An easy angle on choosing an investment is price.  How much can you afford to spend?  Perhaps a better question is how much can you afford to spend on a single animal?  And an even better question is how much can you afford to spend on a single animal and lose it all?  Investing in high-end ball pythons is highly speculative.  Prices fall, animals die and economies fluctuate.  If you spend $20,000 on a single ball python there is no guarantee that you will ever make your  money back.  There is a lot of opportunity but no guarantees; this is the live animal business and prices are often set with whimsy.  Understand your own financial tolerances before you even begin to think about morphs.  Once you come to terms with where you fall on the risk-versus-reward scale you’re ready to start looking at specific projects.

Whether this is supposed to be a business or a self-sustaining hobby the ingredients of a successful breeding project are two parts personal preference, one part economic reality, and a healthy dose of marketing.  If you are 100% dedicated to money you have to breed animals, regardless of what they are, that will provide the best return on investment.  This makes it highly probable that you are going to produce some animals that bring you little joy.  And if  profit truly is your only motive I suggest entirely different lines of work.  When money is the sole objective breeding reptiles is not the right enterprise in which to be.  This planet offers plenty of ways to make great money with products that don’t poop on the shelves.  Ball pythons are depreciating assets that eat.  What other business can you be in where the value of your investments spirals rapidly downward, the costs of production continue to increase, and every ‘unit’ you sell produces a future competitor?

I suspect that all reptile breeders, even the most financially motivated of them, started doing this out of love for the critters.  I recommend finding the animal(s) that you like working with that also have a market capable of providing a return.  Easy to write, difficult to do, I know.  Animals you love that don’t have much commercial value are good to keep around in small quantities (to satisfy the soul) but most of us need to focus on animals that ride the line between joy and profit.  It’s okay to lean more to one side or the other but this business doesn’t really support going all in on one while ignoring the other.  Dedicate too much to the joy of husbandry and you’ll find yourself living in a money pit that grows continuously deeper.   Focus too much on profit and you’ll be mentioned in the same breath as other less than stellar names in the business.  Neither is desirable.

Unlike many other business ventures the world has to offer, reptile breeding requires that you derive some joy from the product making process.  I’m not talking about the so-called flippers, importers and large-scale wholesalers here; I’m talking about actual breeders.  Being a breeder and being in the reptile business are not always the same thing.  There are many shades of grey.  There is a big difference between a person who breeds reptiles to sell and the person who sells reptiles so he can buy and sell even more.  Both are in the same business but in very different ways.  In many ways breeders are idealists while flippers, wholesalers and importers are more pragmatic business people.  I know a few people who do well at both.  Breeders tend work with animals they like.  Businesspeople work with animals that make money.  The best of us attain an equilibrium between both needs.  And in this aspect of the business I continue to search for balance.  I am a steadfast idealist emulating a profit-oriented businessman.

Anybody who regularly reads what I write knows that I frequently reflect on the financial aspect of being a reptile breeder.  I think about it often which is interesting because I don’t live a life with money as the central point of motivation.  I like and want money, of course.  Almost all of us can say that.  But despite my frequent contemplations I’m not obsessed with making it.  And for lack of better words, that is a problem.  When observing other people and how they make money I have come to believe that those who are usually the most financially successful are the one’s who have a certain …ethical flexibility.  They put profit above all.  Those are dangerous words as I do not intend to imply that successful business people do things that are illegal, immoral or even unethical; they are just more likely to do things that are single-sided and exclusively profit-oriented.  Financially aggressive people see angles and take opportunities that I don’t.  From time-to-time my lack of this particular type of vision frustrates me.  And here’s the rub: even if I did see the opportunities I can’t say that I would always leverage them.  I am too well equipped to see and respect the others person’s needs.  And from a single-minded, make-all-the-money-you-can, business perspective this is a potentially fatal flaw.  In the eyes of some this dooms me to a life of comfortable modesty.  Impressive wealth is not likely in the cards.  I don’t tend to participate in “I win / you lose” business arrangements.  To steal words from author Stephen Covey I’m very much a “win/win-or-no-deal” type of businessman (and I am certainly not afraid of ‘no deal’).  This type of business means I actively trade some of the money I could be making for other, less tangible, things.  Fans and deriders of this business mentality are probably equal in their distribution.  But don’t take me wrong; it is not bad to be more aggressive [than me] when making money.  I applaud and occasionally envy the people who are better at it than I am.

Despite not taking excessive advantage during business transactions I am strongly driven to make a profit from what I do.  This only makes sense.  I am not an altruist.  Other people do not pay my mortgage.  Moonbeams and warm fuzzy feelings are not currency.  I do not give the product of my efforts without appropriate compensation; we must all work for what we have.

