Ball python "mills" *rant* (Not trying to offend anyone)

[WingedWolfPsion]

Honestly, it sounds like the old myth that people who care about money don't care about anything else.

If you're breeding snakes as a business....

A) There is NOTHING wrong with that.
B) If you didn't care about the snakes, why would you become a snake janitor as a career?
C) Just because you're looking forward to your female laying 9 eggs instead of 8 doesn't mean you don't care about her. Just the opposite.

A lot of the pride professional breeders have is in how well their snakes are doing--how healthy they are, how much they produce AS A RESULT of their health, and how awesome it is that they can make a lot of money producing gorgeous animals. It's all tied together, these are not separate things. Love for the animals, and enjoyment of making money with them go hand in hand for pros.

I get my females back on feed quickly whenever possible, because I want to see them recover quickly from laying, and I want them to go into the next breeding season in vibrant good health, sleek, and with hefty body weight and great muscle tone. I want them to look like pinup snakes, because that shows that they're up to the challenge of breeding. If they aren't, then they will need a year off--not only do I lose money, but if they were thriving, they wouldn't NEED a year off, so needing a year off is a bad thing.

As has been pointed out, ball pythons breed when they feel they are ready. If they're in superb health going into a breeding season, why shouldn't they breed? There's not only no evidence to suggest this is bad for them, but I'll go out on a limb and say that animals that do this are probably prime examples of health and good breeding--they recover from the rigors of breeding quickly, and remain in good health. Snakes that don't recover quickly and take a year off? Maybe they're not so healthy. Perhaps this means they won't live as long, that they'll be more susceptible to illness, that they aren't as strong.

As breeders, we want to produce animals that eat voraciously, put on weight quickly when food is available, stay healthy, and produce lots of great offspring--those are the same traits that make for great pets, too.

The more food you can put into a female before the breeding season, the better chance she'll produce a big, healthy clutch, and it will do her no harm. We want the females to be in the best health possible before breeding, so of course we would brag about stuffing them with food right away.

I had to put one of my girls on a diet one year, because she ate so much over the summer, she got fat, lol. She was a 13 egg clutcher, too.