Why We Are Idiots For Using Kingsnake.com To Price Our Animals

[wRobio]

I got into ball pythons because mainly because A) I love the animals, and really want some of those multi-gene morphs. Even more than that, I want to hatch those morphs myself. And B) because the money I had for college in the stock market was turning from dollars to pennies, and C) I get free rats from work (that was more of a determining factor in quantity I can handle).

I was really selective when I first picked the higher end animals I wanted to buy and I payed pretty high, but their offspring make it totally worth it, and now I certainly do stick with a few select breeders, even if I pay a little more, and I do not fill my racks as fast as some others, I do feel like my snakes are prettier and healthier.

My big problem, and IMO this is what causes the prices to plumet, is when you see someone who posts say... a 87gram male lesser platinum for $700(that would be last years prices), the snake does not sell, and four-eight months later that snake is still for sale, still around $700(maybe a little less), and now it weighs in at 300-800grams. Through those 4-8 months, people come to post their new hatchlings and see these animals that are way bigger than theirs, but priced where a hatchling should be. I think there are a lot of good quality BPs out there, and they sell for way less than they could, because their owners forget to add price to size.

I also notice that the price of proven females is a lot more stable than hatchlings, obviously proven morph females are not available a ton, but I think the price of each should reflect the other well. For instance, if a proven co-dom female is $2500, than it seems like a hatchling should cost closer to 1/3 of what that female is worth, not 1/10. Right now a hatchling female mojave seems to be worth about 1/10-1/8 of what a proven female is, that seems wrong.

It seems pretty obvious that people want good quality morphs to be worth a higher dollar that low quality morphs. Why do dogs get to be priced based on quality and snakes don't? well... dogs have standards, and registrations, and pedigrees, and all things other people have mentioned before me, and... this is the big one, they have shows where people go to let judges decide how high quality their animals are... they have this with rabbits, guinea pigs, horses, pigs, llamas, ferrets and god knows what else... so, maybe we should all start voting on what the think are the most important features of each morph, develop some guidelines, appoint a panel of well experienced judges, and start actually showing off the reptiles we love so much in.

Am I crazy, or would it be a lot easier to get high dollar for a snake that you can say "These albinos' sire was Zoo Med's Albino of the year at the American Reptile Competition three years in a row, and the mother was the number 2 pick for prettiest albino female at Daytona this year.", than "well I got the mother off craigslist as a het-albino, so I got the male off kingsnake from Dude McDuderson and made some albino babies."

I for one think it would be really fun to actually have reptile competitions, I wanna see what everyone thinks is the perfect example of a lemonblast and whatnot. And until there are some standards, registrations, pedigrees and all that for snake, basically until we all become a lot more snooty about the snakes we breed, and letting people we respect determine the value of our animals, we are all free to sell our animals for what ever we want.

If some "clubs" were developed for reptiles that act similar to the AKC and such, then there really would be separate markets for really serious breeders/hobbyists, and hobbyists who just like to watch snakes hatch.

I may have gone on too long here, but I hope I got some osrt of a point across.