Are ball pythons a domesticated species?

[Egapal]

Canaries have been selectively bred since the 1600s - for song ability, for posture, for colouration, for feather structure. More crucially, the domestic canary has been designated its own subspecies.

or

And a "green" Serinus canaria domestica canary is pretty indistinguishable from a wild Serinus canaria.

You can not have it both ways. I don't know anything about canaries but you have to pick one. If the domestic canary is different than the wild ones then sure its domestic. How can they be a subspecies and be indistinguishable from a wild canary. Again how they look is not really the issue.

Snake steak sausages? That's a "mouse substitute" and doesn't even have any rodent content! If I could source them I would certainly have a go at feeding them to my royals, though I would not feed it as an exclusive diet... any more than I would feed my cats exclusively on kibble.

This is one of the worst points I have seen made yet. I am pretty sure I would fail at getting hard numbers but generally speaking here is why snake steak sausages is complete irrelevent to the conversation. Almost everyone who keeps snakes feeds rodents with a hand full of fringe people trying to feed snake steak sausages. Almost everyone who keeps cats feeds kibble with only a small fringe group feeding live, f/t or pre-killed prey.

For that matter, I would argue that the diet we provide them now is a "substitute" for their actual diet - they don't see Mus musculus or Rattus norvegicus in the wild, they're eating Praomys natalensis and other AFRICAN rodents. I know from keeping all three rodent species that Natal rats do not look like domestic mice or rats, they do not behave like domestic mice or rats, they do not move like domestic mice or rats, they do not smell like domestic mice or rats and they almost certainly don't taste like them either (not that I have a basis for comparison - I haven't tried eating any of the three.)

Are you seriously trying to say that feeding common mice or rats vs african rodents to BP's is analogous to feeding kibble vs prey to cats? The point is that you do not need to simulate a domestic animals natural diet. They are domestic. They eat what we have domesticated them to eat. Convincing a snake to eat a rodent around 1% genetically different from the rodents it gets in nature does not constitute a breakthrough in domestication of snakes. A wild ball python would eat a common rat if one wondered by. In fact they do. Wild ball pythons are reutinely fed common rats. Are you saying there is no wild ball python species? All ball pythons are domestic?

Actually, wild Syrian hamsters do not look exactly like the selectively bred odd-coloured, very large animals humans have bred in several different coat types (including long haired angoras, curly rexes, hairless and satin-coated).

I could certainly show you curly-haired mice - rex and double rex. I could also show you long-coats that look like hamsters with long tails, satin-coats that are metallic and shiny and even texels (Satin longcoat rex). Hairless? Yup. And the English show mouse (particularly the pink-eyed white) is double the size of your average wild Mus musculus - and has been type bred for very large ears, a long tail and a specific body shape.

Same goes for rats - rex, hairless and satin coats; wildtype top-eared or the odd ear set of a dumbo, dozens of colour combinations, even animals that have been bred for taillessness.

You are seriously missing the points being made and arguing other points. The point everyone who believes ball pythons are wild is trying to make is that cosmetic differences that can be achieved in a few generations is not an indication of domestication where as hundreds of generations of selective breeding and classification by the scientific community as a sub species is an indicator.

As I said, royal pythons are on their way to being domesticated and already fit quite a few of the criteria - and they won't be considered truly domesticated until there are no more wild stocks being brought in - once they've been bred exclusively in captivity for a few generations they may well be assigned a new subspecies name - Python regius familiaris, anyone?

I will stipulate that if we stopped introducing wild snakes to the breeding population and we could manage to change them significantly in the next 200 or more years then sure they are domestic. It takes considerably more than a few generations to be classified as a new species let alone a domestic species. But as for the question "Re: Are ball pythons a domesticated species?" well.....Not even close.

[Ssthisto]

You can not have it both ways. I don't know anything about canaries but you have to pick one. If the domestic canary is different than the wild ones then sure its domestic. How can they be a subspecies and be indistinguishable from a wild canary. Again how they look is not really the issue.

A hairless silver fawn dumbo rat is very easily distinguishable from a wild rat and nobody would ever assume that they are anything other than domesticated. An agouti show-bred rat, at first glimpse, looks indistinguishable from a wild rat - the bucket test, unless you're a rat fancier, wouldn't let you pick the wild one from the domestic one. The agouti rat can quite easily be the OFFSPRING of that hairless silver fawn dumbo (breed to a top-eared blue, mink, chocolate, black or agouti normal-coat)... both are still domesticated rats.

