Pythons convert food into meat more efficiently than other livestock, and they can be fed on waste meat, but this doesn't mean snake meat is inherently more sustainable
What kind of meat is the most sustainable? According to a study of farms in Thailand and Vietnam that raise snakes for meat, it might be pythons.at consulting firm EPIC Biodiversity. “No other livestock species studied to date possesses the same credentials or rates of production as pythons.”) over a year, along with what they were fed, plus the weight of their dressed carcasses – that is minus the skin, internal organs, head and tail. This was then compared with existing data on other animals.
Asked about this, Natusch says that what makes snake meat sustainable isn’t the efficiency of food conversion, but the fact that they are fed on waste meat, such as trapped rodents and stillborn pigs. This is made into sausages that the snakes eat.
If the snakes are being fed waste that wasn’t being used for other purposes, this would be an efficient use of resources, Resare Sahlin says. But wild rodents could refer to a number of species. But Natusch makes two other arguments in favour of snake farming. The first is food security. Many of the snakes chose to go for periods of up to 127 days without eating, yet lost just a few percentage points of body mass at most.
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