If there’s one comforting fact in this world, it’s that snakes can’t walk. They slither around on the ground and that’s creepy enough, but at least they don’t have legs, right? Erm… sort of. A snake-loving YouTuber and entrepreneur has gone and created a robot suit that gives snakes legs and allows them to walk. Thanks a lot, Allen Pan! Just what we never knew we didn’t want but certainly don’t!
- Allen “feels bad for snakes.” That’s a sentence you don’t expect to hear, but that’s how he feels. Allen hates that snakes have “lost their legs” thanks to evolution and just doesn’t think it’s fair. So, he set out to right nature’s wrongs and restore what he feels is the natural order of things.
- Apparently, young snakes do have legs. The vlogger claims that snake embryos do start out with legs, but they never develop thanks to DNA mutations and they’re basically lost before the snakes hatch. Hearing this injustice, Allen thought there might be something he could do to help them out.
- He made a state-of-the-art robot suit to help snakes walk. Allen initially reached out to the Los Angeles Zoo to see if they could help him test out his invention, but he was told it costs about $2,000 just to get on Zoom with someone from the zoo. (On a side note: WTF?) He even tried contacting a local pet store but no one seemed to be interested in giving his invention a shot.
- Eventually, Allen finished his suit and got in touch with a local snake breeder. The breeder, who goes by @granddaddyherps1904 on Instagram, has more than 40 snakes in a single section of his warehouse, so it seemed like the perfect match. He got to know the snakes before trying out the robot suit on them to decrease the chances of something going seriously awry.
- Not all of the snakes liked having legs. Some of them would curl up into an S shape, indicating that they were angry and not loving it. In this case, they were impossible to put into the suit. More laid-back snakes would “relax like a noodle,” with a female python being the first to give the suit a go.
- To be honest, it does look pretty cool. While snakes with legs sound like the things of nightmares, it is pretty cool to see the invention in action. Even Allen was impressed, saying: “I cannot get over the image of the snake crawling into its robotic exoskeleton.” What he plans to do with the suit now is anyone’s guess.
