When does the industry/hobby switch to line breeding as a focus...if ever.

Even in my opinion we have some time left in the hobby for collections simply focusing on diverse morph production/ morph quantity production but I'm curious with the falling prices in the hobby when to we start to see the switch to line breeding. What I mean by that is, picking a morph and/or trait and breeding for desirable traits i.e. the entire Boa and Colubrid market.

Breeders picking their favorite morphs and line breeding for the cleanest and brightest or darkest animals to stand out.

What make you think that people don't already do that? ;)

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Originally Posted by Deborah

What make you think that people don't already do that? ;)

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I'm planning on doing it. Because the ball python hobby is at this point totally morph based does it stay the way it is now or does it start to evolve into people line breeding certain animals to hopefully get such high quality and well known stock to rise above the din. That their enchi lessers and bumble bees (insert whatever morph you want) are so high quality that they have a waiting list.

Right now almost the entire market is in a mode to see who has the most diverse price list.

You would be surprise how many breeders are all about high quality and selective breeding and it's not because of the current market ;)

Selective breeding is a choice I made from day one and I know many that feel the same way :gj:

Sure there will always be people getting animals based on price only and just so they can say they have it but those are not the majority of people especially those that are in it for the long term.

Selective line breeding has been going on since day one. If you look at old pictures of a lot of the early mutations like pastel or mojave or spider and you can see that the quality today is a lot better then it was 10 years ago.

I feel like there are a lot of breeders that only work with certain morphs in order to produce the best-looking pythons they can. I have a local breeder here who only works with lavenders, and I've seen others that only work with bananas, etc. So, in my opinion, this already does happen... though of course, there are breeders that try to have the most amount of morphs that they can. I think it all depends on personal preference. Some prefer to see how many things they can do with x gene to make the prettiest snakes and some people want to have a diverse inventory.