Are ball pythons a domesticated species?

[Egapal]

You could say the same of domestic canaries, hamsters and other small pet animals - they are of no use to humans except for entertainment/pets, cannot be used easily for food or to obtain food ... but they've been selectively bred to show traits that are of interest to humans.

And a "green" Serinus canaria domestica canary is pretty indistinguishable from a wild Serinus canaria.

Pet does not equal domestic. Many wild animals are kept as pets. I would not consider canaries domestic unless they were signifgantly different than wild canaries.

That said, I could see Burmese pythons being bred for meat and domesticated to that purpose - royal clutch sizes are just too small to make them practical meat animals.

Carnivors are not pratical as meat animals as it will always be more practical to raise the carnivors prey for its meat. They could only ever be a novelty meat for that reason and thus never be domesticated for that reason.

Neither does a domestic cat suffer from eating a diet solely composed of wild rodents or birds (and in fact they benefit from eating a whole-prey diet, kibble is not the best diet for a cat) - the fact that they CAN survive on the wild diet is not the point. Of course a many-generations-captive-bred royal python would survive very well on a diet of jerboas, multimammates and other similar African rodents.

The point I am trying to make is that they can not survive on anything but a wild diet. Ball Pythons eat rodents in the wild and we provide them with rodents in captivity. Cats eat rodents in the wild and we feed them kibble in captivity. When your Ball Python willingly eats a mouse substitute I will concede that its domestic.

If breeders (intentionally or otherwise) select royal pythons that are willing to eat domesticated, defrostedrodents (mice and rats) instead of insisting on live African rodents like Multimammates (their natural diet) as their breeding stock, then that is a form of selective breeding to accept a specific diet. I certainly won't be breeding animals that won't take domestic rodents as prey and I won't be perpetuating offspring that won't either.

Ok hold up. Captively bred and hatched ball pythons routinely refuse F/T rodents and wild caught ball pythons can be enticed to eat F/T rodents. Selective breeding has not been shown to help this one bit. Conditioning has been shown to help and the ability to condition and animal is not proof that its domestic.

This has been done with certain lines of cornsnakes - selecting the offspring that are willing to accept mouse pinks instead of insisting on the wild hatchling diet of anolis lizards.

The success of this breeding is debatable and diet is not the only reason I consider snakes of any kind to wild.

Canaries are of no practical use except as novelty pets, but they are domestic animals.
Hamsters require their own microhabitats in order to live comfortably, but they're also domestic animals.

Again there are more than one criteria for domestication. If these animals are not significantly different from their wild counterparts then I would not concede that they are domesticated. They are pets.

Royal pythons are useful to humans in one major way - people are breeding novelty mutations and selling them for money. Whether the end user is a pet keeper or someone who's trying to collect enough blue-eyed leucistics to make a solid white snakeskin coat, there is a sound "use" for propogating these reptiles.

All proof they are pets, this is not sound reasoning for them being domesticated. We have not altered the Ball Python to make them useful. We have selected the colors we like and that's it. Domestication is much much more than this. When humans selectively breed an albino tiger that does not make that tiger domestic. That makes it a selectively bred wild animal.