I’ve seen some unexpected questions in this community, but “what’s the tensile strength of a snake?” has gotta be one of the strangest
When I wrote it I was thinking “this is the new airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.”
I was actually waiting for someone to ask me “western or eastern?”
Uhm, well, I don’t know hhiiiiighhhyyyyaaaaaaaa
Okay, afaik, there’s no listing anywhere of tensile strength of living tissues of various critters. There might be, but I’ve never run across one, and my life being what it is, you’d be amazed how often I’ve gone looking for similar information for one question or another someone asks.
That being said, I have dealt with recently dead snakes. We country as fuck up in the this piece, so we got a few snakes similar in size to a rattler, and I’d guesstimate that the average blacksnake is going to be close enough for government work to the average rattler.
So, yeah, I’d guesstimate you could strangle someone with a recently dead snake that was long enough to use as a murder tool. If you ever have to extricate a dead snake from something like a dryer vent, or the various mechanical parts of a car, you have to tug on the damn things pretty fucking hard. Even with sharp and/or hard bits involved to make holes in a snake, they don’t just pull apart. The few times I’ve had to pull a dead snake out of a car, the only thing that pulled off was whatever injury did the snake in.
In other words, if the skin and muscle are damaged enough, it’ll tear apart there. But otherwise? It’ll only come apart where it’s snagged on something, and I’m a big dude, so I can haul on things decently.
I’d say the overall toughness involved is at least similar to a decent leather belt
Depends on the size of the snake but in general the exodermis, or the scaled equivalent, is extremely tough.
Pick up a snake, see if you pull it apart. If you’re really strong you might be able to pop the head off it, but you’re not tearing a snake in half. Maybe a little tiny garder snake you could work apart if you twisted it back and forth enough but not in any short amount of time. It’ll be a liquified snake-dog inside and that skin still won’t snap.
Conversely, you can strangle someone to death with a twisted up plastic grocery bag. You can tear one of those apart with your hands.
I don’t have hard numbers because I would never do that with a poor little snake but I have worked in a kitchen and can testify on the resiliency of biological tissues.
Strangling required very little force if applied properly. I think around 3x blood pressure is hazardous for most arteries. That’s why tourniquets can be created by ‘professionals’ with literally any cloth
What do you mean? Crotalus or Sistrurus?
