For me, a HQ animal is healthy, shows no sign of struggling to thrive (if husbandry is correct) and progresses and grows like it should! To me, that says that the breeder knew what they were doing and were putting the health of the animal before anything else. I know there are a lot of people out there who will attempt pairings that could possibly result in deformed/unhealthy offspring, so to me, folks who don't do that produce high quality animals. Also, someone mentioned "pure blood lines" earlier in the thread, and I honestly don't know what they're talking about... unless they mean animals that aren't crossbreeds of different species? Otherwise, I don't think it's possible to discern what a "pure" bloodline looks like... unless an animal is VERY heavily inbred, and that raises some ethics questions, even though inbreeding in the reptile community is extremely prevalent and (often times) necessary for producing designer morphs.