Culling Healthy Animals

[ShawnC]

Let me first explain that I am not trying to start any fights, but I am trying to get some open, and honest debate going on a topic that I feel is long overdue in our Hobby. It is my position, and it has been for a long time, that culling of perfectly healthy animals is a good thing when apposed to just dumping massive numbers of them into the public marketplace.

Below is a post that I made in another forum where we are debating this very thing. I am begging you all PLEASE do not fight, and keep this in the tone that it is intended, which is a fair, and reasonable debate on the pro's and con's of what we, as serious hobbiest's do to our own hobby by breeding enourmous amounts of these animals every year.

I should preface this by saying that I do cull a small percentage of animals that I feel are better served by being used as feeders for my Monitor Lizard, and my Arrowanna fish, rather than sent out into the marketplace as junk snakes. I should also point out that I work with Carpet pythons alot, so I am talking alot about hybridized, ugly brown carpets, but this arguement can be made for Normal Balls as well. So here goes..please read below, and post what you think is right or wrong?

"I love this debate, because it's all about feelings. These are ANIMALS that we work with as a hobby. They are not my pet like my dog. I probably should have said I love my hobby, as that is much more accurate than I love my snakes. I don't cry and get all upset if I loose a snake...but I bawl when I loose a dog. They are two different things to me. A dog is a part of my family, my pet. My snakes are my hobby. This is a hobby that I enjoy, and I won't jeapordize my hobby to make you guys feel better about killing off unwanted animals (which is good for the hobby). There is ethically, absoutely, no difference, between breeding rats and feeding them off, and breeding snakes and feeding them off. Its done with hundreds if not thousand of species of animals all over the world, every day. Snakes are no different. You like snakes...so it doens't feel right, but ethically, it absolutely is.

I would take it one further and argue that, I am doing ugly snakes a service by ending their lives quickly rather than letting them changes hands from owner to owner dozens of times, until eventually they die from abuse or worse, they escape or are let loose (both hurt our hobby enormously). This is what happens to the majority of ugly, unwanted animals, including snakes. So under the guise of you loving your animals, you send tens of thousands of them (unwanted) off each year, to die much more prolonged deaths, than merely being eaten by a natural predator. This decision is about your feelings, not logical thinking and/or the betterment of the hobby. It's about your heart, whch I totally get, but is the reason the hobby is in the state that it's in.

Now that all said. I think you guys think that I just kill off everything that I produce thats not a morph. Thats not what I said. I said if I have really ugly, unsellable stock, (which is a pretty small percentage) that has no chance of being purchased by someone that I know will care for the animal properly, I see no reason to not feed it to my lizard or my giant fish. Snakes are prey for both animals in the wild. Especialy baby snakes. It's completely normal. No different than deciding one day to throw them one of my mice or rats.

BTW, before you call me money hungry only wanting to keep the best, easiest selling snakes, keep in mind that thats counterproductive. I can always find a jobber to buy my left overs each season for $40 per animals. 10 snakes times $40 each is still $400. Thats alot of cash. It's not about the money. It's about weather or not I think it's a good thing for the hobby to be sending out animals that I know are undesirable and, in most cases, destined to have not so great lives anyway.

You guys want to see all of the designer stuff ,and you want to work on all the projects for double, triple, even quadruple mutations...then you have to deal with the truth which is that in order to make those, you produce lots of normal snakes (in every species, not just carpets). If you think dumping them into the marketplace is good for the animals, and good for the hobby, you'd be dead wrong."

S~