Super High Dollar Morphs

[angllady2]

You know, this reminds me a lot of what happened to cockatiels some years back. I bred for 20 years until my health made me quit.

When I first started breeding, people were standing in line for hand-fed babies as pets, I had a waiting list two years long and I could sell at pretty much any price I felt like and people would pay it. Heck, I remember selling an albino baby for $200 and there were plenty that sold them higher.

After a few short years, you had a bunch of yahoo's who decided breeding cockatiels was the new get-rich-quick thing and soon everybody and their grandma were breeding cockatiels and they flooded the market with their cheap, inferior animals. People started griping about paying good money for a quality bird when someone down the street had it for $50 cheaper. Guess what ? If you didn't want to pay my prices, I told you to go elsewhere. I KNEW those super cheap birds were poorly bred, poorly raised, prone to health issues and who knows what else. Sure I lost a lot of money, I even had to scale back on my breeders because I was finding it difficult to house the babies that no longer sold.

In no time at all, the over-saturated market collapsed, as the schmucks looking to make a quick buck discovered the fortunes they imagined were just that, imagination. So they sold out of everything. Birds that once sold for $200+ were going for $25 and less.

By and by an interesting thing happened. See, all those people who still wanted pet cockatiels suddenly found themselves with no birds to buy. Even pet shops had a hard time finding suppliers. Then suddenly, those ridiculously high prices you wanted people to pay when everybody in your neighborhood had babies for sale, aren't so high when you are the only breeder in the tri-county area who still had them.

So yeah, the ball python market will have it's ups and downs, that goes without saying. But those who are breeding for quality and not quantity who weather the storm will find plenty of people willing to pay for that quality in due time.

Gale