Quality of breeding stock

[Pythonfriend]

since everyone agrees, ill guess i go for it and play devils advocate. After all i guess this thread will be more interesting if you have something to rip apart ^^

i think the individual genes breeders work with, and how these are combined, are in many cases still more important. is it really so bad when a breeder works with 3 or 4 nice genes and just wants the rest of the genetics of the snake to be healthy but random, and for new genes just occasionally buys very good looking normals, from different sources so that they are unrelated?

i still see two issues:

first, i think any codom or dominant base morph can be "fixed up", or be bred to high quality, in 2 generations of line breeding, for recessive its maybe 2 maybe 4 generations. Then you have kept the relevant gene and replaced 75% of the remaining genetics with genes from exceptionally good looking normals and had plenty of choices. and when choosing from different siblings that hit the gene, different parts of the remaining genome will be replaced, giving you control over what stays and what gets replaced. 2 generations is not too much time.

Then, if breeding standards get defined, people want to 1-up these, and when adding other genes is not an option breeders might turn to excessive inbreeding. Pythons seem to be quite resilient when it comes to inbreeding, much more so than mammals, but still, it weakens the genetics.

by the way, what might undercut it.... breeding farms in africa now start working with morphs, ive seen evidence for this when it comes to pastel, calico, cinnamon/black pastel, and albino. So big time breeders that are also dealers and importers will soon order 500 normals and 500 pastels instead of 1000 normals like they used to. And of course the best ones will be sorted out and get a higher price tag, just like its today being done with normals / dinkers / oddballs. Maybe this will set certain standards in the trade no matter what we do. I guess in that environment you just need to make your own plan, define a project, and work hard. And my opinion is that you can search for months to get the best animals to start with, or you can start with the genes you want and improve over the generations just with regular outbreeding to highest quality normals.