Allow me to offer you a scenario for consideration.  It’s comes from a business deal, but not a reptile one.  Imagine you are a professional speaker.  People come to you from all walks of life to hear what you have to say.  You charge $2,000 per person for a 5-day seminar.  There are 12 people enrolled in your next offering.  Most of your seats were sold at full retail and there were a few businesses who bought multiple seats so you extended them a modest discount.  The night before the seminar begins a colleague comes to you and says, “I have a friend who wants to take your seminar but he only has $550.  Will you let him attend for that amount?”

What would you do?  Would you let him attend at a 73% discount?  Most people can answer immediately.  It requires little thought or contemplation.  And your answer, I believe, tells to which side of the ball python business you lean.  If your answer is “yes” your primary focus is profit.  If you say “no” your focus is more idealistic.

Taking the money makes sense from the following perspective:  The seat is empty.  It is not going to sell at the retail price.  The course is going to run regardless of the someone sitting in that  13th seat and it won’t cost you anything extra to let them attend.  His attendance is $550 of pure profit for no additional effort on your behalf.

Taking the money does not make sense from this alternate perspective:  You have assigned a value to the product you provide.  Twelve other customers have paid full (or close to full) price to be there.  This lends credibility to the value of your product at the price being charged.  It is also disrespectful to those twelve if you take the $550.  Why was their seat not $550?  Are they somehow different?

That is not a make-believe scenario for me.  It has happened more than once in my ‘real job’.  As you might suspect my answer has always been “no”.  I have never even hesitated.  I didn’t even hesitate in the early days of my business when things were financially tight.  To my occasional financial detriment I have always had a principled approach to making money and that approach sometimes takes away from maximizing profits.  I had (and still have) an obligation to my customers and to myself that prevents me from taking every dollar possible.  It would have been catastrophic to my business if I had taken that money and my other customers found out.  It would also have been an admission that my product was not worth the retail price I was charging.  The friend who first approached me with the proposition stared at me in disbelief when I told him no.  To this day he thinks I’m crazy.  Who in their right mind would turn down an additional $550 when they didn’t have to do anything more to make it?  Well, …me.  Profit takes a back seat to ethics.  People who let profit ride shotgun are laughing at me right now… and  I’m cool with that.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

Being one of the so-called winners in the ball python breeding business requires several characteristics and qualities:

1. Money.  You’ve got to be willing to spend a lot of it if you want to play around with the cutting-edge animals.  Heck, you’ve got to have a lot of it even if you want to eternally play catch-up.  I’ve said it before:  The high-end arena of this particular field of hobby is not for the financially feint of heart.  Here be speculators.
2. Patience.  Females take upwards of three years before you have any chance at seeing eggs.  Sure, males get up to breeding size in much less time but big genetic magic requires both the boys and the girls to come to the conjugal packing genetic heat.  You are essentially treading water with a backpack full of bricks if you spend all of your money on high-end males without also investing in multi-gene girls to go along with them.
3. An entrepreneurial spirit with a gambling addict’s judgment.  How else can I say it?  You will never get rich by putting your money in traditional savings accounts and certificates of deposit.  Betting it all on black is a good way to do it, though.  But you’ve got to be prepared for it to come up red (and lose it all).  A long time ago a day-trading friend told me, “People get rich by putting all of their eggs in one basket.  People stay rich by spreading their eggs around.”  And perhaps nobody summed it up better than the copy store clerk in Jerry Maguire when he said, “That’s how you become great, man. Hang your balls out there!” The moral is simple:  Do not walk through this life expecting reward if you are not willing to take risks.  The live animal business is packed full of risk.
4. Luck.  Even with the best genetics you still need a bit of luck.  To take things to the next level you have to hit on long odds.  The genetics of ball pythons is a game of calculated chance.  Most of the high-end genetic progress comes when people bet and win on very long odds.  At a bare minimum I’m talking about 1:16 odds.  But real magic is in the 1:32 or 1:64 range.  When you hit on a long shot it’s a payday, something that can leap your collection [genetically] forward by multiple years.
5. Business acumen.  For many of us this began as a hobby and morphed into a business.  If this is a business, treat is as such.  Crunch the numbers.  Factor in the costs.  Do the analysis.  As much as possible, remove emotion from the equation.  How else can you know if you are being profitable?  If your measure of business success is that you have a wad of cash in your pocket at the end of a trade show you aren’t in the right place.  This business is not as simple as putting two snakes together, selling the babies and then going Mercedes shopping.  The expenses of the live animal business are significant, on the rise and constant.   Cash flow does not equal financial success.

