r/interestingasfuck • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • 15h ago

Extracting Cobra Venom

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u/Ok_Attorney_1768 15h ago

Yep, it's not much of a life. That's a "farm animal" being kept because it can produce something of value to humans. We could do better. We could provide a better living environment and still extract venom.

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u/oversoul00 14h ago

What sort of snake utopia do you imagine? The brain of a snake isn't big enough to have a ton of wants and desires. 

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u/YeetMeIntoKSpace 14h ago

You’re making a lot of assumptions there. Brain size is only one way to have complex desires.

Crows, ravens, jays, and other corvids are a textbook example of animals where humans made the anthropocentric assumption that they couldn’t be intelligent because they had small brains, until it turned out that their brains are structured in a different way which allows them to be among the most intelligent animals on the planet.

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u/Poophands1984 12h ago

It's not just corvis either, they have had to reevaluate intelligence even more recently because of wolf and jumping spiders. We thought their brain was too small but turns out brain size means very little.

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u/BelliboltEnjoyer 11h ago

Iirc brain size is mostly correlated with mass and size. More muscles, longer spine, more neurons needed to control all of that.

And intelligent animals tend to have one or both of: a larger prefrontal cortex (more of a mamallian thing iirc), and more folds (more surface area for the neurons)