Downers and Naysayers

[Eric Alan]

I totally disagree with this statement. I think the glory days of breeding ball pythons are upon us right now! I've been buying up a few breeders for the last six months or so, never bred snakes before, so I'm just getting into the whole breeding thing. As with any other animal there are price cycles and they will rise and fall, sometimes very quickly. The good thing about ball pythons is that I still see snakes selling for $40,000+, first it was the scaleless heads, now the totally scaleless ball pythons. Brian Barczyk was offered $125,000 for his first scaleless, he turned it down! New morphs are constantly coming on the scene and with certain morphs such as pieds and scaleless it 'resets' the whole ball python industry giving us a new 'canvas' to paint on.

It's not only about making money on snakes (which I believe you still can make A LOT!), but it's about being an artist of living color. In the early days you only had a few base colors to work with. Now you have a whole array of hundreds of morphs to choose from. Never before have you had so many options as to what you want to make. And with every new gene coming out that's just thousands upon thousands of more combinations you can create with the new gene plus one or more old genes.

Personally I want to both make decent money and be very creative in my snake 'creations'. If you want to still breed for a profit you'll have to dump most of your old single gene snakes and pick up some genes new on the market or do multi gene combos, pretty easy to do and very exciting. I spend most of my days working through a gene calculator to see what kind of new things I can come up with, how much I need to spend to get into that gene combo, and how much it will pay off in the long run. It seems the more I spend up front the more they will pay off later. You have to keep in mind prices can drop like a rock, especially dominant or co-dominant genes, so you have to set a limit on how much you are willing to 'risk'.

Some of the big money right now is in the new stuff coming out like the scaleless, the 'Stormtrooper', the scaleless head, etc. If you are lucky you can produce a new morph that is high in demand and you can make your millions breeding snakes selling some of the first babies for $50K or more.

I'm not sure how you can totally disagree with a statement about it not being as easy to make money in this hobby as it used to be and then spend four paragraphs explaining how much effort and money goes into you wanting to do so.

Yes, there is money to be made. Yes, it will require an effort to do so. Yes, if you're not putting in the work, there is someone else out there who is. Yes, if you're in it for the right reasons all of this should come easily. Yes, those sound like things that it takes to run any successful business. Coincidence?

Best regards,
Eric