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.

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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.