question for those who don't recommend some snakes

I've seen many posts on here where a morph isn't the best looking and everyone's saying don't but that one, wait and get a better one. I too try and get morphs that make you go WOW!!!! my question is even tho you have something that's top notch, doesn't mean ever one of it's offspring is going to be. since you recommend members not to get these morphs. when you hatch one that's not top notch, what are you going to do with it? keep it or kill it, since by the many posts I read, selling isn't an option. I don't have an issue with someone being honest. yes grade the snake, give a range with what you think it should be worth. but unless you think it's sick or deformed. don't buy the snake. to me, it's a bad statement.

when I get one that's not top notch, my price reflects that. not everyone can afford the best. and when it comes down to it. they are all ball pythons, just different paint jobs. I have many ball pythons that I consider very nice. like my pastel clown. I can't say that I'll keep him forever. but I have a normal female that I can say "I'll keep her forever". go figure that.

If I was to hatch, let's say a low-quality pastel, I'd sell it at a reduced price and mark it as pet quality.

if the ball python market is healthy, the vast majority of snakes being produced by breeders should go to people that want them as pets and most likely wont breed them. i would guesstimate maybe 90% of snakes produced should end up as pets. if we assume that the market is stable or slowly growing, and that breeding females produce maybe 20 offspring on average, that would be a reasonable number. maybe a bit higher because females are more productive than i assume or a bit lower because of normal hatchlings being imported, but defintively far away from lets say 50%.


apart from that, never cull an animal that is healthy and can make a good pet and that is not suffering. Thats just wrong. Should that ever become a serious consideration, then clearly something went wrong and/or people are simply producing too many snakes.

Brian Barczyk (my favorite snake guy and one of the biggest breeders) says that if he would catch himself not caring anymore when something completely ordinary hatches or gets born, when he would no longer care about something like a regular BP hatchling, it would be time for him to stop breeding and do something else. I think that makes a lot of sense. every snake needs and deserves care independent of pigmentation. People that dont have it in them to care about a snake just because it didnt hit a morph or the morph doesnt look as good, those peopleshould deal with something else, something dead, like cars or jewelry or trading cards or homes or whatever. There is no damage when a used car salesperson becomes unattached to some cars and has them just sitting around for a while or when a jeweller sorts out some old fashioned stuff that wont sell and smelts it down to re-use the gold and silver and platinum. But when dealing with living animals this is unacceptable.

There is no need to cull healthy offspring.

Premium examples should command somewhat above market, nice examples market and poor examples below that, IMO. They all still get sold, and folks can breed them if they like.

The idea that you do not know if they are going to produce nice offspring is partially true. Two super nice Pastels may throw the occasional bad one when the genes just do not line up, but you are much more likely to get nice babies out of parents with nice genetic material in the first place. Not too many morphs throw truly random levels of a trait.

By the pure "even tho you have something that's top notch, doesn't mean ever one of it's offspring is going to be" mentality you negate the effects of line breeding.

In the end we are all giving out opinion. I will be honest ant tell someone that "I" would not buy a certain animal. They are coming here and asking for that opinion (for the most part) so they should be willing to hear it and make a decision on their own.

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since you recommend members not to get these morphs. when you hatch one that's not top notch, what are you going to do with it?

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I price according to quality or wholesale any animals that do not seem to sell (just like I wholesale normals), fortunately I am not having much of that issue. ;)

It is silly to assume that a poor quality animal will produce high quality babies. You should never purchase a low quality animal and tell yourself that there is a possibility of it producing some really great specimens.

If you want to produce high quality animals, you need high quality breeders. Of course there will be some variation and some bad examples will hatch from time to time, but this does not mean that you stop selectively breeding altogether. That makes no sense.

Not everyone can afford the highest quality morph. They have a few options though. Buy a lower quality animal and pair it with a higher quality animal, or wait to purchase the higher quality animal.

I feel like there are way to many people rushing into breeding by buying morphs that are low quality and in turn producing low quality animals. Pastel is a perfect example of a morph that has almost been completely ruined by (in my opinion) irresponsible breeding.

I can't tell people what they should and shouldn't breed. I am only responsible for my own breeding practices. I can only encourage other keepers to wait on that brown looking pastel until a nicer one pops up on the market.

Ditto ^ ^ ^ which is also one of the reasons why I don't have a pastel yet. Most you see for sale these days for me are not worth the price and all the brown pastels are messing up other combos.
More often than not when you breed quality animals then you get quality animals, can't say the same with low quality.

I think when people give the "don't buy that animal, it is a poor example of its morph" advice, they mean 1 of 2 things (altho they may not type it out fully, this is what I believe is in their head):
1) - Don't buy that animal FOR BREEDING. It is a poor example of its morph and thus it is likely its offspring will be poor examples of the morph as well.
2) - Don't buy that animal (let's say it is a pastel) IF the reason you want a pastel is because you love the bright yellows. It is a poor example of its morph and thus it will brown out soon and won't have the bright yellows which are what you want.