A green singer canary doesn't LOOK different to a wild canary - but the song is significantly different. Green singers are a variety of the domesticated subspecies that just happens to resemble the original wildtype in certain aspects (it hasn't been bred for colour or posture traits, ONLY for song.) I personally couldn't pick out a green singer domesticated bird from an aviary containing singers and wild Serins... but I bet someone who's a canary fancier could.

A Violet Pied English show budgie doesn't look that much like a wild Australian Undulated Grasskeet... but they're both Melopsittacus undulatus, and a captive-bred domesticated budgie that has come from an outcrossed line will be visually similar to the wild type.

This is one of the worst points I have seen made yet. I am pretty sure I would fail at getting hard numbers but generally speaking here is why snake steak sausages is complete irrelevent to the conversation. Almost everyone who keeps snakes feeds rodents with a hand full of fringe people trying to feed snake steak sausages. Almost everyone who keeps cats feeds kibble with only a small fringe group feeding live, f/t or pre-killed prey.

Actually, most people worldwide who keep cats probably have cats that live off of the mice and birds they kill... because the vast majority of "kept" cats are not cats confined to houses, they're barn and working cats or just plain cats that have access to the outdoors. My cats catch, kill and eat wild rats and mice (and my occasional escapees!), but they are also provided with kibble. Just because they always have a bowl of kibble available to them doesn't mean they don't want the biologically appropriate diet!

But the fact that some snakes DO take the artificial processed foods indicates that it's possible to feed them that way. Heck, I've got a baby albino royal who wouldn't eat on her own until I provided her with a strip of raw chicken thigh. After that she was quite happy to eat the mice and rats I WANTED her eating.

Are you seriously trying to say that feeding common mice or rats vs african rodents to BP's is analogous to feeding kibble vs prey to cats?

Yes, I am. It's an artificial diet based on its convenience to humans; if they required a strictly biologically appropriate diet they would be much harder to convert to domesticated easily obtainable defrosted rodent prey. Compare to something like a mock viper, which does NOT convert to readily available prey items, not even when several generations captive bred. They demand the species of geckos they eat in the wild.

The point is that you do not need to simulate a domestic animals natural diet. They are domestic. They eat what we have domesticated them to eat.

So feeding an obligate carnivore a diet based on grain makes it domesticated?

Just because a cat or dog can survive on a kibble made out of corn (and please keep in mind kibbled foods have only been around for the last century or so - the animals in question were domesticated thousands of years prior eating their own NATURAL diet... mice and birds for cats, carrion and scavenged table scraps as well as hunted prey for dogs) doesn't mean that they are adapted to eat it nor that it's good for them to eat it.

If a domesticated animal didn't need to be fed its natural diet, why can't people keep cats alive on a vegan diet, or feed dogs on, say, mashed potatoes? For that matter, why do rabbit keepers suggest you let your rabbit graze for its health, why are free-range chickens that eat seeds, bugs and plants healthier and tastier than battery farmed ones and why do dogs that get a raw-bones diet have fewer dental problems and less obesity than kibble-fed ones?

Conversely, my "wild" royal pythons will eat rodents that don't resemble anything they'd ever see in the wild (and the next time I see someone say "they eat gerbils" I am going to scream at my computer... no, they aren't making the thousands-of-miles trek to Mongolia to eat pet-trade gerbils!) that are fed on diets composed in part of *surprise surprise* kibbled pet food.

Convincing a snake to eat a rodent around 1% genetically different from the rodents it gets in nature does not constitute a breakthrough in domestication of snakes. A wild ball python would eat a common rat if one wondered by. In fact they do.

My captive-farmed adult male didn't recognise domesticated rats as prey. He was quite clearly hungry, but unless you offered him a Multimammate rat (which are genetically much further from domestic rats and mice than one percent - chimpanzees are as close to being humans as multis are to being rats) he would not take the prey. It took quite a bit of doing to convert him to the readily-available prey.

On the other hand, my captive-bred babies from Bob Clark were not interested in the multimammates at all - they wanted the rats they'd been raised on.

Wild ball pythons are reutinely fed common rats. Are you saying there is no wild ball python species? All ball pythons are domestic?

Nope, no more than I am saying that tigers are domesticated - just because it'll eat "artificial" food doesn't mean it IS domesticated (wild fox in my garden quite happily eats cat food; wild birds eat imported milletseed, and so on) any more than eating a biologically appropriate (if not geographically appropriate) diet makes them NOT domesticated. But I am saying that royal pythons have the POTENTIAL to be domesticated, they meet many of the criteria already, and with a few generations of captive breeding under their belts WITHOUT input from wild populations, we'll be well on our way to having domesticated Python regius familiaris.

