10/04/2020
Snake wine, beating snake heart, snake bile, snake meat … snake farms in Vietnam offer many forms of snake meat to local and international tourists. Many of the snakes on the menu are endangered, and have been poached from the wild. This is illegal and in eating at these restaurants you are not only fulling the demand but supporting the illegal wildlife trade.
The conditions of the snakes are often atrocious; most of the snakes we saw had sores on their noses from hitting the glass, many were in glass containers flooded with water, their scales were rotting and they were in a lot of pain. Many of these restaurants also served other wildlife like civets, porcupines, turtles to name a few.
What about the health and safety side of things. Did you know in consuming this wine (not all bacteria is killed when the snakes are fermented), snake/other wildlife or RAW meat can expose you to a number of zoonotic and bacterial diseases like botulism, salmonella etc.
Simone Magnino, lead author of a study about snake meat consumption and a researcher for the World Health Organization (WHO) when talking about diseases present in snake meat said, "The clearest microbiological risk comes from the possible presence of pathogenic bacteria, especially Salmonella, and also Shigella, Escherichia coli, Yersinia enterolitica, Campylobacter, Clostridium, and Staphylococcus aureus, which can cause illnesses of varying degrees of severity."
HUGE thank you to my good friend Thanh for your help with this one. You are an inspiration!
Video copyright (C) Kayleigh Ghiot