I believe both of those, when you look at what is really meant rather than the abbreviated version that is often all that gets typed, are very good advice.

As far as your statement that having a top notch animal doesn't guarantee that every one of its offspring will be top notch: yes, that is true. There are no guarantees. However, it has been proven over and over again throughout the history of domesticated animals that selective breeding does work and is in fact a very powerful force. Just look at the huge variety we have in breeds of dogs. And if you breed a Labrador to a Labrador, you will always get a Labrador, not a poodle nor a St. Bernard. There is already plenty of evidence so that I think it is safe to say it has been proven in BPs in particular as well as animals (and plants for that matter) in general. So while breeding with top notch animals does not guarantee all offspring will be top notch, it does, on average, raise the quality of the offspring you produce.

As far as what to do with those animals that are produced that are less than top notch, as has already been pointed out, there are plenty of ways to get rid of them that don't involve culling, so I don't really see an issue.

Some people prefer line breding while others prefer to combine morphs.

unfortunately i dont think the two can go together very well.

the thing is, to use the analogy, we DO breed labradors to st.bernards just to then breed the offspring to a german shepherd. We do it intentionally to hit the coveted LabraBerna Shepherd.

What makes ugly pastels is NOT irresponsible breeders.... ugly pastels come from pewter or super pastel combos or out of multi-gene combos. A nice line-bred pastel goes on to become lemonblasts and bees, then gets bred to some stuff containing cinnamon and black pastel to hit some pewters and maybe pewter pin or something, these get bred to pied to make pewter het pied or lemonblast het pied, and then end up in a pewter pied or sterling pied.

Some morphs can be extremely improved by line-breeding but degenerate in the combo process, other morphs are super stable in combos.

Some breeders prefer line-breeding and want to make the picture-perfect show quality bees or lemonblasts or whatever and search for highest quality single-gene pastels, and it pays off. Some breeders care about combos and just want some pastel for pewter stuff or something. They might buy some super pastel with a third gene added, or some pewter-containing stuff, above-average looking but still, no line-breeding influence.

If you can or cannot make awesome looking morphs with or without linebreeding influence just depends on the morph. And yes you can get awesome morphs out of poor-quality single gene animals, depending on the genes. Like the sterling pied: Pied is notoriously resistant to attempts at influencing it with line-breeding, the super cinnamon content destroys the pattern, and all you can say about the pastel that went into it is: Its there, the shade of grey reveals it.

Im sure these discussions in ball python breeding will NEVER go away. In horses, a few genes are known, but mainly because they cause problems in the homozygous form. To make better horses, its line-breeding all the way. In guppy fish or other easy-to-breed tropical fish, genes and morphs are known, but a small breeding line with maybe 10-20 females can produce on average maybe 50 offspring per week, each and every week, year-round. It again comes down to line-breeding and careful selection, if a trait is recessive or codominant or a super-form just doesnt matter with these timescales and numbers. In the world of animal breeding, as pets or for any other human use, ball pythons are the odd one out. A comparatively insane and over-the-top amount of genes that are not only known, but where some things about the genes are proven out, on average a considerable value per animal, low rates of reproduction, high cost of maintenance per animal. Its a species difficult and expensive enough to breed so that people care about each individual pairing and clutch, but cheap enough to be a mass phenomenon. And its a species where line breeding is not the only strategy and you can do cutting-edge stuff while avoiding inbreeding and to a degree rejecting linebreeding. Maybe its that what makes BP breeding so popular, that you can have different strategies that work differently but lead to awesome results?

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Originally Posted by Kurtilein

What makes ugly pastels is NOT irresponsible breeders.... ugly pastels come from pewter or super pastel combos or out of multi-gene combos. A nice line-bred pastel goes on to become lemonblasts and bees, then gets bred to some stuff containing cinnamon and black pastel to hit some pewters and maybe pewter pin or something, these get bred to pied to make pewter het pied or lemonblast het pied, and then end up in a pewter pied or sterling pied.

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I don't know what your point is here. It seems most of your post is a giant run on sentence that is incomprehensible. So you are saying that brown pastels don't come from people breeding brown pastels? Because.. that is where they come from. Not to say they don't also come from multi-gene snakes, but those poor quality pastels that result should not be bred in my opinion. But people do breed them.

Ok so when considering selective breeding and how quality is affected lets just say you have a decent pastel and assuming you breed it to something that is a darker morph like say mahogany or ghi (I chose these because I think pastel GHIs and Mahoganies are just not very attractive) could a pastel be dirtied up by simply breeding it to something dark like that? I have heard a lot of different things suggesting that characteristics can be passed on without actually passing on the gene in particular. So in the case of breeding dark morphs to pastels could some of the dark characteristics be passed on to the babies even if the gene itself was not? I am not real good with genetics but I know what I like and thats what I plan to breed for. I try not to complicate things. I am not against breeding pastel to darker morphs I think it works in many cases but isnt that part of selective breeding? Deciding not to pair pastel with something because it could just muddy it up? I hope I am not confusing any body.