Whether you call ball python breeding a hobby or a business it has the capacity to be both personally and financially rewarding.  But you have a greater chance at achieving personal rewards (e.g. the joy you feel when you produce a particular morph for the first time) than you do financial rewards.  Reflect on your motivations and your aspirations and define your goals; both tactical and strategic.  Do so and you will find that the opportunity for financial success is much more likely.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

They say the first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  Well, after several years of denial and inner-confusion I have come to realize that I have an odd sort of problem.  Now that I know I have it I’m not entirely sure what do to about it.  It vexes me because it’s part of me, I internalized it long ago.  People who don’t suffer from one type of affliction or another often don’t understand why people struggle with such things.  Skinny people who eat to live can’t figure out why fat people live to eat.  People with no particular desire to gamble are baffled by the compulsion others have to do it.  Souls at the mercy of a bottle of Jack Daniels are odd to people who don’t have any desire for a drink on Friday night.  The problem I have may be just as elusive to understand as those just mentioned.  My problem is the strange combination of ball pythons and money.  It’s a multi-faceted problem with the ever-present “too much out, not enough in” issue riding on top of the heap.  But the problem I’m writing ab out today is not how much money is coming or going; it’s about how the money goes after it comes.

Like many other reptile enthusiasts I live with the delusion that I will one day be solely employed as a reptile breeder and that I will be financially prosperous as a result.  That dream and that day, however, are not yet here.  I already work 40+ hours/week as a breeder but that’s only after my ‘real’ job is done.  As I get closer and closer to my goal I wonder just how much my perspective will change when the only way I can pay my bills is by selling a snake.  I suspect it will not always be a happy feeling, especially during times such as these when superfluous income is all but gone in the bank accounts of many Americans.  People will always have to buy groceries, fuel and underwear, etc.  They do not have to buy a new snake.  I am living proof.  Over the past year I have gone from buying multiple new snakes each month to one or two every other month.  I notice it in my seemingly stalled collection and I am sure that the breeders to whom I have been a steady client (e.g. source of cash) have noticed it as well.  Nobody is happy with the current state of affairs.  Compounding the problem are the recession-proof bellies of my snakes; they eat as much today as they did a few years ago when money was more readily available.  I endure this, of course.  Snakes not properly fed are as valuable as having no snakes at all.  Some things simply cannot be set aside.

But buying hundreds of rodents each week is not a problem for me.  I enjoy feeding my animals and, while expensive, I don’t mind the cost in the long run.  Considering the return you get in the form of babies you do quite nicely on the dollars that go down the throat of a snake.  Again, I am fortunate that I have another full-time job that can help offset any cost overruns that arise.  What’s more, feeding my snakes is often therapeutic.  I am mentally at ease after a day of good feeding.  Cage-after-cage, thump-after-thump I can feel the stresses of my life falling away.

The money that goes out to make my reptile collection better is almost effortless to spend (inasmuch as money can be easy to spend, that is).  Buying rodents, water bowls, paper towels, soap, cypress mulch, plastic tubs, etc. is relatively easy money to say goodbye to.  I see all of it as an investment that will pay itself back in the near future.  Paper towels to clean poop?  No problem.  That translates to healthier snakes.  Healthier snakes help to make baby snakes and baby snakes are how I make money.  Cypress mulch?  Not a problem.  It’s a more natural bedding and my animals do very well on it.  They feed better and it’s easy to clean.  Clean cages and solid-feeding snakes means better breeding results.  Better breeding results means more baby snakes.  If you can name a reptile supply/necessity I can quickly tell you how I justify it as an investment in making the business better.  I am at peace with the money spent.  This, however, is not always the case.  And this brings us back around to my problem.

In my ‘real’ job I go to work for two weeks and, “Poof!”, a paycheck appears.  That money only represents the last two weeks of my life and that is not a sizable investment in the form of time.  Because I do not have a lot of time invested in making that money it is easier (mentally) to spend.  I often apply a simple but far from foolproof measure to determine value when spending money:  Do I get more time out of the money when I spend it than it took me to make it?  For instance, if I make $50/hour I often ask myself if the $50 that I am about to spend is going to translate into more than one hour in return.  Going to a movie costs $10 and lasts 2 hours.  That has the potential for good value.  It’s not an exact science.  Shawshank Redemption:  excellent value.  G.I. Joe – Rise of Cobra:  not good value.  Life is full of gambles.  Another example is when I pay my mortgage.  Spending that money grants me my home for another 30 days but it takes less than 1/2 that time to make that money.  Again, my simple criteria for value is met.  The whole perspective is terribly unscientific and easily picked apart, I know, but it is only one of my most basic measures of value.  At $50/hour it takes me about 8 hours to make $250 (assuming a 35% tax rate).  For me to go to the grocery store and spend that $250 on groceries that will sustain my family for the next several days is a reasonable price to pay.  But what happens when that $250 is money from the sale of a ball python?  Things change for me in a hurry.  And this is my problem.  When I look at a baby ball python I see it, like all money I make, in the form of hours of work.  How long did I have to work to make that snake?  In the most simple scenario it is not less than 9-12 months, from the end of one breeding season to the hatching of the eggs from the next.  Taking $250 from the sale of a ball python and blowing it on groceries that will only last a few days breaks my equation.  The groceries no longer have value when using this ‘snake money’.  I need the money from the sale of a ball python to last …a long time.  In my head I need those $250 to be spent on something that will last as long or longer than it took me to make it.  As a result, spending snake money on daily expenses breaks my rule on the value of money spent.  How do you make $250 from a snake sale last 10 months or longer?  Buy something tangible, of course.

