How to feel about the ethics of the spider wobble?

[cristacake]

I'm firmly in the camp of "there are morphs without neuro issues out there that can be bred so why breed the ones with neuro issues?"

Spiders and their combos can be absolutely gorgeous, I understand. They make some of the most striking BPs out there. But I don't feel right choosing to create animals that will with 100% certainty carry a genetic problem, and that they may suffer from, when I could instead choose to create animals with no higher than usual risk of being born with problems/defects/disabilities.

The difference between owning and loving an animal with a problem and intentionally breeding two animals together that will result in offspring with a problem is very clear to me.

As for whether the wobble is painful, I don't think can't really know that with 100% certainty. And if it's not painful, is it uncomfortable? Is it frightening, frustrating? Does it cause them stress? I have problems with confusion sometimes and I can tell you it is very stressful trying to make sense of a world that seems different from how it just was in your head. Maybe on a basic level they experience something like that. We just can't ask them, so we don't know.

And since there is no consensus on whether the animal suffers from wobble or not, I see breeding an animal with the wobble, knowing that its offspring will have the genes for the wobble, is unethical. Which brings me back to my first point: you are in a hobby in which there are thousands of possible morph combinations out there to be bred for, dinkers to be proven out, polygenic traits to play with, etc. Why include one of the handful of morphs with a known genetic defect in your breeding projects?

All the same, love and fat rats to all the wobbly babies out there and those who will be born in breeding seasons to come

[Pug50]

I won't speak for the snake. How can I? A snake has never spoken to me so how would I know what it is experiencing? How can I know if it is in pain or distressed by it's condition? We humans, in our arrogance, have a tendency towards anthropomorphism.

I agree with this.

However, the greater arrogance is the opposite - the tendency for humans to forget that they are just hugely sophisticated animals.

It wasn't that long ago that some people (maybe some people still do...) proposed that non-human animals either didn't feel pain or didn't subjectively experience it - for example, making claims that although a dog would yelp and avoid you if you trod on it's tail, it was just a programmed response from an "automaton". I think this was just rationalisation to allow suffering to be ignored.

Applying human emotions to a snake is ridiculous - they don't have the brain-power. But denying they have some basic inherent experience of comfort/discomfort and fear/security is pretty difficult. If there is any possibility that these animals have lower levels of comfort (or higher discomfort) than a normal animal (even if it's constant throughout their lives) then I feel we should avoid breeding them.