Handling wild caught BP

[Pythonfriend]

Thanks everybody! I got them from a friend who buys wild caught balls by the bag from some company in Africa. The company gets them by the bag, each bag contains about 10 snakes and they do not look in the bag they just sell them as is for $200.

your friend is not buying wild caught. your friend is buying farm bred and/or captive hatched africa balls.

i wrote it all down just recently for a different thread.

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...-thought/page7 its post number 70. just check the thread for post #70 , i included some video evidence. a german breeder (Stefan Broghammer) had the balls and the access to document it all.

what many farmers do is to provide the pythons with a safe hiding place for the day. at night, they go out to hunt for rhodents. every evening they leave, every morning they return. its like a mutual agreement between farmers and pythons. taking gravid females to let them lay in captivity, and taking clutches, is common practise. most hatchlings go right back into the wild. but when a farmer has a rhodent problem, he might buy some and release them. and when a farmer has a money probem, he might sell some. multiply that by 100000, and put in place a cooperative where people bring hatchlings for sale, and where people come to buy them, and where exporters put together large shipments, and you have a basic idea.

the larger cooperatives move hundreds of hatchlings every single day, and they can put together a shipment of several thousand hatchlings easily, on short notice. they supply the big chains, like petco, except that its not just the USA, its global. and all this has no effect on the wild population, because the wild population is enormous. and noone ever goes into the jungle with their machete to hunt one down. farmers have barns and silos, which means rhodents, and they know the places where the BPs stay during the day. and they want their BPs to be there. semi-domesticated. much like cats in a rural area somewhere in the middle of the USA. you kill rhodents, i accomodate you.

then there are also breeding farms for BPs, and professional breeding operations where people work with morphs.

its so much different for so many other species, where there is no huge semi-domesticated population. and poachers and trappers actually go into the wild to hunt them down. you just cannot say "wild-caught BP" and be both serious and informed, it makes no sense. just call them africa import hatchlings. this is also where the really big guys get their dinkers. like for example the first pinstripe, or the first banana / coral glow, or the scaleless head. bamboo is an interesting case, it showed up and didnt move far at all, it went straight to a local breeder, who proved it out and claimed his world first and later sold bamboo hatchlings, at high prices, to you know who. EB Noah in Ghana.

http://www.worldofballpythons.com/bl...visiting-noah/ <--- big, professional, high-end morphs, located within the natural range of the ball python.