Breeding to sell for pets doesn't interest me. I trust no one.
I can envision an eventual interest in breeding animals that are at risk for loss the natural world. The Timber Rattlesnake has a terrible fungus problem in the wild. Others are loosing habitat. The Eastern Indigo Drymarchon couperi already has an organized captive breeding program for field release. The Hog Island boa is now mostly if not entirely captive kept.
HerpNation Radio had a good program with a guy who works with the very hard to breed Morelia boeleni (spell?) python. Again, conservation. An animal that beautiful is going to get over harvested out of the wild.
Another similar case is the Oenpelli python. Pretty snake in itself, but the purported assoc. with mystical creator "Rainbow python" of the Aborigines makes it culturally significant. A guy named Gavin Bedford is working with those. I became intrigued with his work when I saw a pic of one of the babies he bred. It looks a lot like the small adult Antaresias (spell?). Same proportions, shaped head, general coloring, and spotting...same buggy eyes. I have seen no rainbow on any pic of the Oenpelli like you can see on some locality boas, or the Rainbow boa, where the surface shimmer colors are intense and irridescent, but the Oenpelli is reported to have a distinct and remarkable silver "glow" at night. The ghost morph of the Children's pythons also does this at night (Snakebytes vid??, IIRC, this a snake at the Peter Birch facility in AU). Might make a good marketing angle - if you can't afford the mythic creator Oenpelli, you can get nearly the same in the little Childrenii morph.
...anyway long winded answer.
Happy breeding.
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