Prices down?

[T&C Exotics]

about the best way to adapt:

i think, if you want to make money, or if you are a professional and your income depends on it, you need to either be at the top or near the top, or you need to diversify. and with that i mean diversify across species.

breeding rats can cut down your cost of keeping BPs and other snakes. at the same time you can sell live and frozen thawed feeders of all sizes. at the same time you can produce pet-quality rats.

then there would be chameleons. hard to keep, even harder to breed, in females egg retention leading to death is not uncommon, but well-started captive bred chameleons can be worth double the price of an import subadult (taken out of nature), because the captive bred ones are more stable in captivity and healthier. no morphs here, they change color, they are colorful, what would be the point of having an albino or axanthic or hypo?

or hognose, or green tree pythons. or maybe even spiders. when 100 of these really tiny tarantula larvas hatch and you get 40 up to size for sale, thats a lot of money, but its REALLY hard to do.

also there are species that are critically endangered or even extinct in the wild, but present in the market due to captive breeding. not only does it generate intense warm fuzzy feelings deep inside when you manage to breed something that is extinct as a species in the wild and that only a handful of people on the planet breed, but you might also turn a decent profit.

People that successfully breed BPs and even turned a profit for a while are EXPERTS, its an ACCOMPLISHMENT to get it done. its sad when they then cannot sell their product and re-coup their costs because of an overheated market, BUT THEY ARE STILL EXPERTS. there are around 3000 species of snakes and only around a third of them are venomous. And most of them are small. Some are tiny. Many are endangered. Many are facing extinction in the wild.


So for all that are successfully breeding BPs but cannot get near the top, maybe the next project should not be bamboo or scaleless or GHI or sunglow, maybe the next project should be jacksons chameleons or green tree pythons or something even more unusual. There are so many species of geckos and lizards, so many species of snakes, so many species of lage spiders. I tried to find a source for these earthworm-like snakes, borrowing black snakes that do not get larger than earthworms, but they eat insects and, well, earthworms. I could not find a single person keeping or breeding them, only a few scientific studies in the lab based on wild caught specimens.

The problem with what you proposed here is appeal. Most people do not want a snake that is not appealing visually so they do not want a snake that is never seen and is very small. Also most people that keep snakes do so because they are a lot easier than lizards for the most part. Most people want something they can take out and hold and show off and all of that fun stuff but also have ease of care. The ball python fits all of that perfectly where no lizard does.

To make it in this industry is quite simple. Produce the best examples of the morphs, be a stand up person and stand by every animal, have exceptional customer service, and offer animals in every price range from a cheap normal male to a bamboo or scaleless.

A lot of people are to stuck on this or that aspect of breeding to look at the market realities of it. Almost no one markets animals well to be quite honest. The best thing to do is reach out in multiple ways, various adds on different sites as well as a website, to market everything and provide details of each individual animal. An example of the information would be hatch date, weight, what it is feeding on, shed dates, dates of feedings, genetics, pictures from multiple angles, prey item size, and pictures of parents. That is a lot of work on the breeders behalf but I as a buyer would be way more interested in that animal from joeblow than a animal listed from Mr. Top breeder with the basics of gender, genetics, and if you are lucky weight.

Those are just my thoughts.