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[–] 14 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

Depends on the size of the snake but in general the exodermis, or the scaled equivalent, is extremely tough.

Pick up a snake, see if you pull it apart. If you're really strong you might be able to pop the head off it, but you're not tearing a snake in half. Maybe a little tiny garder snake you could work apart if you twisted it back and forth enough but not in any short amount of time. It'll be a liquified snake-dog inside and that skin still won't snap.

Conversely, you can strangle someone to death with a twisted up plastic grocery bag. You can tear one of those apart with your hands.

I don't have hard numbers because I would never do that with a poor little snake but I have worked in a kitchen and can testify on the resiliency of biological tissues.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    That was exactly my problem. I’ve seen snakes, I got bit by a copperhead as a kids. My daughter had snakes as pets when she was a teen.

    But I’ve never pulled on one. I’ve never even thought about if I could pull one apart until I saw that scean. Then I was thinking how people pull chicken heads off and thought “well hold on a second…”

    That’s when I turned to the internet. We have to get to the bottom of this. In a humane way of course.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago*

    If I recall correctly, it takes about 100 lbs of force to pull the head off of a chicken. So while a strong person with a really good grip could do it, it's hard to do with just arm strength alone. As soon as you employ back and leg muscle into it, with a way to pin it down though, it would be fairly easy.

    So, applying that to a snake, and I'm not sure how the skin and ligament structure compares to a chicken, by hand, is probably really difficult if not impossible. However if you step on the snake (which, btw, is now an evil demon-snake from dimension-x out to kill because real snakes are cute and did nothing wrong) and wrap the other half around the wrist, it might be possible to leverage your whole body strength.

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