If I can’t shake my definition of value, I’m doomed.  I don’t stand a chance as a full-time reptile breeder with no other source of income if I can’t bring myself to spend this so-called snake money on the trivial daily expenses that come about.  What makes this problem even more unexplainable is that I know that my system is flawed.  I didn’t spend the past 10 months producing one $250 snake.  I produced hundreds of snakes in that time.  I should be looking at their combined value rather than their individual value.  If I produce 300 babies at an average price of $500 each (a guess) that means it took me 9 months to make $150,000.  I don’t make that much in 10 months at the thing I call my real job so why do I find that money so much easier to spend on the necessities of life?  In short, I don’t really know.  I just do.  That’s where my logic is broken.

Writing all of this is an effort at self-treatment, my own self-help manual written by me.  Stay posted for the day that I tell you that I’m a full-time snake breeder.  When that day comes you’ll know I’m cured.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

The next best way to build a great ball python collection is to buy babies from other breeders and raise them.  Other people always have something you don’t and there are tons of animals out there just dying to fit perfectly into your collection.  Bring your wallet (or purse, as the case may be) and be prepared to spend.  Building a nice, high-end ball python collection is not for the financially feint of heart.  Buying a baby pastel genetic stripe is definitely faster than taking the six or so years it would take you to make them from scratch for yourself.  The premium you pay on such an impressive animal is, in part, compensation for the fact that the person from whom you are buying the animal has already paid the six-year price to produce it.  That investment of time and the risks associated with it are worth money.  And we all must pay for it.  Now that you have this wonderful animal in your collection you are still stuck waiting for it to grow up.  If you’re lucky you can get your male up to breeding size in less than a year.  Females are going to take no less than 18 months, most likely 24-36 months before you’ll be able to do anything with them.  Once again you have to hurry up and wait for your collection get to the next level.

Being patient sure is hard sometimes…

Don’t want to raise babies?  Want a shorter path to being a baller in the ball python business?  Simple enough:  buy adults or subabults from someone.  That shaves the time down to less than a year in many cases.  Or does it?  Before you drop cash on an adult ball python you need to seriously ask yourself why the person is selling it.  There are many legit reasons, of course.  But a huge number of ball python adults that get sold are animals that have problems of some sort.  I’m not suggesting that they are sick, though.  The problems I’m speaking of are more subtle.  When you buy these adults you may be unknowingly paying someone else for their problem.

What are some of the legitimate reasons that adult ball pythons get sold?:

1. The breeder is decreasing the size of his/her collection.  This is often done because large collections are very expensive and very time consuming to maintain.  Scaling back from 1,000 breeder females to 750 means that there are going to be 250 perfectly good girls coming into the marketplace.  It is, however, almost an industry standard that these girls get dumped into the marketplace shortly after laying eggs.  This means their weight is down greatly from its norm and if you don’t get them early enough in the season you are going to be hard pressed to get them to lay eggs again the following season.  If someone sells you a 2,100 gram het pied female you might be thinking, “Sweet!”.  But what you don’t know is that she weighed 3,000 grams 5 months ago, laid eggs a month ago and has only had 2 meals since laying.  Females that were 3,000 grams last year aren’t often going to lay eggs the following year when you only get them back to 2,700 grams.  The seller of the animal is not obligated to tell you this, of course.  It would be nice if they did rather than letting you have unrealistic expectations for the coming season.
2. The seller is having some sort of financial crisis/hardship.  They don’t want to sell the animal but they need money for some imminent need.  You can often get some nice animals this way.  But keep in mind that when the going gets tough breeders aren’t going to go through their collection and pull out the best animals to sell.  They are going to pull those that were not quite as good as the others.  Maybe they are often reluctant feeders or have laid eggs each year for the past three years.  The chances of going (laying eggs) four years in a row are lower than they are for going three years in a row, aren’t they?  The first adults someone is going to sell are going to be the least cool their collection has to offer.  Don’t get me wrong, though.  This won’t always be bad.  Selling the worst animals in an awesome collection may still mean that you are getting some exceptional creatures.
3. The animals have been upgraded.  I have an outstanding male spider het albino that I raised from a baby.  He is a fantastic feeder, a great breeder and doesn’t have even the slightest head wobble that many spiders often have.  He aggressively courts and breeds multiple females each year and has produced several albino spiders for me.  I held back the first albino spiders males I produced, of course.  They are now adults.  Why do I need a spider het albino when I have multiples of the real deal?  I don’t.  So it’s time to offer him for sale, let him go to work for someone else.  I’m not getting rid of a problem animal.  Quite the contrary.  He is a rockstar but my collection has moved on.  These are nice animals to find when they come along.
4. Proven hets are being replaced with the homozygous form.  A breeder may have 50 adult albino het females.  It makes sense to replace them with albino females (at the very least).  Once the breeder has raised up the replacement albinos he/she will often look to sell the hets.  He is managing the size of his collection to a consistent and stable size while increasing its genetic quality.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with the albino het females; they were good enough to be the breeders for several years but now its time for them to move on to make room for a new crop of albino females.  While these are good animals to add to you collection be sure to keep in mind that they are likely to only hit the market just after laying eggs (as discussed earlier).
5. A breeder bought an entire collection from another breeder who is getting out of the hobby and they are liquidating it to make money or they are getting rid of the animals that they don’t want to add to their own collection.  This happens a lot.  Like many business ventures, many wanna-be breeders just don’t make it.  A large number of people get big into reptile husbandry with dreams of an easy and large payday.  And they are frequently ready to get out of the business in less than two years.  Because of this, entire collections get bought and sold on a regular basis.  I have purchased entire collections more than once.  When I do it I usually have my eye on a few choice animals in the collection and sell off everything else at a profit.  Doing so helps to offset the cost of the animals I want to keep.  In many circumstances you reclaim all (or more) of you investment and still have the animals you wanted to keep.   Having it work out this way is not a slam dunk, though.  Collection flipping requires a little bit of skill and is logistically a lot of work.  Not everybody is good at it.  I’ve seen people get completely burned doing it.  I have made my share of mistakes, too.

