Wild Caught Specimens

Well, I have been watching the market lately and I have been seeing a lot of advertising for wild caught snakes. I am aware that in order to bring brand new morphs (not mixed morphs) into the community one has to acquire them from the wild, and I'm also aware that all the snakes I own right now would not be here if it were not for exporting their parents/grandparents from Africa.

But, at the risk of sounding hypocritical lol, I am a bit of a conservationist and I would think that, by now, we would have a well enough established captive bred colony to sustain our insatiable herping hunger. Not to mention morphs keep getting more and more interesting anyways, just by combining them with other morphs.

So my questions are these: What is the most up to date status on the ball python in the wild? Through how large of a region are they distributed? What type of regulations are there for the import and export of wild caught ball pythons?

I ask because it seems that every time I see an ad on some website these ball pythons come over in large numbers. Litereally masses of them, all different sizes, come over in bags.

I do know that where I live snakes are an important and delicate part of our ecosystems (probably not so different than in Africa), and to remove them in large numbers would be detrimental to localized populations.

I am from Southern Ontario, Canada, and I'm pretty sure buying/selling snakes native to this region is illegal (I attained this information from a local pine/bull snake breeder). But what is the difference where they are from? I take snakes from this region, I take them from another, either way I don't think the outcome is constructive to that area.

I guess I am looking for a general opinion on bringing wild caught specimens into captivity. I am probably overreacting, and maybe I am causing more harm than good, but I can't help but be concerned.

Any feedback would be great to hear. Thanks for reading

The problem is worse than you think it is.

Unfortunately, all of those animals are better off coming over here in bags than they are remaining in Africa. The people who are catching and selling them would simply switch to selling them to the bush meat trade if folks overseas stopped buying them alive.

Most places in Africa are poor, overpopulated, and harsh. They are eating all of their wildlife, cutting the trees to make charcoal, and trying to farm on any patch of ground they can scrape up and pray for rain on.

The wildlife trade is a matter of desperate survival for these people, and the solution is absolutely NOT as simple as refusing to buy wild-caught animals from Africa. In reality, that may only make things much worse. If someone cannot make a living catching small geckos for export, what will they do instead?

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...t+ball+pythons


nice thread and poll on subject :)

You also have to realize that the prime habitat for a ball python is not necasarily the deep jungles. The increase in farming areas actually creates more prey for the pythons, in encouraging rodents and discouraging predetors. Plus bush meat is a completely normal source of protein for the people in the area, at least to them. So a large ball python isn't a lovely reptile to be admired, it's just another python that represents a decent amount of meat OR a price if it's exported. Pythons to us are an exotic species, to them, it's like a grey squirrel to us.