[ad_1]
–
“Peta discovered that a farm in Vietnam supplying snakeskin to the global leather industry exposes snakes to terrible cruelty,” Peta spokeswoman Nirali Shah said in a letter to the German news agency on Tuesday.
The mouth and anus of the animals would be sealed with duct tape. They would then be “inflated” with an air compressor. “This leads to extreme pain, the heart is crushed, and the circulatory and nervous systems are under terrible stress,” Shah said. A similar procedure is also used with crocodiles.
A video shows a worker standing on the inflated body of a python. Another shot shows that the snake’s tail is still moving. The animals’ vital functions were not checked before skinning and gutting, he said. According to Peta, the reptiles are kept in small cages and are not cared for by a vet.
A single reptile farm could kill up to 2,000 pythons per year. Their skin goes to the international market to make bags, boots or belts with it. There are nearly 500 registered python farms in Vietnam, according to a 2016 International Trade Center (ITC) report. Even then it was said that blowing snakes was a common practice in the Mekong country.
Vietnam has been criticized for years for its cruel treatment of snakes and crocodiles. In 2014, Animals Asia reported on the “Snake Village” in Hanoi, a tourist attraction for people from all over the world. There, vacationers can not only taste snake meat, but also drink snake blood and eat snake hearts that are still beating. Animals Asia warned that such restaurants would also catch wild animals, threatening the survival of endangered snake species.