What about the illegitimate and hidden reasons many adult ball pythons get sold?

1. The snake is a poor feeder.  Maybe it only eats once per month.  Better still, maybe it only eats mice.  A 2,500 gram female ball python will need to eat mice like Pez in order to get them to a good weight for breeding.  One medium rat can easily was as much as 6-8 adult mice.  Not only is it a chore to feed that many food items it is also comparatively expensive.  Eight mice will cost you about $4 on the low end.  A single medium rat is more in the $1.75 range (depending on how you get supplied). Mouse feeders will more than double your food cost in addition to the time and energy spent.  Heaven help you if you are buying your food items from a pet store.
2. It prefers gerbils or African soft-furred mice.  Just what you need; a snake on a special diet.  Not only do gerbils and ASF mice tend to be quite a bit more expensive they are both notoriously more aggressive than typical lab rats (and mice).  There is a stronger need to chaperone the feeding event when the predator is at increased risk of becoming the prey.
3. She’s a 3,000 gram girl, nice and big.  She has laid eggs two out of the last three years.  Sound good, right?  Problem is she only laid 4 eggs each year.  Big girls who don’t lay lot of eggs get farmed out quick.  They are genetically weak and have a low return on investment.  The best decision is to move them out and replace them with new animals that produce larger clutches.  It’s simple math on behalf of the breeder.
4. A beautiful adult male comes up for sale.  He appears to be a great shortcut to breeding success.  The only problem is that he’s a crappy breeder.  He shows absolutely no interest in females.  I know several breeders who have gone through multiple males before they found one that was a good breeder.  What happened to the seemingly gay males?  They disappeared into the collection of some other aspiring breeder, of course.  I can guarantee you that the ad listing them for sale didn’t read, “Beautiful Adult Male Pastel Lesser – Crappy Breeder”.  How can you tell the difference between this male and the great breeder who is being replaced by a better animal?  You can’t.  The only thing you can do is trust the seller.
5. It’s stolen.  I’m always amazed how many ball pythons get stolen.  They get stolen at trade shows and they get stolen right out of people’s collections.  It happens with some regularity.  I suppose there may be nothing physically wrong with the animal; you’re just getting it at the expense of someone else.  You have no way of knowing this, of course.  At trade shows where I am a vendor I am often offered animals for oddly low prices.  I know what the animals sold for two years ago and now they are offering me what appears to be a healthy animal for a price that is way below what they would have paid for it and certainly less than it is currently worth.  How can I not wonder about its origins?  Wouldn’t you?  If I buy it and post if for sale on-line am I going to get an email from someone telling me that the snake was stolen from them?  That has never happened to me but it has happened to others.  In an industry that is largely based on personal reputations I’d like to avoid ever being wrapped up in a situation like that.

