No, they are just for decoration.
Ok…like what?
I HAVE to know where you were going with that lol.
Practical uses? Like if you come across a bunch of pickles but have no jar you just throw em in with the snakes?
O.k…this is kind of a weird and morbid thread.
Here’s a less morbid option, maybe. All of my pets that have died since 2001, I’ve had cremated. Most are in nice little wood boxes. Some of the first ones are in decorative tins. If the shop I found can do labeling on the wood, I’m going to move the ones in tins, into nice matching wood boxes, and have everyone labeled. There’s over 20 of them stacked neatly on my altar to deceased friends and family.
I will either some day scatter each critter’s ashes to a specific plant if I finally have a yard and house that we own. Or…they’ll all get buried with me when I die. I’ll be surrounded by my beloved babies.
That’s my plan anyway.
I hope it’s several years before I have to deal with it! But anything I can do to help further science if it’s not a ridiculous inconvenience I’ll try and do.
More along the lines of taking sketches or observations of parts you can’t really access with a alive snake too well (inside the mouth, eyes, glands and so on).
But yeah, people drink tequila with scorpions and other weird shit at the bottom, why not…
I bought an albino checkered garter from someone, and the snake died within a few days of me having him.
I suspect it was due to the previous owner feeding him fish with thiaminase in them, since he was having seizure-like symptoms and spazzed out a few times before he just stopped moving completely.
For right now I have him in the freezer in a ziplock bag, since I live in an apartment complex I have nowhere to bury him and otherwise have not decided what I’d like to do with him.
I have a couple of specimens in the freezer that I haven’t gotten around to preserving.
If it’s for gross dissection purposes to show the insides to a class, freezing works fine. Got to see a chameleon on the inside that way. But if it’s for research purposes, like looking at tissues under a microscope, or running tests for various diseases or other bio-chemicals, freezing will destroy it. I just recently lost a beardie to some weird unknown thing, and I really wanted to know what killed him. I was going to have a necropsy done, but since it’s California Fire Season, my vet didn’t have any power and wasn’t going to for awhile. I offered to bring him home and freeze him till they had power again, but the vet told me it would make diagnostics to find out what happened impossible. Makes sense, freezing expands the water in the cells into ice. Ice crystals destroys the cells.
There’s a leatherworker who turns up at Repticon Orlando. Unfortunately I can’t remember their name but they make some really neat stuff with humanely harvested snakeskins. So that’s one option I guess, find a craftsman who works with reptile skins and either donate it or commission something to be made from it.
I have lost one snake…my sweet Fiona. I couldn’t bear to bury her, so I had a professional help me preserve her. She “lives” in a Ball jar. I’m glad to have her beauty frozen in time that way. This person was good enough that even her eyes are preserved perfectly. I have included a photo of her in life and another of her preserved body.
That is my son’s biggest dream, to one day have a crocodile, alligator or caiman. He is still debating about which one I hope our snakes still live for many more years but maybe when they are old…and we win state lottery…or I find a very rich husband…we will have a gigantic house with a large pond for summer…and a very large greenhouse with pond in it for winter…
I beter tell him to start saving all his pocket money so maybe by the time our snakes are really old we can feed them to his crocodil
My parents already have a “Pet sematary” in their garden (a hint. They have half an hectare and it’s mostly grass so why not) where we burried 3 of our dogs, 2 cats and 2 pet rabits, nice big boulders as tombstones and all. Adding a snake wouldn’t be a problem.
Although honestly? I know this one guy who makes hides as a hobby. Wild game, sheep fur, even some cool fish skins - those look especialy dope because they are so thin you can see through. If my pet died, well, they would be dead anyway. Why not to turn them into something prety? Taxidermy sounds cool but again, i don’t know a taxidermist, i know a tanner. So snake leather it is.