[Egapal]

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]A hairless silver fawn dumbo rat is very easily distinguishable from a wild rat and nobody would ever assume that they are anything other than domesticated. An agouti show-bred rat, at first glimpse, looks indistinguishable from a wild rat - the bucket test, unless you're a rat fancier, wouldn't let you pick the wild one from the domestic one. The agouti rat can quite easily be the OFFSPRING of that hairless silver fawn dumbo (breed to a top-eared blue, mink, chocolate, black or agouti normal-coat)... both are still domesticated rats.

A green singer canary doesn't LOOK different to a wild canary - but the song is significantly different. Green singers are a variety of the domesticated subspecies that just happens to resemble the original wildtype in certain aspects (it hasn't been bred for colour or posture traits, ONLY for song.) I personally couldn't pick out a green singer domesticated bird from an aviary containing singers and wild Serins... but I bet someone who's a canary fancier could.

A Violet Pied English show budgie doesn't look that much like a wild Australian Undulated Grasskeet... but they're both Melopsittacus undulatus, and a captive-bred domesticated budgie that has come from an outcrossed line will be visually similar to the wild type.

I have no idea what your point is. I don't care what the animal looks like. Can't say it any other way. You are hammering one point to death and poorly at that. If an animal is altered from the wild type significantly than that fact could be used along with others as a case for being classified domestic. Ball pythons have not been signifigantly altered from the wild type and therefore I don't understand why you insist on making all of the irrelevant points above.


[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]Actually, most people worldwide who keep cats probably have cats that live off of the mice and birds they kill... because the vast majority of "kept" cats are not cats confined to houses, they're barn and working cats or just plain cats that have access to the outdoors. My cats catch, kill and eat wild rats and mice (and my occasional escapees!), but they are also provided with kibble. Just because they always have a bowl of kibble available to them doesn't mean they don't want the biologically appropriate diet!

I personally do not believe that cats are truly domesticated for the above reasons. I really don't understand what point you are trying to make. If you could make a statement and then we could discuss that it would be great. My point has from the beginning been that snakes do not have a flexible diet. You claimed the fact that bp eat common mice and rats as an example they do, I disagreed, you brought up snake sausages, I disagreed with the whole idea that could refute my initial statement and now you are going on about what cats eat. Snakes do not have a flexible diet.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]But the fact that some snakes DO take the artificial processed foods indicates that it's possible to feed them that way. Heck, I've got a baby albino royal who wouldn't eat on her own until I provided her with a strip of raw chicken thigh. After that she was quite happy to eat the mice and rats I WANTED her eating.

Snakes do not normally take artificial processed food. You can not use rare examples to make a point about the classification of a species. The fact that Ball Pythons are finicky eaters is alone proof they are not domestic. The whole point of the flexible diet is that in order to domesticate an animal its must be easy to feed. BPs are not easy to feed when compared to domestic animals.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]Yes, I am. It's an artificial diet based on its convenience to humans; if they required a strictly biologically appropriate diet they would be much harder to convert to domesticated easily obtainable defrosted rodent prey. Compare to something like a mock viper, which does NOT convert to readily available prey items, not even when several generations captive bred. They demand the species of geckos they eat in the wild.

Well I guess we will have to just disagree. In fact I disagree with your above comparison. BP eat rodents in the wild. Feeding them rodents in captivity is not an artificial diet. It is strictly biologically appropriate. I can not believe you are now comparing the differences between common rodents and african rodents to the differences between rodents and geckos. What makes your point so much more rediculious is that BP do not readily eat anything. They are notorious for not eating at the drop of a hat.


[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]So feeding an obligate carnivore a diet based on grain makes it domesticated?

Just because a cat or dog can survive on a kibble made out of corn (and please keep in mind kibbled foods have only been around for the last century or so - the animals in question were domesticated thousands of years prior eating their own NATURAL diet... mice and birds for cats, carrion and scavenged table scraps as well as hunted prey for dogs) doesn't mean that they are adapted to eat it nor that it's good for them to eat it.

Again I do not concede cats to be domesticated and dogs will eat what humans eat. What they eat does not alone make them domestic. I never said it did. It is one trait among many.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]If a domesticated animal didn't need to be fed its natural diet, why can't people keep cats alive on a vegan diet, or feed dogs on, say, mashed potatoes? For that matter, why do rabbit keepers suggest you let your rabbit graze for its health, why are free-range chickens that eat seeds, bugs and plants healthier and tastier than battery farmed ones and why do dogs that get a raw-bones diet have fewer dental problems and less obesity than kibble-fed ones?

