I definitely think one of the most damaging things people do as new owners is immediately start impulse-acquiring a huge collection, buying a dozen or so random morphs with an eye towards making big bucks with breeding before they know how morphs are even inherited / which ones have issues etc. I've seen people buying more and more snakes on loans/credit because they've already calculated in their head how much they're going to sell this or that baby for every year, and counting their profits before they've hatched.
Not that I think you're likely to do that, but it can be really tempting to go "oh I don't have this morph, oh this one's cool too, oh I'll just get all of these, oh someone on craigslist is dropping their entire collection for cheap!" and the bottom seems to be falling out of the ball python "bubble" at least somewhat right now so people are having more and more issues paying for feeders, heat, etc for all these snakes. They're becoming more costly to care for, so keeping an eye on that and making sure we do our best for the animals we have I think is the best we can do.
Reply With Quote