#also snakes donāt have enough good vision to strike without smell
This isnāt true, but I get what youāre saying. The likely explanation is that Mark somehow either a) looks enough like a prey item for Tofu to confuse him with a mouse, or b) Mark is moving in a way that signals to Tofu that he is a prey item.
Snakesā eyesight isnāt that similar to ours, as they primarily function to detect movement. Snakes hunt through detecting chemical signals, heat (if they can see it), vibrations and movement (in that order). They donāt tend to strike at prey that isnāt moving, and this can be why itās difficult to switch captive snakes from eating live prey to eating frozen/thawed prekilled prey.
I donāt know exactly what Tofu is, but I would assume heās a Honduran milk snake or some type of rat snake. It would be easier to tell if he wasnāt fully leucistic. Either way, both of these animals feed on rodents in their regular diet, and I guess somehow Mark looks like a mouse.
But the bottom line is that Taylor Nicole Dean somehow thinks itās funny to watch her snake hit himself in the head at full speed (which, by the way, for faster-striking snakes, is between 70-200 MILES PER HOUR) directly into, what is to Tofu, effectively a glass and metal wall. She shows him flashing images and overstimulating sounds forā¦ what? Yeah, girl, why do you think he tries to leave you every single time you do that?
Snakes absolutely can form close bonds and relationships with humans (and Iām sure other animals, as long as those animals know how to respect the snake ā which is difficult when you are ignorant to how they function). My ball python is 8 years old and loves when I take her out and just hold her like a baby. I take her on walks like that. Every time sheās in my arms, she immediately settles in and relaxes her whole body. She asks to come out of her terrarium just to be with me sometimes. Itās really nice and it makes me feel SO loved and special. She has never struck at me besides the one time she escaped and I was frantically looking for her in a corner of a closet I couldnāt reach, and she didnāt know who or what I was. These are some of the ways you can tell that a snake loves you, and donāt ever let anyone tell you theyāre incapable of love. The limbic system is responsible for emotion, and there are brain cells in the frontal lobes of Tyrannosaurs that are the same in snakes and some lizards and birds, but we donāt even know what they do, and the frontal lobes are where creativity originates. So snakes do feel, they do love, and they have the capacity to be creative. They are not dumb animals who have some sort of āstrangeā reflex according to you. Tofu is doing what he knows how to do. Heās not an idiot, heās a snake thatās being actively tortured and harassed.
By the way, whenever Tofu hits the screen when he strikes, it hurts. Itās like a mini concussion. Snakes who compulsively strike at glass, or who are goaded into doing so, can suffer from dementia and neurological problems later in life. This isnāt a fucking joke.
EDIT: Just want to point out that Taylor Nicole Dean gets new animals every few years, despite the fact that the average lifespans of most of her animals exceed 10 years. Very telling. Also sheās probably gonna rebrand after she gets backlash for this, unless she can maintain ignorance in her comment section as she has managed to do so successfully in recent years. At most she had 30-50 animals and multiple animals were dying near-daily. When people called her out about it years ago, she made videos talking about how she had been trapped in an abusive relationship and was going through heroin addiction, and that hoarding animals was is her coping mechanism. As someone whoās been sober from heroin since August of 2022, this is absolutely obscene and disgusting and I donāt give a fuck who you are or what youāre going through. Stop abusing your fucking animals.