All of this is irrelevant. What is best for the animal has virtually never been considered when it comes to domestication. Non of the above points have anything to do with BPs.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]Conversely, my "wild" royal pythons will eat rodents that don't resemble anything they'd ever see in the wild (and the next time I see someone say "they eat gerbils" I am going to scream at my computer... no, they aren't making the thousands-of-miles trek to Mongolia to eat pet-trade gerbils!) that are fed on diets composed in part of *surprise surprise* kibbled pet food.

We disagree on the definition of "resemble" as well. Wow you are very serious about using the appropriet terms. Does it bother you that I call my snake a ball python and not a royal python.


[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]My captive-farmed adult male didn't recognise domesticated rats as prey. He was quite clearly hungry, but unless you offered him a Multimammate rat (which are genetically much further from domestic rats and mice than one percent - chimpanzees are as close to being humans as multis are to being rats) he would not take the prey. It took quite a bit of doing to convert him to the readily-available prey.

On the other hand, my captive-bred babies from Bob Clark were not interested in the multimammates at all - they wanted the rats they'd been raised on.

Not sure what point you are advancing here. I love the point about humans and chimps because I bet we disagree here as well. Humans are basically chimpanzees. We are genetically very very similiar. I would argue that an animal that ate sole humans in the wild would not be considered domestic just because it could be coaxed into eating chimpanzees. All of the stuff you said above also great reasons why BPs are not domestic.

Nope, no more than I am saying that tigers are domesticated - just because it'll eat "artificial" food doesn't mean it IS domesticated (wild fox in my garden quite happily eats cat food; wild birds eat imported milletseed, and so on) any more than eating a biologically appropriate (if not geographically appropriate) diet makes them NOT domesticated. But I am saying that royal pythons have the POTENTIAL to be domesticated, they meet many of the criteria already, and with a few generations of captive breeding under their belts WITHOUT input from wild populations, we'll be well on our way to having domesticated Python regius familiaris.

Well you say a few I say hundreds, I am going to go ahead and say we agree on this point.

[_Venom_]

You don't find these crazy morphs in the wild.

[fishmommy]

my own personal test for whether an animal is domesticated is this:

If you let it go and it comes back within a few days.....it's domesticated!
Very few animals are domesticated. Tame is not the same as domesticated in my mind. I think snakes probably don't even have the brain structure needed for true domestication.

[rabernet]

You don't find these crazy morphs in the wild.

Really? Where do you think all the base morphs were imported from?

[TMoore]

I completely forgot about this thread.

You don't find these crazy morphs in the wild.

Ohh thats right, I forgot about those mad scientists that genetically engineer designer ball pythons, because they obviously couldn't exist in the wild.

[womensitdown]

They way I see it is , If I let my cat out in the mourning he might be gone for the day maybe the night too. However soon enough i hear him making noise at the door. That to me is domestic he wants to come in to eat. Sure he could maybe live outside on his own but he wont, he'll come back. We have mousers in the barn also. They can come and go as they please but when I take food outside they are right there. Sure they stay where it's easy to get food, but even never having been in the house they don't leave. If I put my snakes out side in the mourning assuming I live some where they wouldn't freeze this time of year they would not come back or expect me to bring them food at night. They would hunt for it and never think twice about me, thats wild. Cats are 100% domestic to say they aren't doesn't make sense. If anyone who thinks other wise can come to idaho and take me in the woods and show me a tabby running around I'll dance everywhere I go for the rest of my live. Thats how I see it.

[_Venom_]

Really? Where do you think all the base morphs were imported from?

I completely forgot about this thread.



Ohh thats right, I forgot about those mad scientists that genetically engineer designer ball pythons, because they obviously couldn't exist in the wild.

Not talking about basemorphs.

[Neal]

They way I see it is , If I let my cat out in the mourning he might be gone for the day maybe the night too. However soon enough i hear him making noise at the door. That to me is domestic he wants to come in to eat. Sure he could maybe live outside on his own but he wont, he'll come back. We have mousers in the barn also. They can come and go as they please but when I take food outside they are right there. Sure they stay where it's easy to get food, but even never having been in the house they don't leave. If I put my snakes out side in the mourning assuming I live some where they wouldn't freeze this time of year they would not come back or expect me to bring them food at night. They would hunt for it and never think twice about me, thats wild. Cats are 100% domestic to say they aren't doesn't make sense. If anyone who thinks other wise can come to idaho and take me in the woods and show me a tabby running around I'll dance everywhere I go for the rest of my live. Thats how I see it.

If you want to get technical, cats arent domestic either. They have reasoning skills, and they are smart, thats why they come back where its easy to get food, They know how they are treated and whats "home".