What is the best example of....

How bout this. Just answer this question for me. Say you get a group od people together to come up with a standard for a certain color morph. What happens if noine can agree? What happens if half the people like blushing and half do not? How are you gonna write a standard?

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Originally Posted by Rhasputin

Even MOUSE breeders disagree, when the standards for mice were written over 100 years ago, and competitive breeding has been going on for upwards of 300 years. ;)

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And herein lies the issue. Setting aside differences in opinion completely, ball python morphs have been bred for such a short period of time. Some people have been in it long enough, or have bought only top shelf stock and are consistently producing very nice animals, so they would be producing fairly obvious "nice" examples of whatever morphs they are producing. However, the 10-15 year period that is the morph craze just isn't a long enough time to set the standards. Who knows how much more refined some morphs may become with further selective breeding and line breeding? It could take many more years to really focus on and bring out some subtleties in some morphs, rather than just reproducing them for the obvious traits. It really blows my mind to hear it when people talk about balls already nearing the end of their popularity when so much more can be done. Maybe there won't be any more mind blowing morphs coming over from Africa, but there's more than enough in our hands now to work with for a long time. Point being, could ball python breeding be so young/fresh/new that we truly don't even know yet what "the standard" should be? I think something gets lost with so many people seemingly in a rush to at least stay with the curve...but think of what could be done with a pastel or a lesser with 20-30 more years of just working with a pastel or a lesser. It almost unfortunate that with ball pythons, NEW and MORE seems to far outweigh PERFECT.

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Originally Posted by snake lab

How bout this. Just answer this question for me. Say you get a group od people together to come up with a standard for a certain color morph. What happens if noine can agree? What happens if half the people like blushing and half do not? How are you gonna write a standard?

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Coin flip tiebreaker...simple enough.

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Originally Posted by snake lab

How bout this. Just answer this question for me. Say you get a group od people together to come up with a standard for a certain color morph. What happens if noine can agree? What happens if half the people like blushing and half do not? How are you gonna write a standard?

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So are you under the impression that the color/pattern standards for rats/mice were just magically agreed upon because everybody liked the same thing?

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Originally Posted by Rhasputin

People don't have to agree. That's what you're missing.
Didn't you say you were leaving the conversation? :P

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If noone agrees then how can you set a standard? And who sets the standard? You? Someone who isnt even a ball python breeder?

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Originally Posted by RobNJ

Coin flip tiebreaker...simple enough.

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Rob thank you for your thoughts. You bring up a good point with the time line. even 5 years from now, we could see tons of new mutations.
A club can deal with this by allowing provisional standards to be shown, and eventually accepted.

It's not simple to answer your question about how to pick which one would be the standard, Snake lab. It would depend on how similar it is to other standards already in place, if it can be broken down into 2 categories, and in the end if nobody agrees on anything, it might be as silly as a coin toss! :P

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Originally Posted by snake lab

If noone agrees then how can you set a standard? And who sets the standard? You? Someone who isnt even a ball python breeder?

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The presidents of the club set the standard. I'm sure they will make them in such a way that enough people agree with them to keep a good following of breeders. But in the end it's 100% up to the club owners to decide on standards. This is how all clubs work.

i think we should just do a "beauty pageant" with entry standards such as males/females, weight classes, photography methods and limitations of editing and whatever else by morph, weekly or monthly.

do it for a whole year and compare all the winners and use that as a guideline for setting standards or just forget about standards all together.

Lmao. This thread has really burned some brain cells for me. I keep trying to get away from it but it keeps pulling me back in. Arghhhhh

*facepalm*

People are TRULY overcomplicating this. Showing animals is about a group of people setting a standard, and then competing to meet that standard.
A) If someone doesn't like the standard, they simply don't join the club, and don't compete.
B) The standard can be revised if the majority of the club changes its mind.
C) If the people in the club can't agree on whether or not blushing is good in pastels, then they have 2 choices--allow both high and low blushing, or write 2 different standards, and declare 2 different versions of that morph (which is what we have done in the ball python community, by referring to animals as 'lemon pastel' or 'Graziani pastel'--people know what that means, basically).

You don't want to show ball pythons? Simple...you never join the club. You don't like their standard? No problem...you breed for a different look. Someone in the club doesn't like one of the standards? They can leave the club, or try to get the look they want listed as a standard for a new strain.

What is the purpose? Because people like to show off their creations, and people are competitive. It's purely for fun.

I can also imagine standard sizes being introduced--ball pythons above or below certain weights could be labeled 'miniature', 'standard', or 'giant', for example. Body shapes, tail lengths, etc, all could be selected for.

If people want to do it. All you need for this to happen is a group of people...say, maybe 10...who want to do it. Voila, it will be happening. It doesn't matter if 300 people hate it, if those 10 want to do it, they will do it, lol.

I'm not sure why folks are confused.

Breeding ball python morphs is about creating gorgeous animals through selective breeding. A show club would be about doing so in a more organized fashion, that's all. I can understand people not wanting to participate, but I don't quite get where the poo-poohing of the idea is coming from. It's bound to happen eventually. How long people have been breeding ball pythons is quite irrelevant to that.

Why? Because there is an enthusiastic following of people all across the US who show horses. Not living ones, mind you. Plastic horses. Some of them repainted, some of them original as the factory made them. They love their hobby, they love the competition and the social aspects of it, and they have a wall full of ribbons. They're not all teenaged girls, either.

If people will show plastic horses, it would be pretty absurd to think that they won't show ball pythons.