Would you breed her

I didn't really see what others were selling normals for at the show--but mine come with ID sheets, feeding records, care sheet, and registration on iHerp's lineage base. I suspect because they are fat, healthy, and obviously treated just as well as my morphs, this attracts more buyers...
I can't post on Craigslist, either, because I am a business.

Well after reading everything in the thread, I think I am gonna hold off on breeding her this season. I was kind of already leaning that way but just wanted to see what everyone else thought. There is no rush and around here I still see normals for sale but they are only going for 15-20 bucks. Thanks all for the input. I did learn something from this thread though, I did not know there was an age at which a snake should breed at I was under the impression if they where 1200g+ they were big enough to breed fairly safely. I also knew that 1200 is ok but 1500+ is preferred. If you should wait till 3 yrs why do people power feed and get them up to size within a 1-2 years?

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Originally Posted by nixer

i dont know where your looking, but just petco and petsmart have major standing orders every year for pretty much as much as they can get!
your also not going to get 50$ a piece for them either in a wholesale market especially when big orders of ch babies can go for as little as 7$ each unstarted. i have a wholesaler that would gladly take every normal i can produce, but then again your not going to get much more than 10$ each selling to a wholesaler. now to a petstore you could get more, but then your doing the leg work lining it all up

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I think you are making my point for me. If you 10$ to 20% dollars a snake hardly makes it worth your time and effort, let alone the time and effort of your female. You are looking at making maybe 150% for the whole clutch. How much does it cost you to feed your female up before and after laying her clutch, plus starting the babies, hatchrite or whatever you use to incubate, electricity to run the incubator. Then all the leg work to broker the deal. At 150$ before you take out expenses I can't think of a solid reason to bread a female even a little too soon unless you are trying to prove her out and even then I would say wait.

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Originally Posted by Egapal

I think you are making my point for me. If you 10$ to 20% dollars a snake hardly makes it worth your time and effort, let alone the time and effort of your female. You are looking at making maybe 150% for the whole clutch. How much does it cost you to feed your female up before and after laying her clutch, plus starting the babies, hatchrite or whatever you use to incubate, electricity to run the incubator. Then all the leg work to broker the deal. At 150$ before you take out expenses I can't think of a solid reason to bread a female even a little too soon unless you are trying to prove her out and even then I would say wait.

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no it does not prove your point. in a wholesale market due to the price of imports many many large pet stores will only pay the lowest they can. do i agree with it no, but when your running a resale business you must attempt to buy cheap and sell high inorder to turn a profit. i do not breed normals to make normals i breed for what i want/need first then breed for what i think the market will be. not many in this industry put a value on their time and unfortunately many more do not value all animals. when i choose to wholesale off normals its because i have to for one reason or another.

now lets just say you have a wholesaler who offers you 10$ a piece started
you could take that or you could not and feed them and house them till they sell, but now lets figure in just the feeding
40 cents for a mouse it would take 25 mice to eatup 10$
now thats just feeders.
so if you go 5 meals then wholesale your looking at 2$ in feeders then you would have 8$ for everything else.


currently at the shows around me i have seen many many normals for sale for 15-20$

at 15$ your looking at 37.5 feeders
so just feeders alone you would have to sell them within 37 weeks

either way your not making money, but if your trying to make money on normals of either sex its not going to happen. even if you raise up normal females the math does not work out. just with the price of feeders. now if you start factoring in codoms it pays some but not ALOT

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Originally Posted by nixer

no it does not prove your point. in a wholesale market due to the price of imports many many large pet stores will only pay the lowest they can. do i agree with it no, but when your running a resale business you must attempt to buy cheap and sell high inorder to turn a profit. i do not breed normals to make normals i breed for what i want/need first then breed for what i think the market will be. not many in this industry put a value on their time and unfortunately many more do not value all animals. when i choose to wholesale off normals its because i have to for one reason or another.

now lets just say you have a wholesaler who offers you 10$ a piece started
you could take that or you could not and feed them and house them till they sell, but now lets figure in just the feeding
40 cents for a mouse it would take 25 mice to eatup 10$
now thats just feeders.
so if you go 5 meals then wholesale your looking at 2$ in feeders then you would have 8$ for everything else.


currently at the shows around me i have seen many many normals for sale for 15-20$

at 15$ your looking at 37.5 feeders
so just feeders alone you would have to sell them within 37 weeks

either way your not making money, but if your trying to make money on normals of either sex its not going to happen. even if you raise up normal females the math does not work out. just with the price of feeders. now if you start factoring in codoms it pays some but not ALOT

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Hold up nixer. I am pretty sure we both agree that in this case the OP should not breed the snake.

I understand the basics of supply and demand. I am not really sure what you are trying to say above. My comment was that the market is flooded with normals. So far you have confirmed what I stated. That normals are sold by breeders for 15 to 20 dollars. So if by your own admission you can not make money selling normals. Now if something isn't profitable that tells me that there is a problem with either the supply being too high or the demand being too low. We know that the demand is not something that can easily be affected so that leaves demand. Now WingedWolfPsion says.

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Originally Posted by WingedWolfPsion

If the market were flooded with them, they wouldn't be importing them from Africa.

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This is the furthest thing from logic I have seen in a while. Imported snakes is the reason the market is flooded not evidence that its not. In fact when you have a market that is flooded, thats when you see the most imports. Countries where people make much less on average import to the US. Many BP's are imported from Ghana. 28% of Ghana's population makes less than $1.25 a day. So you may think "why would they import normal BP's if the market were flooded" The answer is because you are paying people less than $1.25 a day to round them up in Ghana and shipping to the US is not as expensive as you would think. So does anyone have any good evidence that the market (in the USA) is not flooded?

I'd wait till she weighs around 1500 grams

lance