are not as smart as others, as we have seen pic's of silly things they do. also read of snakes that have attachments to objects like certain water bowls.

and they do have emotions to a certain degree or as people call it instincts.

they feel pain and fear whats to say they don't feel happiness? maybe not in the form we show it or understand happiness to be.

i think alot of people like to say they have no feelings so its ok to keep them in small tubs with no climbing space ect. but the COP changed that.

my childrens escaped during the night and were did she go? in bed with me and slithered over my face? why? maybe i was warm? but so was her enclosure, maybe she recorgnised a familiar smell being me.

just because we don't see it or can't see it does not mean it does not exist.

i do think they are simple creatures who rely on instinct maily but they do have emotions but not as we see it.

blue tongues are intellegent lizards but i don't see them showing happiness. but we all agree they are intellegent ect
 
Snake are intelligent for a certian value of intelligence and emotional for a certain value of emotion...
much like any animal is...
how intelligent and/or emotional they are is subject to debate and certainly varies from snake to snake, us humans are the perfect example, there are people that are best compared to a brick and others that are "rocketscientists". I imagine it is quite similar in snakes though the range of intelligence/ emotion may be somewhat skewed ...
 
When humans have inhabited the earth for a fraction of the time snakes have without overpopulating, polluting, breeding in plague proportions, stripping resources, creating weapons to destroy all life as we know it many times over etc. etc. etc. I will accept that snakes have no intelligence. Until then I'm going to give the intelligence round to the snakes.

Nb. Regarding photos showing snakes doing stupid things, do I need to mention the Darwin awards???
 
I think mine are intelligent (mostly), if you are really interested in the psychology, read about the reptilian part of the human brain, its our ancient ancestral link with reptiles.
 
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