Personal Opinions on Spiders

[JodanOrNoDan]

Personally, I would not want to buy or deliberately create an animal with a high probability of a neurological disorder. Note that this applies not only to Spider ball pythons but also to the Jaguar morph in carpet pythons and possibly other species/morphs I don't know about.

That doesn't mean others cannot do it. I agree that both spiders and jags are attractive and I'm not going to condemn others for wanting one, but I'm not comfortable with it for myself.

However, I also feel like someone who breeds morphs with known neurological disorders should be up front with their customers about this because the customer may not be aware of the connection to specific morphs. I would not want a first-time owner to have their heart broken when their animal start exhibiting neurological behaviors that they did not know about in advance. Yes, you can say that they "should have done their homework" but this information is not typically in reptile books or care sheets so even someone that's made a solid effort to get educated could easily not come across this.

When I sell a spider, I ask if the buyer knows what they are getting into. For that matter when I sell any snake I ask if the buyer knows what they are getting into. That said, no matter what I buy I do a little research. I typed "ball python issues" into google. The first thing that came up was OWAL's site where every known issue concerning ball pythons is to be found. Not too hard. If an owner cannot do at least that much they are probably too lazy to own a snake. Before the internet, people actually had to go to the library and do some research. These days the information is pretty much at your fingertips. There is no excuse for not knowing.