Reserving eggs?

[jeffjr464]

do any breeders let people reserve a certain egg? like say $200 for the egg no matter what comes out? i always thought that would be cool, have like a surprise lottery. hehe a egg lottery!!

[daniel1983]

...sounds like just another way for people to scam others to me.

Ever hear the saying 'Don't count your chickens before they hatch'?........too many people forget that simple advice with reptiles these days.

[PythonWallace]

I don't think people do that because it wouldn't benefit anyone, except maybe someone without a lot of money who wanted to take a risk at getting a deal. BPs are fairly easy to breed, and most breeders have an excellent hatch rate, so they gain nothing by selling eggs for less than they would get for the contents in 2 months. I guess it wouldn't be a big deal to do it with something like pastels, but I don't envision seeing a lot of people doing it. Say, you take a normalxpastel breeding and get 8 eggs. Odds are 2.2 normals and 2.2 pastels. If you charge $20 for a normal male, $30 for a normal female, $225 for a male pastel and $550 for a female pastel, you can say the odds are that the eggs total up to $1,650, and have a lottery for $212 per egg. You wouldn't likely take a big loss, unless you hatch 4 female pastels, and the lotto player has a 50% chance of at least getting a male pastel, which wouldn't be a loss, while a female would be a nice score, and a normal would be an expensive normal hatchling. I don't know, it would be interesting to see I guess.

[aaajohnson]

It seems there are so many things that can happen between having an egg to the point of a well started hatchling ... I am not sure any breeder (or buyer)would want to open themselves up to the kind of hard feelings that could cause. But who am I to say.


Neil

[lillyorchid]

I've never seen or heard anyone doing this. It just sounds like a bad idea to me because not all eggs make it. Let's say people do sell eggs before they hatch. Say a pied X 100% pied bred and that female het laid 8 eggs. People paid "X" amount of dollars on those eggs. What happens if 3 of those 8 eggs go bad? Does the breeder refund those peoples money or are those people just out of some money because they kind of gambled on it?

Scam artis would LOVE this kind of way! It's to shady and scammy to me and I'd never reserve an egg from any breeder... not even the top best of the best.

[recycling goddess]

good point allison... esp since i could sell the eggs and then just say... "oh they didn't make it... sorry you are out your money" and then sell the actual snakes later to someone else.

:eek: the thought of this makes my skin crawl!

[PythonWallace]

I agree. I would never play a game like this, but I assumed in my reply that we were talking about a breeder like Adam who is trusted and has enough clutches to hypothetically do something like this. I also figured bad eggs would be refunded.