Is anyone breeding for temperament?

Very interesting thread! Thanks for sharing, everyone. :)

I loved the article on domestication. I wondered about a couple of the items on the "should you domesticate" list, though. On at least two of those scores, cats should never have been domesticated! LOL

Very interesting article, though. Thanks for the link. Gotta love wikis.

Heather

If anything there may be some selecting for bad temperament with the common belief that they eat and breed better. Maybe the do but it would be a shame if balls end up loosing their docile reputation.

I select my stock for temperment. I've only been bit a couple of times in the past years (I contribute it to my own actions, and not to the snakes) and I own a decent group.
My snakes (with the exception of like three...) are all pretty calm.

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Originally Posted by RandyRemington

If anything there may be some selecting for bad temperament with the common belief that they eat and breed better. Maybe the do but it would be a shame if balls end up loosing their docile reputation.

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Oh please! Somehow I doubt anyone is going through their breedable snakes looking for the nasty, eat your face off snakes thinking that those are better eaters or breeders. I haven't a clue whether it's even genetically possible to breed for temperment in snakes but somehow I don't see it happening anytime too soon. How do you determine temperment in the first place? You can't breed for a trait if you can't define it. Example.....

When we got Brannagh she was nuts, extremely tempermental, extremely difficult to manage. Eventually she calmed down. Now which was her "true" temperment. Was she born difficult and grew up difficult and just calmed down after Mike and I worked with her as an adult? Was she born calm and some experience in her previous life resulted in her aggressive ways? How in the world do you determine her "genetic" temperment and if you can't, how can you selectively breed for it?

I would say that consistently striking and hissing as a hatchling is an indicator of bad temperament. How bad it is depends on if they outgrow it or not. Many ball pythons don't show this even as hatchlings. Of those that do, most outgrow it with age. But the worst of the worst would be the ones that still hiss and strike as adults.

Perhaps if you only bred animals that didn't hiss and strike as babies you would get fewer babies that hiss and strike. Many would consider this goal silly as what harm does a hissing and striking ball do to an experienced snake keeper but some new potential keepers would be turned off by it.

My first clutch of ball pythons was from a hissy and striky het albino male to a nice female. Half of the 4 daughters hissed and struck as hatchlings. One of them would still hiss as an adult produced only two hatchlings in her first clutch, one nice and one pure evil. Small sample size but there could actually be a temperament gene or two.

Hopefully there aren't breeders purposely selecting aggressive adults for breeders but for someone who works with more aggressive species temperament might not be much of a negative and if it is less likely to be a tricky eater or breeder it may be attractive. At least it would be hard to cull a valuable morph from your breeding collection just because of its attitude.

Wow, this discussion is bordering on ridiculous...

I can see the kingsnake ad now....

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Here's my pastel 100% het for :cens0r::cens0r::cens0r::cens0r::cens0r::cens0r:....$6000 shipped.

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:P

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Originally Posted by frankykeno

Oh please! Somehow I doubt anyone is going through their breedable snakes looking for the nasty, eat your face off snakes thinking that those are better eaters or breeders. I haven't a clue whether it's even genetically possible to breed for temperment in snakes but somehow I don't see it happening anytime too soon. How do you determine temperment in the first place? You can't breed for a trait if you can't define it. Example.....

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You assume that artificial selection occurs only by means of selective breeding where the breeder consciously selects for a trait. However, evolution doesn't stop being evolution because the forces that determine how many offspring an organism begets change from wild/natural ones to artificial/human-made ones. And humans don't always have complete control of the artificial situation they've come up with.

Thousands of years ago, I doubt dog breeders were selecting for some of the diseases that now are prevalent in certain breeds of dogs. A side effect for selecting for certain traits can be others less desirable or unknown traits. This was called unconscious selection by Darwin himself.

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Originally Posted by aaajohnson

That article and the question made me think about what I have heard from a few different breeders, that more agressive BPs sometimes make the best breeders. I have no personal experience yet to say either way, but maybe someone else will chime in ...

Neil

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If this is true....then what Randy said remains a possibility.

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Originally Posted by elevatethis

Wow, this discussion is bordering on ridiculous...

:P

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I respectfully disagree, threads on this kind of thing can get silly......I thought this thread on bp behavior/temperament was ridiculous.....but I don't think we've reached that point anywhere in this thread.

My "bad tempered" snakes have always proven to be really good feeders, so for me it's all good. Then again I haven't had a lot of feeding problems with the more docile ones either. :P

I hope to breed beauty snakes for temperment eventually. Mostly because there's no blue beauty morphs to shoot for like there is with BPs and it's nice to have goals, as well as because they have such an undeserved rep for having attitude problems and it'd be nice to turn that around.

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Originally Posted by RandyRemington

consistently striking and hissing as a hatchling

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You just described almost every single BP hatchling I've seen.....