question for those who don't recommend some snakes

I've seen many posts on here where a morph isn't the best looking and everyone's saying don't but that one, wait and get a better one. I too try and get morphs that make you go WOW!!!! my question is even tho you have something that's top notch, doesn't mean ever one of it's offspring is going to be. since you recommend members not to get these morphs. when you hatch one that's not top notch, what are you going to do with it? keep it or kill it, since by the many posts I read, selling isn't an option. I don't have an issue with someone being honest. yes grade the snake, give a range with what you think it should be worth. but unless you think it's sick or deformed. don't buy the snake. to me, it's a bad statement.

when I get one that's not top notch, my price reflects that. not everyone can afford the best. and when it comes down to it. they are all ball pythons, just different paint jobs. I have many ball pythons that I consider very nice. like my pastel clown. I can't say that I'll keep him forever. but I have a normal female that I can say "I'll keep her forever". go figure that.

If I was to hatch, let's say a low-quality pastel, I'd sell it at a reduced price and mark it as pet quality.

if the ball python market is healthy, the vast majority of snakes being produced by breeders should go to people that want them as pets and most likely wont breed them. i would guesstimate maybe 90% of snakes produced should end up as pets. if we assume that the market is stable or slowly growing, and that breeding females produce maybe 20 offspring on average, that would be a reasonable number. maybe a bit higher because females are more productive than i assume or a bit lower because of normal hatchlings being imported, but defintively far away from lets say 50%.


apart from that, never cull an animal that is healthy and can make a good pet and that is not suffering. Thats just wrong. Should that ever become a serious consideration, then clearly something went wrong and/or people are simply producing too many snakes.

Brian Barczyk (my favorite snake guy and one of the biggest breeders) says that if he would catch himself not caring anymore when something completely ordinary hatches or gets born, when he would no longer care about something like a regular BP hatchling, it would be time for him to stop breeding and do something else. I think that makes a lot of sense. every snake needs and deserves care independent of pigmentation. People that dont have it in them to care about a snake just because it didnt hit a morph or the morph doesnt look as good, those peopleshould deal with something else, something dead, like cars or jewelry or trading cards or homes or whatever. There is no damage when a used car salesperson becomes unattached to some cars and has them just sitting around for a while or when a jeweller sorts out some old fashioned stuff that wont sell and smelts it down to re-use the gold and silver and platinum. But when dealing with living animals this is unacceptable.

There is no need to cull healthy offspring.

Premium examples should command somewhat above market, nice examples market and poor examples below that, IMO. They all still get sold, and folks can breed them if they like.

The idea that you do not know if they are going to produce nice offspring is partially true. Two super nice Pastels may throw the occasional bad one when the genes just do not line up, but you are much more likely to get nice babies out of parents with nice genetic material in the first place. Not too many morphs throw truly random levels of a trait.

By the pure "even tho you have something that's top notch, doesn't mean ever one of it's offspring is going to be" mentality you negate the effects of line breeding.

In the end we are all giving out opinion. I will be honest ant tell someone that "I" would not buy a certain animal. They are coming here and asking for that opinion (for the most part) so they should be willing to hear it and make a decision on their own.

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since you recommend members not to get these morphs. when you hatch one that's not top notch, what are you going to do with it?

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I price according to quality or wholesale any animals that do not seem to sell (just like I wholesale normals), fortunately I am not having much of that issue. ;)

It is silly to assume that a poor quality animal will produce high quality babies. You should never purchase a low quality animal and tell yourself that there is a possibility of it producing some really great specimens.

If you want to produce high quality animals, you need high quality breeders. Of course there will be some variation and some bad examples will hatch from time to time, but this does not mean that you stop selectively breeding altogether. That makes no sense.

Not everyone can afford the highest quality morph. They have a few options though. Buy a lower quality animal and pair it with a higher quality animal, or wait to purchase the higher quality animal.

I feel like there are way to many people rushing into breeding by buying morphs that are low quality and in turn producing low quality animals. Pastel is a perfect example of a morph that has almost been completely ruined by (in my opinion) irresponsible breeding.

I can't tell people what they should and shouldn't breed. I am only responsible for my own breeding practices. I can only encourage other keepers to wait on that brown looking pastel until a nicer one pops up on the market.

Ditto ^ ^ ^ which is also one of the reasons why I don't have a pastel yet. Most you see for sale these days for me are not worth the price and all the brown pastels are messing up other combos.
More often than not when you breed quality animals then you get quality animals, can't say the same with low quality.

