I knew what to expect before I even clicked on it. I knew that “Python caught in Malaysia could be the longest ever recorded” would take me to a picture of a snake being held by a long queue of men, each straining to bear its weight. I knew to expect that photo because we love measuring animals in this way (see: snakes, oarfish, sturgeon); as if straining men is an international unit of measurement for long creatures. And so it was with the snake. In old money, the record-breaking serpent made famous this week was 15 men long. (That’s 8m long, and 250kg for the purists.)

It was a reticulated python – a beautiful charismatic snake that was apparently making its way over a flyover being built on the tourist haven of Penang. It was immediately caught and brought down to the ground by emergency services who then posed for some photos and TV cameras. The most predictable bit, of course, is what happened next. It died. Something went wrong with its ability to be alive, somehow, and … the snake died mysteriously. There is a report that it was kicked and quite brutally handled, but that wasn’t what killed it. I believe that the endless posing for photos will have contributed to its death. What killed it was us. Welcome to a new age of animal cruelty: an age of death by camera phone.

Find a washed-up dolphin? Great! Now damn well pick that dolphin up and walk around with it over your head so that everyone can get that really good snap for Facebook! (Oh, it died). Whale washed up on your local beach? Your selfies will help its survival chances immensely! What are you waiting for? Get going! And sharks? Of course! SHARKS!!! They’re fair game too. They had it coming. Get out there and pull them out of the water and get that shot! What are you waiting for? But there’s more. A swan, you say? Excellent! Go on!!! Grab that injured swan and get it to pose with you! Your friends will be really impressed. As they will be if you grab that peacock and hold it down for a selfie! Oh, it died? Not your fault. You were just taking a photo, after all…

And so it goes on. A new case every month. If it wasn’t so sad it might be laughable: a love of animals, undermined by thoughtlessness. A moment in time captured forever in someone’s newsfeed or in your photo album, and for what?

Of course, these are isolated cases. Selfies (and irresponsible animal photography in general) is not a conservation threat to any of these animals, but it is a threat worth highlighting nonetheless. Our appetite for ill-considered photos of animals can, and sometimes does, have consequences. I have seen this first-hand. I am as guilty as anyone.

My own personal story is with snakes. Not reticulated pythons but adders. As a young naturalist in my twenties I would take myself off at weekends in spring to observe snakes basking in the bracken near my local nature spot. I would go armed with my camera. It would be me and the snakes. I’d seek them out, basking in the sunshine. I’d get as close as possible, desperate for that up-close shot: the adders’ eyes reflecting the overhanging bracken or (even better) me: the intrepid and fearless naturalist. Sometimes the adders would catch me at it and they would slope off into the undergrowth. I hadn’t meant to disturb them. Oh well, I’d thought. But I wasn’t the only one, I soon realised. The more I visited, the more I saw many of the same naturalists treading the same paths with their cameras. We were seeking out the same animals, I realised. We were disturbing the same individuals again and again. Spring is a tough time for adders: they need uninterrupted sunshine to warm their cockles (genitals) in preparation for an intense mating season. That’s difficult when people like me kept turning up for photo shoots, I realised. What was I thinking? Sometimes I worry that I was once like one of the men holding that big reticulated python. A man seeking something more than the moment. A man seeking status by association with something bigger? Maybe.

Irresponsible photography like this isn’t yet a conservation threat to species, but one day it might turn out to be. And it might not always take obvious forms, like parading dying dolphins around beaches for selfies or carting 8m-long snakes around a building site. Even naturalists like me might be guilty of a subtler form of this sometimes.

Is this just a teething stage in our use of cheap and easy photographic equipment? Perhaps. Personally, I hope we learn that photos of animals being carried or poked or pulled or lifted or disturbed again and again and again for ever-better snaps says far more about us than it does about the animals we disturb. Only time, and the frequency of death-by-selfie stories, will tell.