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The hidden factory farms behind America’s pet snake boom

More people are buying pet snakes than ever. It’s hurting millions of other animals.

You might have particular feelings about snakes, but for millions of Americans they’re a member of the household. And their popularity as pets has only been growing: From 2018 to 2024, the number of households that own a pet snake rose from about 810,000 to 1.3 million. And the share of snake-owning households with more than three snakes doubled over that time period.

About 1.3 million households in the US have at least one pet snake — a number that’s rapidly grown since the 2010s.

To feed all of these pet snakes, companies are breeding tens of millions of mice and rats in factory farms. Undercover investigations have revealed overcrowded and inhumane conditions.

But there are some solutions, including changing pet snake diets so they rely on fewer animals and getting zoos — which also buy a lot of factory-farmed mice and rats — to set higher standards.

Social media could have something to do with this, as snake influencers with millions of followers have proliferated across platforms. Some have even turned their passion for reptiles into a business, breeding “designer” versions with ever rarer patterns that fetch anywhere from $25 to $60,000.

I’ve written about the moral questions raised by keeping wild animals like snakes as pets: They’re confined in small tanks and unable to express their most basic, natural behaviors, like hunting, climbing, and roaming. But if you dig a bit deeper into what keeping a snake as a pet involves, there’s a particularly dark side you’ve likely never heard about: factory farming hundreds of millions of mice and rats each year to feed them.

It’s a largely invisible form of factory farming that causes far more animal suffering than most industries that exploit animals — yet it has received essentially zero attention. And given the recent boom in pet snakes, it’s one that’s only likely to get worse in the coming years.

Inside mouse factory farms

In the wild, snakes have a diverse diet that consists of small mammals, like mice and rats, along with birds, fish, frogs, and insects. But pet snakes are fed a near-exclusive diet of “feeder” rodents — mice and rats — consuming anywhere from two infant mice per week to one or two larger mice or rats every 10 to 14 days.

Like the animals raised for human food, mice and rats aren’t protected by the federal Animal Welfare Act, and there’s no animal welfare oversight in these operations, even though welfare issues abound. It starts with lack of space; mice and rats have long ranges in the wild, yet in rodent farms, they’re confined in small tubs, never to breathe fresh air or step on grass.

The big case against owning........

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