Culling Healthy Animals

[ShawnC]

pitch it as a morally responsible husbandry practice to a community who is fanatical about how beautiful and wonderful these animals are. What kind of reaction would you expect?

I bring it here because this is the place that it matters themost. IfO go to any other forum and talk about what we do, I'll get alot of people who agree with me, but thats only because they think any good snake is a dead snake. Here, we all like snakes, but we also agree that our hobby in under serious threat, I am am pointing out that we could be hurting ourselves by what we are doing, and offered what I do (and what others have done or do, and don't like to talk about) as a solution.

A market saturated with "defective" stock might, in the end, be GOOD for the hobby, especially for those people who actually care about, and put effort into what they're producing. It would make beautiful, well-bred reptiles a rare and valuable thing, and make good keepers really stand out.

In the case of carpet pythons this isn't true. The reason is, unlike ball Pythons, we can't just go get more from the wild. We have to work with what we have. The more we muddy up the gene pool, the harder we make it to keep any line of carpet pure. There are guys who make a good living selling well documented animals, but they will be the first to tell you that it's everyone else indiscriminately selling hybrid offspring for cheap that are ulitmately sold as a "jungle" or a "coastal" that in fact causes the problem. As a by product...when there are ALOT of these animals out they...they have to end up someplace...and thats usually not a happy ending for the snake once people realize what they have is not what they thought.

I also suspect that rather than really caring about the animal's well-being, you'd just rather kill a "ten foot, muddied up, ugly brown carpet python" than sell it to somebody, for the fear that if you did, they would only later realize what an unpleasant thing it is and then associate the negative experience with your good name. So, what I think you're doing is a business practice, driven by the profit-machine. Killing it means you don't have to clean it, feed it, advertise it, or ever think about it again. Are you sure things like that have nothing to do with your decision to kill your snakes?

Not at all. By the time that happens, most people have no idea who produced it. When I wholesale a bunch of mutt babies...they get sold again, and again. My name is never a part of the discussion, and is part of the problem. I am just a supplier at that point, not a breeder. I also don't feed off larger snakes because I can't stomach it. It would require me whacking them on the head r some other such thing, and I can't stomach that. Besides, it a useless death, which I don't feel really good about.

So, what I think you're doing is a business practice, driven by the profit-machine. Killing it means you don't have to clean it, feed it, advertise it, or ever think about it again. Are you sure things like that have nothing to do with your decision to kill your snakes?

So is selling 100 of them at once on the cheap to get rid of them. It does exactly the same thing, and I actually make more money, not less.

S~