Albino lovers... Don't look!

That picture is nearly 10 years old. It started making the rounds back in 2002, and showed up on many, many t-shirts at the National Reptile Breeders Expo in Daytona Beach, FL that summer (I still have mine ;)). This was back when albino ball pythons were regularly selling for $2000+ EACH.

Story behind it (memory is a little dim) is that the albino was a dead F/T animal fed to the king cobra, and the picture was taken specifically to get people all riled up (hence making it into T-shirts, etc), because on the outside looking in, a lot of non-ball keepers felt the whole morph craze was kind of ridiculous at the time.

King cobras are snake eaters. Those of you who are flipping out over this probably don't realize that captive kings are more often than not fed snakes to which they'd NEVER be exposed in the wild, because that's what's available in captivity. I don't know a single O. hannah keeper that regularly feeds their king expensive ball python morphs just for grins, nor do I know any who *enjoy* feeding them snakes, beyond it being a normal aspect of keeping king cobras. I was fortunate to have one that ate rats, but it took a looooong time to get him to do so, and all things considered it wasn't the normal diet for this species.

This image was an opportunistic situation for a few keepers to have a laugh over those would get all bent out of shape over it...it certainly got my back up way back when, but looking back now, it's easy to have a laugh.

$.02...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kara

I was fortunate to have one that ate rats, but it took a looooong time to get him to do so, and all things considered it wasn't the normal diet for this species.

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OT - but I miss your king. It was an honor and a privilege to meet him. King cobras are at the top of my list of favorite venomous.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Skiploder

I agree that feeding ball pythons to other snakes is a stupid idea.

I fed my cribos a steady diet of butters, bananas, caramels, chocolates, cinnamons, mochas, mimosas, sugars, toffees, and vanilla creams. They all developed cholesterol and weight issues.

There are better choices out there.

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well no wonder they had problems with a diet so high in sugar. you're lucky they didn't end up diabetics. good luck finding an insulin ball to treat that problem. ;)