#jay brewer

He keeps his animals in enclosures that are far too small for them, participates in mass breeding without care for the health or well-being of the animals involved, including creating morbidly obsese animals to have the "biggest" ones for clout and so that he can breed them as fast and often as possible since they don't get too skinny from being bred too often while being massively overfed. He's also well known for cutting eggs (which by itself is.... eh but-) where he removes the entire top, pulling live babies out, and putting them back in, which is ridiculously dangerous to the baby.

This year he's going to be getting his own television show. I don't know the name of it yet, but given his behavior on youtube - where he purposely elicits stress responses, defensive behaviors, and bite attempts from large reptiles purely for views, with no interest in whether these actions are in the interest of the animal's best welfare - I doubt he is going to improve any. The producers are GOING to try to sensationalize it a la Tiger King.

Please, I am asking you to not support this man or his new show. He represents the worst side of the hobby, the people that have no business being in business, no business keeping the animals he does. Don't spite watch, don't curiosity watch; pirate it someplace if you must, but any views that count toward success of his show only puts more into his pockets to continue doing things he shouldn't, and it's his animals (and the animals his popularity convince others to buy thinking they can do the same as him) that pay the price for it.

Of all the reptile influencers, Jay Brewer is my least favorite. Let's see what he is up to today!

Recently this colossal idiot pet store owner who pretends he has any real knowledge about natural history went field herping. He grabbed a wild rattlesnake and filmed himself popping its genitalia for field sexing, without having ANYBODY CONTROLLING THE HEAD.

He just put his snake hook on top of it and popped out its genitals. In this incredibly unsafe video, he not only put himself and the snake at risk, but he claims it's educational- and that's why he did it.

Only thing is, he's wrong, and in fact spends time spreading misinformation. Let's take a look at some of his comments. This is the caption to his video.

The "nodes" are the hemipenes. He says that if there was one, it would be a girl. Thing is, girl snakes don't have hemipenes. While they do have hemiclitorises, those don't evert like hemipenes do. If "a node" comes out when you pop (read: bend a snake's tail back at the cloaca, forcing the genitals to emerge), you've given your snake a cloacal prolapse. This can kill them, but mill-style breeder Jay Brewer does not care about the lives of animals. We've known this. He doesn't care about his own snakes- he cuts eggs for funsies, he keeps giant snakes in drawers, and he regularly puts peoples' safety at risk for viral videos. But he also clearly doesn't care about the lives of wild animals.

What else has he said?

So here's a thought: Maybe your audience shouldn't know that they can pop a rattlesnake's hemipenes out of its cloaca because that is fucking dangerous. Not all information is good information to share in the Instagram format! Sometimes the general public shouldn't see you casually doing something dangerous without explaining what it is or why you're doing it!

Just wanting to know the sex of a snake in the field, when you're not actually doing any real research, is not a valid reason to do something this risky. Part of education is knowing what's actually educational. Another part is knowing how to appropriately frame dangerous activities so that you don't make your audience think that it's something anybody can go out and do. One of the things that makes me so upset about this video is the complete lack of context. It's not just that he has zero respect for a venomous animal, it's that he has zero respect for his audience.

Also, in the audio of his video, he doesn't call them hemipenes. He doesn't provide the most basic education he claims he does! He's just messing with an animal for the sake of messing with it!

He also promulgates a lie that popping doesn't cause the snake any harm, which is not what even most breeders say about it. Now, luckly, the snake seemed fine in this case. But there are plenty of people, mostly pet owners, who have lost snakes because they've tried to pop incorrectly and broken their snake's spine around the cloaca. Between the inability to eliminate correctly and infection caused from wounds, popping is one of the riskiest- and most unnecessary things- you can do to a pet snake.

Good breeders and snakekeepers do not take videos of themselves popping their snakes and put it on instagram and pretend it's educational. You pop snakes to guarantee the sex of the animal, and you do it ONLY when they are very young. Older snakes have more muscle control and it can hurt them pretty badly.

Even Spruce Pets knows that popping can cause your snake significant trauma, but fine, whatever. Let's traumatize random venomous snakes for Instagram views!

Also, he's just completely uninformed! Take this answer:

Probably? No, the answer is an easy yes. Rattlesnakes lose rattles all the time. They lose rattles due to terrain, to genetic deformity (some rattlers never form them!), and to predation attempts. It's just keratin. They're fine without it. Any real herpetologist would know this. If he can't get basic facts right, how can he be trusted to get more complicated stuff right?

When you see a picture of an angry snake on social media, it’s a very striking visual. The curved teeth, the tension in the coils and neck– it definitely catches the eye. But is it fair to the snake?

When you’re posting animal content, is it ever ok to post a picture of an animal in obvious distress? I personally think that there are times when it’s actually very valuable to post images of an upset animal, provided that:

It’s well explained and the condition that led to the animal’s distress was necessary.

The distress wasn’t prolonged any longer than it had to be for the animal’s overall health and well-being.

The human is in control of the situation at all times and isn’t putting themselves, the animal, or anyone else at risk while photography is happening.

One of the things that people like Jay Brewer/The Reptile Zoo/Prehistoric Pets likes to share on social media that gets me so upset is Jay provoking female constrictors for no apparent reason when they’re on their eggs. He claims that he does this to remove them so that he can properly incubate the eggs. That in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but the way he does it is dangerous to both the snake and himself. Personally, I don’t care if he gets bitten, but this isn’t remotely the educational content he likes to think he promotes. I’m not going to link to his social media accounts because attention is a currency, and I don’t want to drive any traffic his way, but here’s some stills that show what I mean.

In this video, Brewer was talking about getting bit in the face while poking at a nest-guarding female by himself with a small snake hook. The responsible way to go about this is to have at least three handlers: two to move the female’s heavy body, while one uses a plexiglass shield to gently hold her face down. A hook is simply not enough to handle an animal this size, and nobody should be attempting to handle an animal this size alone. (Note: I’m not touching on his husbandry here. That’s bad for many other reasons. But what I want to focus on is why he’s showing off an angry snake.) At the start of the video, he’s not even using the snake hook correctly; when you’re working with a distressed snake, the point of the hook is to gently control the head to limit the animal’s ability to strike and ability to hurt itself by striking into something hard.

Anyways, what does he have to say about this video?

Do you learn anything from this? The video is just him talking about how it’s unpleasant to be bitten in the face. It’s all hashtags with no explanation of what he’s doing and why, and there’s none of that in the video either. You learn nothing from this content, despite him claiming to be an animal educator.

Just because you say you’re an educator does not make you one. If the content you’re posting isn’t educational, you’re not educating.

But I truly think that showing animal body language and talking about distress can be educational. Take this instance, posted in the Advancing Herpetological Husbandry group on Facebook:

He's not cutting a small slit in one egg, he's doing this:

and he's pulling the babies out of the egg through those holes before they're ready