Turning Snakes Into Handbags: The Disturbing Process In 10 Pics

I’m going to take this opportunity to do what I rarely do, and that is break away from the regular topics we write about on Bit Rebels to share with you something I stumbled across yesterday which I find so horrible and cruel that I wanted to bring it to your attention.

We often write about fabulous geeky jewelry, shoes and accessories. Whether it’s a pair of Super Mario earrings we think the gaming community will like, or even something silly like Twitter shoes, those things are always fun. However, what about python handbags? Even though those are very popular, they aren’t geeky, so we’ve never written about them before.

Do you know how those are made specifically? I wrote a sarcastic post in the summer of 2010 about cobras chopped up and cooked as burgers. Even though cobras are very dangerous snakes, I wouldn’t write that same post today because even though I’m not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination, I don’t condone blatant cruelty to animals. I caught a lot of slack from the Internet community when I wrote How To Kill A Lobster In A Humane Way, but that was a long time ago, and I’ve learned a lot since then about compassion, empathy and kindness, with regard to all living things on our planet.

Python snakes are non-venomous, and they try to stay away from human beings as much as they can. The fact that we go out of our way to kill them just to make handbags literally makes my stomach turn. Part of me thinks that if most people knew what these poor animals had to endure so we could spend $3,000 on a handbag, they might reconsider. What the heck are we doing?

In this post on One Piece Discoveries, you can see children playing with a 15-foot long python. Although that seems strange to me because here in the States we don’t do that, it makes more sense than what I see below. These photographs take you through the step-by-step process for how a python snake becomes an expensive, exotic handbag.