Quote Originally Posted by CharlesMTF View Post
I'm watching Youtube videos on all this stuff, learning, soaking in all this info, as I ready myself for my first ball, and I constantly see videos of bp eggs, and people helping them along by cutting with a small scissor. Just curious on the reason. Why wouldn't you just let it be, and wait till they hatch? I would've thought its bad to help... but I guess not since its what many breeders are doing on these videos. So, next thought process is, why?
IMO, it is not a good idea to cut the egg shell. Reasons for cutting are mostly to rationalize impatience to see what is in there. IMO, a broken egg tooth can happen but is too rare to justify wholesale cutting.

Note that people who do not cut eggs do not post egg-cutting videos, so YouTube is biased in favor of cutting. And if you start looking through the list, the vast majority are of ball python eggs. Where are the videos of corn snake egg cutting? IMO, ball python egg clutches have few enough eggs to be easily separated at laying time. A single egg is big enough to open and look inside. And at pipping time, the babies are big enough and tough enough to not be particularly affected. Corn snake's lay more eggs which are much smaller and more likely to be incubated as a mass than ball python eggs. All this makes cutting them much more difficult to cut and more likely to produce bad effects than cutting ball python eggs.