I got one of my BPs at a reptile expo from a local breeder. The snake is the one in my profile picture and she was marketed as a female. The expo was in march or april and she was less than a year old but not by much (born in june or july of last year). I have reserves about the gender because he had a set of female and male from the same clutch that looked pretty similar and at the expo he tried popping her to show that she had no hemipenes. He did it fairly quick but i didnt see any but he did it because he was worried in setting them out for display he switched them up accidentally. He seemd to know what he was talking about, though and having never bought a young snake i kind of took his word for it because he tried popping there. I have since learned that males can resist popping past 6 months, especially on a short quick one like he did. At the next expo that was two weekends ago I stopped by his booth to look at a black head and i glanced at the rest of his collection (it was near the end and I was with others who were moving on) and I swear he was marketing the sibling of my baby as a female (coulda been a display case next to the sibling or a snake that looked sorta like it, he had some butter calico pins and some reg pins etc., but i coulda swore it was the sibling). This got me extremely worried because one of the reasons i got her was to breed her to my male in the future. I didn't see the butter pin in the available on the website meaning he probably sold the other one so i am out of luck in terms of trying to noninvasively sex the snake. My questions are these, is it still safe to pop the snake at a little under a year? I have read that it is not because their muslces develop enough to need to use some force that could injure in order to get the hemipenes out and that it has an alright possibility of getting a false negative on the hemipenes. I also have never popped a snake myself since i bought my other ball at adult age and he is a proven breeder and rescued my boa and dont plan on breeding her I never needed to. I also have the option of probing but i am very wary of doing this because of my inexperience. Do you think this would be something i could do/ could try or should I try to find someone to sex my snake for me? Im not sure i trust the pet stores around her other than one in Lawrence (about 50 min drive) to do it. Should i put an add in the KC Reptile classifieds or what?