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Originally Posted by Kaorte

I don't know what your point is here. It seems most of your post is a giant run on sentence that is incomprehensible. So you are saying that brown pastels don't come from people breeding brown pastels? Because.. that is where they come from. Not to say they don't also come from multi-gene snakes, but those poor quality pastels that result should not be bred in my opinion. But people do breed them.

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The point that Kurt is making, and it is an absolutely valid one, is that when you are line-breeding you not just dealing with the morph gene alone but you are also selecting for other genes that influence that morph gene. So you can blame people who breed low-grade Pastels all you want but the blame lays just as squarely on the mass-combo makers as well.

Morph genes do not exist in a vacuum. There are probably 18,000-20,000 genes in the ball python genome. Let us just arbitrarily say that, when line-breeding for quality, you are selecting for 100 other genes that influence a given morph. So when someone decides to shooting to make the first ever Pastel Pin Chocolate hetRedAx Spotnose BlackHead, even if they started out with the pinnacle representations of each of the individual morphs there are 600 other genes in the equation at the end point you have to account for and if you think that the 100 extra genes that make an one of those morphs superb are going to have an equally positive effect on the other five morphs then you are fooling yourself. The reality is that the "positive-influence" genes each morph is carrying are more than likely going to negatively influence the other morphs. So if you look at Pastel in this situation, what you have is 500 "negative-influence to Pastel" genes antagonizing 100 "positive-influence to Pastel" genes so any straight Pastels you generate from this breeding are more than likely going to be mediocre-grade Pastels at best.

I understand that. But couldn't you agree that the low quality pastels that result should be marked as pet quality? I'm sure breeders don't sell them for the same price as a higher quality pastel and people still buy them with the intention to breed.

Its just frustrating for me. I feel like this is happening to other morphs as well. They are getting so degraded.

Personally, I don't even like most combos that have more than 4 visual traits expressed. I think the 3 gene combos are the most interesting. When you get to 4 and 5 it just kinda washes some of the other genes out.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

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Originally Posted by Kaorte

But couldn't you agree that the low quality pastels that result should be marked as pet quality?

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I absolutely agree with that. However...

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Originally Posted by Kaorte

I'm sure breeders don't sell them for the same price as a higher quality pastel and people still buy them with the intention to breed.

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I think it depends on the breeder. I am sure some breeders do segregate, usually the smaller breeders who actually care about these kind of things. That said, I believe larger breeders are more than likely doing one of two things: 1) lumping them all together because it takes too much time to segregate them out or 2) lumping them all together because they are their specific line and that alone makes them better regardless of quality. And that latter decision is a slippery slope because then the person who buys one of those animals more often than not perpetuates that screwed logic.

In the end it comes down to what everyone says: Only buy it if it is quality. You are the one who has to determine what that quality is... It will be different for everyone

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Originally Posted by asplundii

I absolutely agree with that. However...



I think it depends on the breeder. I am sure some breeders do segregate, usually the smaller breeders who actually care about these kind of things. That said, I believe larger breeders are more than likely doing one of two things: 1) lumping them all together because it takes too much time to segregate them out or 2) lumping them all together because they are their specific line and that alone makes them better regardless of quality. And that latter decision is a slippery slope because then the person who buys one of those animals more often than not perpetuates that screwed logic.

In the end it comes down to what everyone says: Only buy it if it is quality. You are the one who has to determine what that quality is... It will be different for everyone

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Good point. I do plan on pricing my animals based on their quality. I can understand that when you start producing 100-200+ snakes a year, it can be time consuming to price them all individually.

I'm going to continue to buy quality breeding stock and hold back animals that I think are the best possible examples of the morph so that I may continue to produce high quality animals. If/when I produce some lower quality animals, their price and description will reflect that.

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Originally Posted by Kurtilein

Some people prefer line breding while others prefer to combine morphs.

unfortunately i dont think the two can go together very well.

What makes ugly pastels is NOT irresponsible breeders.... ugly pastels come from pewter or super pastel combos or out of multi-gene combos. A nice line-bred pastel goes on to become lemonblasts and bees, then gets bred to some stuff containing cinnamon and black pastel to hit some pewters and maybe pewter pin or something, these get bred to pied to make pewter het pied or lemonblast het pied, and then end up in a pewter pied or sterling pied.

Some morphs can be extremely improved by line-breeding but degenerate in the combo process, other morphs are super stable in combos.

Some breeders prefer line-breeding and want to make the picture-perfect show quality bees or lemonblasts or whatever and search for highest quality single-gene pastels, and it pays off. Some breeders care about combos and just want some pastel for pewter stuff or something. They might buy some super pastel with a third gene added, or some pewter-containing stuff, above-average looking but still, no line-breeding influence.

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*sigh*
I've countered and rebutted this exact same statement from you before in at least two separate occasions, I don't understand why you continue to say it.....
This is getting really tiresome.... m(___)m