Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Now that the idea has occurred to me, it seems like it would be deeply ethically problematic for me to *not* run a snake rescue and adoption agency out of this church

Would it not also be deeply ethically problematic for you to offer rescue and adoption for reptiles that eat mammals and other warm-blooded prey? Or will you harbor only snakes who eat bugs?

Does "warm-blooded" have ethical significance?

my understanding is that warm-blooded critters tend to have more cognitive function, capacity to experience pain, what seems like "emotions," etc. Sam Harris has remarked that he's ethically uncomfortable with the idea of having a pet snake and feeding rodents to it

Where's the understanding coming from? Because it seems likely that there's a range of cognitive function across species, but my error bars are *very* wide and I've seen nothing that would imply "cold-blooded" vs. "warm-blooded" has anything to do with it. My dogs eat meat, btw,

I think dogs eating meat is ethically different. It's more similar to humans eating meat than, say, bears eating humans. (I think the Harris argument against feeding rodents to snakes is less "rodents are intelligent," but more specifically, "rodents > snakes wrt intelligence"