Breeding

[artgecko]

I agree with Deborah on this one. It is SO easy to get super excited and stoked about a new interest and go off the deep end. Right now, I'm sure BPs are your obsession and everything about them is awesome, which is normal for new owners.

I would give it a solid couple years with your current BP to see if you have that same enthusiasm. I've been keeping reptiles for ~11 years and snakes for 5. In that short amount of time, I've gone through various phases of being obsessed with my snakes, adding to my collection, being "tired" of the maintenance, etc. I am just now at the point where I am considering breeding and purchasing my first breeding plan animals... That said, this is also the first year I've incurred vet expenses on two of my snakes...and likely will a third as well... So right when I'm gearing up to spend money on animals and equipment, I'm spending money on health issues lol. Not what I was hoping for, but the unforeseen risks are part of it... Not to mention finding out if you have a vet in your area that will see exotics or even knows anything about them. That was harder than I thought it would be...

A lot of pet ownership is learning to manage your time and resources to best care for your pet and seeing how that level of commitment effects your free time and relationships. Right now, you need to be keeping track of expenses and as Deborah noted, learn to keep your one BP as well as you can...keeping correct temps and humidity, doing searches on the forums here and on Google for any and all topics you can think of, etc. You should also start keeping records... like a spreadsheet of expenses and also of data on your BP, listing weights, when he shed / ate, etc.

Coming up with a sound financial and housing plan for yourself and your animals should also be priority number one. It takes a lot of money to house and feed (not to mention buy) snakes for a breeding program (or even pets). To that end, you have to consider how you will provide for your collection and how you will find a living place that will allow a large number of snakes. Keep in mind that some apartments will not allow any reptiles. Some may be ok with one snake, but tell them you have 10 and they may choose otherwise. I owned a couple snakes when I lived in an apartment but did not even dream of breeding until I owned my own house.

If you are serious about improving your husbandry and want to look into the business / research side of breeding for future purposes, I recommend these sources. This book, the Complete Ball Python and JKRs "Ball Street Journal" and his videos.

Beyond that, make the "advanced search" function on the forum your best friend.. I can't even tell you have many times I've thought of a random question or scenario, searched for it, and had numerous threads show up in the search that helped me find my answer. It is a good tool when you are looking at things that are not of immediate importance or may have been covered before. I used it quite recently when I was researching my new breeding project with ghosts / hypos and came up with some useful info.