The moral of the story is that there is no substitute for starting with babies, investing the time and earning good results with quality animals.  The temptation to take the short path and buy adults is too much for speculative breeders to avoid.  Unless you personally know the seller and have detailed and accurate knowledge about the origins of the animal you are doing little more than buying a scratcher lottery ticket when you decide to buy and adult ball python.  You might win big.  You may also get screwed and come to realize that you actually paid someone to take their problem off their hands.  Fortunately, I think it’s true that you won’t lose the majority of the time.  Most ball pythons are perfectly good animals.  All I suggest is that you take the time to question and prod.  Does the story being offered with the sale make sense?  Can you handle the result of the animal not being a producer for you?  If so, speculate your heart out.  If not …buy babies and invest the time.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

The idea behind breeder loans is “together everybody achieves more”.  If I have an adult female pastel and you have an adult male spider we won’t produce anything but spiders and pastels by working alone.  But together we can have a chance at producing Bumble Bees.  This appears to be a compelling synergy; a win/win!  On paper a lot of things look good.  Plans nicely laid out on paper have a bad habit of being pummeled by reality, seldom working the way we intended.

There are things that need to be considered when contemplating a breeder loan.  There are a lot of ‘what if’s’ that can happen and if they are not adequately vetted prior to entering into the arrangement things can get ugly, feelings hurt, egos bruised and friendships shattered.  Breeder loans require you to consider many things.  On  the bottom of the list should be how cool the animals you are going to produce will look when added to your collection.  Keeping your eyes on the prize is typically good advice but when it comes to a breeder loan you may find that a fixation on the end result will do more harm than good.  Listed below are just a few of the things that need to be pondered.

Consideration #1:  The values of the animals entering into the transaction versus the value derived from the union

What is the financial value of the parents entering the breeding arrangement?  If I have an adult normal female (say, 3,000 grams) that is het for orange ghost and you have an adult male Ghost Mojave ball python, things are financially lopsided.  Dividends paid on an investment are based on the number of shares owned (e.g. the more you put in, the more you get out).  Because of this, dividing the clutch is not a matter of 50/50 division if the initial value of the animals is used to determine how the bounty (e.g. babies) are to be divided.  Currently my adult female het ghost ball python is worth a small handful of hundreds while your adult Ghost Mojave is worth a few thousand dollars.  In this example I will assign arbitrary values of $600 for the big adult het ghost female and $3,000 for the adult Ghost Mojave male.  The total value of the parents is $3,600 which means that my female is a mere 16.6% of the total value.  Using this as a single measure I should get 16.6% of the value of the production, you should get 83.4%. But which 16.6% am I entitled to (genetically speaking)?  The genetics of this particular union can yield:

• Normals, 100% het ghost
• Orange ghosts
• Mojaves het ghost
• Ghost Mojaves

Producing ghost mojaves is obviously the most desirable result, with male ghost mojaves being arguably at the top of the list.  If a single male ghost mojave is produced, who gets it?  The 16.6% equity I have in this breeding arrangement isn’t going to cover it so I’ll need to pony up cash (or something else in trade) for the difference.  And that is only after we agree that I get first crack at taking it.  What happens when I really want it for my collection but you already have a client who is ready to pay you cash for a male?  Well, that’s a problem.  Who wins?  Your desire to make money or my desire to upgrade my collection?  The same situation is true regardless of the number of ghost mojave’s produced.  To keep it equitable I won’t be able to walk away with a ghost mojave without going out of pocket.  Using the values I assigned above I won’t be getting a male mojave het ghost either.  The cash value simply isn’t there, especially if the clutch size is on the smaller side.

Because my 16.6% equity in the project isn’t substantial enough for me to get one of the higher-end animals (assuming any are actually produced), how does it benefit me to participate in the arrangement?  In theory it doesn’t.  Lopsided deals provide lopsided benefits.  The end result of such a lopsided arrangement is that I am doing little more than helping you to better your collection and/or your bank account.  Compared to the gains you stand to make neither my wallet nor my collection are going to get better.  But the parties in the arrangement could be cooler about things.  I have seen people split the clutch evenly, regardless of the value of the animals in the arrangement.  In this circumstance friendship supersedes business and the party with the more valuable snake is freely giving money away to a friend.  You can wordsmith it all you want but that is what is ultimately happening when someone splits a clutch down the middle.  Deciding if that is worth it (or if it will pay itself back in the form of good-will in the future) is a personal matter that must be independently evaluated.  I can’t offer you any advice on this angle other than to say I don’t do it.

Splitting clutches down the middle without considering the value of the animals involved is never going to go unnoticed by the person giving more than the other.  I do not care what they say to your face, they are aware of the reality.  If the total value of babies produced is $6,000 and I walk with $3,000 after only having contributed 16.6% of the investment you (the 83.4% shareholder) are not going to be able to forget it.  You have essentially given me $2,004 out of your pocket.  Have you ever just handed a friend that much cash for no particular reason?  If you are running a business the answer should be no 100% of the time.  The person giving more will expect something in the future.  Trust me.  It will manifest as a sense of entitlement or an expectation of future favors.  One way or another they will expect to be “paid” at some point in the future.  They may deny it and they may not even be conscious of it but it will eventually come back around.