I think when people give the "don't buy that animal, it is a poor example of its morph" advice, they mean 1 of 2 things (altho they may not type it out fully, this is what I believe is in their head):
1) - Don't buy that animal FOR BREEDING. It is a poor example of its morph and thus it is likely its offspring will be poor examples of the morph as well.
2) - Don't buy that animal (let's say it is a pastel) IF the reason you want a pastel is because you love the bright yellows. It is a poor example of its morph and thus it will brown out soon and won't have the bright yellows which are what you want.

I believe both of those, when you look at what is really meant rather than the abbreviated version that is often all that gets typed, are very good advice.

As far as your statement that having a top notch animal doesn't guarantee that every one of its offspring will be top notch: yes, that is true. There are no guarantees. However, it has been proven over and over again throughout the history of domesticated animals that selective breeding does work and is in fact a very powerful force. Just look at the huge variety we have in breeds of dogs. And if you breed a Labrador to a Labrador, you will always get a Labrador, not a poodle nor a St. Bernard. There is already plenty of evidence so that I think it is safe to say it has been proven in BPs in particular as well as animals (and plants for that matter) in general. So while breeding with top notch animals does not guarantee all offspring will be top notch, it does, on average, raise the quality of the offspring you produce.

As far as what to do with those animals that are produced that are less than top notch, as has already been pointed out, there are plenty of ways to get rid of them that don't involve culling, so I don't really see an issue.

Some people prefer line breding while others prefer to combine morphs.

unfortunately i dont think the two can go together very well.

the thing is, to use the analogy, we DO breed labradors to st.bernards just to then breed the offspring to a german shepherd. We do it intentionally to hit the coveted LabraBerna Shepherd.

What makes ugly pastels is NOT irresponsible breeders.... ugly pastels come from pewter or super pastel combos or out of multi-gene combos. A nice line-bred pastel goes on to become lemonblasts and bees, then gets bred to some stuff containing cinnamon and black pastel to hit some pewters and maybe pewter pin or something, these get bred to pied to make pewter het pied or lemonblast het pied, and then end up in a pewter pied or sterling pied.

Some morphs can be extremely improved by line-breeding but degenerate in the combo process, other morphs are super stable in combos.

Some breeders prefer line-breeding and want to make the picture-perfect show quality bees or lemonblasts or whatever and search for highest quality single-gene pastels, and it pays off. Some breeders care about combos and just want some pastel for pewter stuff or something. They might buy some super pastel with a third gene added, or some pewter-containing stuff, above-average looking but still, no line-breeding influence.

If you can or cannot make awesome looking morphs with or without linebreeding influence just depends on the morph. And yes you can get awesome morphs out of poor-quality single gene animals, depending on the genes. Like the sterling pied: Pied is notoriously resistant to attempts at influencing it with line-breeding, the super cinnamon content destroys the pattern, and all you can say about the pastel that went into it is: Its there, the shade of grey reveals it.

Im sure these discussions in ball python breeding will NEVER go away. In horses, a few genes are known, but mainly because they cause problems in the homozygous form. To make better horses, its line-breeding all the way. In guppy fish or other easy-to-breed tropical fish, genes and morphs are known, but a small breeding line with maybe 10-20 females can produce on average maybe 50 offspring per week, each and every week, year-round. It again comes down to line-breeding and careful selection, if a trait is recessive or codominant or a super-form just doesnt matter with these timescales and numbers. In the world of animal breeding, as pets or for any other human use, ball pythons are the odd one out. A comparatively insane and over-the-top amount of genes that are not only known, but where some things about the genes are proven out, on average a considerable value per animal, low rates of reproduction, high cost of maintenance per animal. Its a species difficult and expensive enough to breed so that people care about each individual pairing and clutch, but cheap enough to be a mass phenomenon. And its a species where line breeding is not the only strategy and you can do cutting-edge stuff while avoiding inbreeding and to a degree rejecting linebreeding. Maybe its that what makes BP breeding so popular, that you can have different strategies that work differently but lead to awesome results?

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Originally Posted by Kurtilein

What makes ugly pastels is NOT irresponsible breeders.... ugly pastels come from pewter or super pastel combos or out of multi-gene combos. A nice line-bred pastel goes on to become lemonblasts and bees, then gets bred to some stuff containing cinnamon and black pastel to hit some pewters and maybe pewter pin or something, these get bred to pied to make pewter het pied or lemonblast het pied, and then end up in a pewter pied or sterling pied.

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I don't know what your point is here. It seems most of your post is a giant run on sentence that is incomprehensible. So you are saying that brown pastels don't come from people breeding brown pastels? Because.. that is where they come from. Not to say they don't also come from multi-gene snakes, but those poor quality pastels that result should not be bred in my opinion. But people do breed them.