Breeding Standards

[Eric Alan]

Eric, if you are really interested, I will attempt to put my jumbled thought processes into something coherent.

Certainly. Throw it up in a separate thread though, as this one feel like it's veering off course from its original intent.

I definitely agree on creating a quality standard though. Nearly every pet trade hobby has an association of breeders and a breed standard. While we don't have breeds, we do have morphs, and you might not be able to ascribe a value judgement to an animal based one whether someone likes it or not - as pointed out, some people like different things, and to return to the dog allegory for a second, I love a well bred, straight-back German Shepard and loathe toy breeds - it may be reasonably doable to create a morph standard based on traits that morph should have. It could possibly revitalized interest in single gene morphs even, if breeder start a focus on selecting one or two single gene morphs to improve the quality of.

I agree that quality should be the standard (whether formal or informal). Comparing dogs to the ball python hobby, though, is like apples and oranges. For comparison's sake, in 1990 there were basically only three ball python morphs total. Dogs have been domesticated for ~15,000 years and have been kept as pets for ~2000 years (from my quick Google-fu). What kind of requirements did the AKC and CKC have at the beginning of the first millennium? I'm not saying that it can't, or shouldn't, be done. I'm simply saying that the dog folks have quite the head-start on us.