Culling Healthy Animals

[ShawnC]

I feel that if you are producing these animals, then you have taken on the responsibility of either keeping or finding responsible forever homes for every life that you produce.

So when you produce 100 (i don't know if you do or not, its a rhetorical question) normal Ball pythons, and you wholsale them for $10 each to a jobber, does that qualify as taking responsibility, or is that just making a quick buck? Be honest with yourself I emplore you.

To me, your analogy that feeding off these "less than acceptable" animals is no different than breeding rodents as feeders doesn't cut the mustard.

Why not? I am nto freezing them or chopping their heads off. I am choosing to use them as feeders to care for my other animals.

Blaming the "irresponsible public" for the willful killing of a perfectly healthy animal has always been a perverted sense of logic that I've never been able to understand. Pointing a finger and saying that if I don't kill these animals someone else will or someone will let it go or someone will let it suffer is complete crap ... the exact same thing could happen with the animals that you put a high value on and decide not to kill. Maybe the solution is to screen your customers more thoroughly, maybe you shouldn't produce as many offspring, maybe you shouldn't breed at all. But I can say with absolute certainty that justifying the killing of a perfectly healthy animal by blaming the public at large is pathetic.

In your opinion. My opinion is, it's more ethical of me to take the responsibility and make the choice to feed them off. Why would I want to sell them off cheap, with no sayso on where they go and who cares for them, when they are, based on market value, not likely to have a high quality of life? I would argue you are not taking responsibility when you do that. It's much easier to just sell them. (Again, you being the guy who may, or may not produce a bunch of unwanted snakes) Expensive animals are much more likely to be cared for properly. Thats just basic common sense. There are exceptions to every rule...but you have to look at this from the majority point of view.

The bottom line is that I value life ... all life ... I despise the idea of ending a healthy life for any reason, even if that reason is feeding my animals ... but there is a cycle of life that I have respect for and until an alternative solution presents itself, I must follow. But playing god by picking and choosing which lives have value and which lives are acceptable to destroy is something that I personally don't believe that any person has the right to do.

You are already playing god by deciding to breed reptiles in captivity. These animals do not need you to do that for them I assure you. you do it for personal pleasure. When you make that decision, you also make the decision to feed and care for them. Why then are you not willing to take the next responsbile step, both for the animals and the hobby, and figure out a reasonalble way to deal with the offspring...both desirable, and undesirable? Is ti really a good idea, good for the animals, and good for our hobby to send out tens if not hundreds of thousands of cheap, ugly snakes into a marketplace full of impulse buyers?


S~