Average Prices for 2007

[NextWorldExotics]

Adam earlier you were talking about quality...how do you determine that?
If they are healthy and taken care up..wouldnt that be good quality?

Well since no one jumped , i will...

Quality is color, pattern, feeding, and size...

Meaning a high quality Pastel, should be eating well, of good size for its age (not overfeed) Higher Yellow and either lots of blushing (most lines) or deep black bands (mostly nerd lines)

[NextWorldExotics]

Pic example... (Based only on appearence)

High Quality Pastel



Lower Quality Pastel (But he does have a lot of blushing which will make nice Supers or Pewters)

[Adam_Wysocki]

Adam earlier you were talking about quality...how do you determine that?
If they are healthy and taken care up..wouldnt that be good quality?

When I buy snakes, there are two ways that I look at quality ...

First, obviously there is the appearance and traits of the animal itself ... some breeders when they pair animals up, place any two animals together .... usually, with a co-dom mutation like lessers, a male lesser is bred to as many extremely large females as the breeder can find in hopes to produce as many eggs as possible and subsequently, as many lessers as possible. Other breeders, are more selective. The spend painstaking amounts of time looking for the "right" females to pair their lessers up with ... girls with exceptional pattern, girls that have great feeding responses, girls that hold the best gold/yellow colorations into adulthood, and even the calmest most laid back girls ... selective breeding can make the difference between a snake that grows up to be an exceptional animal in both appearance, appetite, and temperament, and just an "ok" animal.

Second, is the way the animal is "programmed" so to speak from birth until it's delivered to a customer ... in my opinion, a "quality" animal is an animal that is fed an appropriately sized meal on a regular and consistent basis, one that is "trained" to know what feeding day is and smells like, one that is handled regularly in an attempt to help it become calm and friendly, and one that has been acclimated to captivity in the same enclosure relatively undisturbed since it’s birth ... putting a little effort into a ball python in it's first few weeks and months can make the difference between a strong, confident animal that will eat anything anytime it's offered and a shy, skittish snake that eats, but not in the strong aggressive way that most people prefer an animal to eat. A great looking snake that is a "awesome deal" might be totally healthy an beautiful, but if it's been passed from breeder to wholesaler to reseller and dragged to 10 different shows and only fed big meals on "non show" weekends to make it appear that it's been eating appropriately sized meals weekly might not be all that great of a deal once you finally get it into your collection ... and sadly in this business what most often happens is that the guy/gal that sold you that snake for a "awesome deal" won't be answering emails or taking your calls when you want to know why it will only eat every other week ... or why it strikes at the side of the cage every time you walk by.

These are living animals and they all have different personalities … there is much more to the “quality” of an animal than how it looks and it’s overall health.

Hope this helps.

-adam

[mricyfire]

Whoa that helps a lot...good to know that my snake is good quality