Friendship and money do not go together.  Entering into financial dealings with people you call friends is a sure-fire way to lose them as friends.  I write from a position of experience.  I ruined my relationship with a very good friend over debates about who gets how much of a combined reptile investment.  In my business ventures outside the reptile world I have business partners with whom I am friendly, but we are not friends.  We don’t hang out and we rarely socialise outside the office.  We maintain a positive relationship because we do not burden our business dealings with an excess of friendship.  The model works.  People who are in business with their spouse may relate to what I am writing better than most.  Seldom is tension greater in an office than when it occurs between two people who sleep in the same bed at night.

Consideration #2: Uh, Quarantine?  …And re-introduction.

I treat every snake coming into my collection like it has mites and any other potentially bad things that we sometimes see.  Translation:  My “Welcome to the team” party is the snake getting Nix-ed and quarantined.  It’s unlikely that any of us would knowingly enter into a breeding loan with someone who has mites in their collection.  Knowingly sending your animal to a collection that has mites is just silly.  Regardless of the opportunity for financial gain, you cannot do it.  I know people who have done it, though.  I also know people who have lied to the other party about the presence of mites in their collection.  They told me it wasn’t a big deal because they would just treat the snake for mites before sending it back home again.  Really?  Seriously?  People get shanked for less in prison.

More to my point:  How do I bring your animal into my collection and quickly let it mingle with my breeding stock (or vice versa)?  Unless I’m breaking my own quarantine rules, I can’t.  Who am I kidding anyway?  If the het ghost female is mine and the ghost mojave male is yours the animals will be in your collection, won’t they?  That’s probably the most normal way breeder loans take place; the female goes out on loan, not the male.  But the same problems are still there.  How can you bring one of my animals into your collection and immediately let it be with your male?  You male is going to be making the rounds through other girls in your group so if my animal has something bad your male becomes the vector for spreading it through your collection.  Are you really ready to take that risk?  Stop staring at the dollar signs you think you see at the end of the tunnel and focus on what I am writing.  Is the fallout of something wrecking your collection really worth what you might gain from this breeder loan?

And how am I going to safely reintroduce my own animal back into my collection?  If I stay true to my quarantine principles I’ll have to separate her just like any new animal.  The logistics of doing it right and the consequences of doing it wrong are just too great for me.  Being willing to loan out an animal and then have it come back again means you are likely to make exceptions to your own rules.  As I write this my snake collection is 100% mite free and has been so for several years.  The thought of having a mite come into my building is one of the most terrifying things I can think of.  I’m not kidding.  Having to treat a large snake collection for mites is a monumental undertaking.  It is such a daunting task that it is far easier to never let a mite come into the collection in the first place.  Meticulous tenacity and an unyielding focus on prevention is the only way to avoid it.  Being lured by the prospect of getting a certain morph or financial gain is enough to make some us let our guard down.

You might not have a problem this year or next year but what about the year after that?  The more often you have animals coming in or going out the more likely it is that something bad will be riding along with them.  Sooner or later it is going to catch up to you.

Consideration #3:  Paper, Cypress Mulch, Aspen?  Does Bedding Really Make a Big Difference?

In my experience the type of bedding a ball python is raised on is not trivial.  The transition from paper to mulch and then back to paper can produce an animal that refuses to eat for months.  I have seen it several times.  For example, a friend of mine who keeps his animals on paper had  a ball python that ate well.  The animal went out on breeder loan for about a year.  While away the animal was kept on mulch (and fed just fine).  When the animal was returned and put back on paper it would not eat.  It did not eat for almost a year.  The animal became part of my collection where it was once again placed on mulch.  It ate 3 rats the first day it was back on mulch.  It had been perfectly happy on paper but being on mulch did something to change the snake.  I don’t have a word to define it, I just know it to be true.

What type of bedding will your animal be kept on while it is away?  What impact will that have when the animal returns home.  Maybe none.  Maybe a lot of unexpected frustration.  What good is a female who comes home from a breeder loan that won’t eat enough to get up to size for the following year?  Whatever it is that you gained from the breeder loan may need to be enough to compensate you for this breeding season as well as the next if you have an animal come home with a feeding problem.

Consideration #4: Food & Feeding

Who pays to feed the animal while in another person’s care?  Is that cost negligible?  For some, yes.  For others, no.  If you have a snake for a year and it eats 40 rats @ $1.50/rat you are down $60.  Not a large sum of money but in a business that has a nasty habit of nickel and diming people to death it’s the sound of yet another coin hitting the offering plate.

Snakes that cost $50 cost just to much to feed as snakes that are worth $5,000.  This is a cost that should be evenly distributed between the parties.

