Just a thought....................

I'm definitely not planning on breeding him to all those girls!! :) I also have an albino pair and a pied male, just not of size yet, but I do see what your saying, and to me they are worth their weight in gold, all of them.


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Originally Posted by Jackie

Just made a deal a while ago. Bought a rack. With it came 5 normal female breeders and a male. Hearing the girls are near worthless bummed me out a little! Either way, they are beautiful girls and good pets if anything. (Actually, the male is a pastel.)


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if you get a nice multi-gene breeder male, its still a cheap way to drive up the number of clutches and eggs :)

the only issue is that nowadays, people generally want more than that.

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Originally Posted by Misha

You just wrote the magic words. This is a HOBBY for me as well as most small breeders and probably yourself. I don't rely on breeding to pay my bills. My first reason for breeding would be to have fun not to strike rich. I think you're in the wrong hobby to make money.

If you want me to look at breeding from a business point of view then I'd tell you it's not a good business to be in period. If all you care about is making money, there's plenty of things you can do that will make a lot more money a lot faster than breeding ever will. So please don't talk to me about smart choices.

So at the end of the day, unless you're the select few who actually depend on breeding to pay their bills, you shouldn't be talking about how uselss certain animals are. Maybe you should reconsider your hobby/business choices and go into something that doesn't deal with useless animals.

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Where in any post in my entire time on this forum have I ever said I do it for the money and to pay my bills? You really might need to start READING with a open mind and not put words in my mouth/posts. If you breed, then you breed for a purpose and this then makes it a business. Some of us make start choices with our families money while there are others that don't. What you do is your choice but it seems to me that you are just wanting to start an argument.

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Originally Posted by Misha

This has nothing to do with breeding projects. Read the post before you reply.

I'd love to produce cool morphs but I'm not going to use regular BPs I produce as feeders as someone on this thread suggested. And your "useless" normals are the ones that get people involved in this hobby. I think most people here started with a normal including myself.

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#1 You said it yourself that you are a breeder, correct? As a breeder we all should have plans/purpose for every pairing that we do. If you don't then you just might be a hack. Its not about throwing two snakes together just because you have a male and female. (This reminds me of a lot of wanna be dog breeders) Every pairing I have going on with my 9 girls have a goal, some could be in one clutch while others might take several?

#2 Don't sugar coat it, I'm not that kind of guy. Yes I said I know someone that feeds off his normal hatchlings to hid kings. Again IF you open your mind you would not have zeroed in on just those couple words in that post. If they have any type of birth defect only, then again even morphs have gone the same route if they had issues. Would I do it? Don't know, depends on the situation and condition of the hatchling.

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Originally Posted by MrLang

I don't think they'll go up. There will always be people breeding their pastel male to normal female.

I'm not sure why there is so much offense being taken to the word useless. He is talking about the dollar value of the animal over the cost of keeping it alive. He is not talking about how you should just pick them up, throw them at the garbage can or let your cat play with it. Nobody is downplaying the value of life. We're on a website dedicated to these animals - we all signed up here because we agree they're all cool, including normal males. It's pretty obviously a discussion about return on investment. Chill out.

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What you are seeing is what happens when people are stuck in the self centered world of "me" and cannot open their eyes or minds to what other people do and the reasons why. That just sounded like something from the Matrix LoL.

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Originally Posted by Jackie

Just made a deal a while ago. Bought a rack. With it came 5 normal female breeders and a male. Hearing the girls are near worthless bummed me out a little! Either way, they are beautiful girls and good pets if anything. (Actually, the male is a pastel.)

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We all have/had to start somewhere. Normal females have a value as breeders but not like they use to. Again its up to what the breeder wants to do and their individual goals. I have 4 normal girls in one rack and two of them are pet quality as I also have two males in another rack that were my first snakes.

Lets see how much heat I catch for the following, I kinda feel like I am going on a pet rat forum and posting about raising feeders.
If I have normal males (yes this is my first year breeding so my luck I will have all normal males or nothing LOL) after a certain point of feeding them and not being able to sell them, feeding them off becomes a very real possibility. I see no difference in feeding off snakes vs feeding off rats, mices, hell even roaches, and mealworms. Everything I just mentioned was a living creature giving its life to sustain another life.

Anyway back on topic towards the OP original post. I do not believe there will be a raise in the cost of normals unless something really really drastic happens (disease tears through a bunch of breeders reducing the overall availability of normal ball pythons). There are too many coming out of Africa and the prices on morphs is low enough that even people just getting into breeding can start with morphs instead of normals.

While I don't personally use snakes as feeders, I doesn't bother me seeing BPs or other snakes used as feeders. BPs, including morphs, are some of the most common feeder snakes in the reptile world.

Just like our snakes have to eat rats, some snakes have to eat other snakes. I've seen a few cobra, monitor, and frog keepers feed balls to their snake eating animals. And animals like King Cobras cannot eat any other prey(I.E. with fur) because they evolved to ingest specifically snakes. They do not thrive on any other diet. And other furred prey like rats have been seen to actually give them internal and digestive problems.

I'd rather see a snake become a feeder than it go to a bad home and suffer slowly or thrown away/released into the wild(we all know its happened).

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I personally have quite a few normal females that I use for breeding. Which means I usually end up with plenty of normal offspring. These babies are useless to me, (as in I personally have no use for them) that doesn't mean they are without value. I'll feed them up (not too much, just maintenence feeding, and I try to get them on frozen thawed as fast as possible) and generally sell them off to a pet store or wholesale them. It usually cost me more (especially in time) then they are worth. It's a good thing I'm not in this for the money. :D

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Originally Posted by PitOnTheProwl

you also need to step away from you hobby choice and look at it from a business point of view.

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Well here's a good example where you told me to look at my hobby from a business point of view. The only business point of view I know is to make money.

Look Pit, I'm not here to argue with you. I'm not saying breeders can't have ambitions or goals but eveyone has a different outlook on what is useful and what is not in breeding and elsewhere. So I'll agree to disagree with you on this.

I think if breeders stood their ground on normal's prices, people would buy them at the same price as private reptile stores sell them. What happens is people just start flooding the market and underselling their animals because they're trying to so over time, it becomes the norm and everyone expects to buy a normal for 10 bucks.

They'll always going to be a demand for normals as a beginner snake/pet snake so as long as we stop selling them for next to nothing, there's a slight chance they might be worth more than a couple of bucks.

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The problem with the stand your ground thing is that there are always people who simply do not want to deal with raising up normal males, myself included, that will sell them for cheap to get them gone. The joy of the free market. If all the breeders got together and agreed on certain prices for normals you would all go out of business for price fixing and I would still sell my normals for low prices :D

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Originally Posted by Misha

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Originally Posted by PitOnTheProwl

As much as you think you love your normals (don't twist what I type because I have my share of normal that I wont let go of either) you also need to step away from you hobby choice and look at it from a business point of view. I love breeding, raising up little ones costs the same regardless if its a normal or a ?? morph. Whats the smart choice?

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Well here's a good example where you told me to look at my hobby from a business point of view. The only business point of view I know is to make money.

Look Pit, I'm not here to argue with you. I'm not saying breeders can't have ambitions or goals but eveyone has a different outlook on what is useful and what is not in breeding and elsewhere. So I'll agree to disagree with you on this.

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You are correct, we will agree to disagree but please use my whole quote not just the center section that you don't agree with.