Consideration #5:  The Silent Investor and the Swoop-In

“It’s like it’s both of ours, we’ll just keep it at your house.”  You feed it, you clean it, you keep it warm and make sure it is grows into a big snake so we can make baby snakes.  After you do all the work I will take my cut.  What’s my cut?  We worked that out years ago.  When you made the deal did you account for the time an effort required to take care of the animal during the last few years?  If you are like many of us you didn’t put sufficient value on your time on the front-end.  We seldom do.  Taking care of snakes in the future is always worth less to you than the snakes you just took care of.  Call it sentiment for life spent (life is a currency and the balance is always heading toward zero), call it a sense of value for efforts put forth.  If you put years of time into raising a snake from a hatchling to a successful breeder you are going to be mentally more invested at the end than you were at the beginning.  That sense of being vested is worth money in your mind.  It is not likely to be worth money in the mind of your partner.  He/She was outta’ sight, outta’ mind for the past several years and will do little else than swoop in to collect the return on their investment when the babies hatch.  This is certain to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Neither party can de-value the time invested by the person holding the animals, especially if the loan is going to be long-term.

Consideration #6: The Snake Got Sick.  Worse Still, It Died.

A snake on breeder loan dies.  Oh, dear.  How do you handle this?  Did you discuss it before you went into the arrangement?  Once in a blue moon a snake will roll for no observable reason and with no warning.  It’s rare but how much would it suck if it happened while a buddy’s snake was visiting your collection?  All the wondering that will take place is sure to put a strain on the relationship.  Was the animal not properly cared for?  Is someone to blame?  How about replacing the animal?  Is there any expectation on that front?

Because it is rare  it is likely to be dismissed on the front-end.  Eyes once again too focused on the end result with no real attention being paid to the nasty little realities that creep in from time to time.

Last year I had a snake of my own develop a problem with one of its hemepenes.  I immediately took the snake out of breeding rotation and sent it to the vet.  I got it back six months later.  Needless to say it missed the breeding season.  My bill?  It was well over $1,000.  I talked with my vet at length about things I can do to diminish the likelihood of it happening again.  There were no definitive answers; sometimes things just don’t go right.  What would have happened if this was not my snake?  What if it belonged to a fellow breeder and was with me on loan?  His problem developed very early in the breeding season so none of the girls became gravid by his effort.  Now we have no babies and more than a grand in vet bills.  The snake was in my care so is it my responsibility?  Or is it yours because the snake belongs to you?  Perhaps we both should contribute to the bill.  Should the contribution be evenly split?  These are things to discuss before a breeder loan begins, not when the snake is already at the vet.

Despite not being thrilled about having to spend money on vet bills I must say that I am glad the problem was mine and mine alone.  Having to try and sort things out with the owner of the snake would have made a bummer of a situation even worse.  And yes, the snake is doing great now.  He is cleared for action this coming season.

Consideration #7:  Helping Another Herper Get A New Morph Makes One Less Customer For You

For me this is a business.  Relationships with other breeders are nice but there are less financially strenuous ways to have friends.  I could play softball or fantasy sports if I was just in this for the friendship.  I hear World of Warcraft is a great way to have lots of friends and you never even have to take a shower or leave your house.  So no, I didn’t get into the ball python business to make a lot of friends.  It’s a nice fringe benefit, though.  It is callous to say but friendships are secondary.  Letting friendship entice you into entering into a breeder loan is going to make one less customer to whom you can sell your production.  You just helped them get the morph that you could have charged money for!  Wanna’ make it worse?  Congratulations!  You already did.  You just helped them produce the same morph in as little as a year.  This means they are now a direct source of competition for you to sell your animals in the future.  Give it some serious thought:  If everybody has all the same morphs because we help each other to get them through breeder loans who are you going to sell you animals to?  The massive influx of people getting into the ball python breeding game?  (<— That’s me being facetious.)  Seriously, this is called the ‘ball python business’, not the ‘ball python co-op’.

A fellow breeder and friend regularly tries to chastise me on this topic.  He is constantly trying to get me to breed my animals with his and when I refuse he tries to use our friendship as a weapon, suggesting that I should do this because we are friends.  I tell him that I will not do it because we are friends.  He thinks I’m rigid and missing the bigger picture; that this is about comradery more than money.  Uh, no.  Nope.  Negative.

Consideration #8:  Trust but Verify

It’s not cool to think about but what would happen if the person with whom you worked a breeder loan decided to lie to you about the results of the pairing?  Unless you are there when the eggs are cut you have to rely upon the level of trust you have in your breeder loan partner.  In general I think that most of us would not consider a breeder loan with someone who did not already have our complete trust.  And it may be true that they are worthy of trust but go back to what I wrote a bit earlier.  They may have just spent a year or more taking care of your animal and have developed a greater sense of their contribution to the arrangement.  They may no lonber buy into the original terms.  A sense of entitlement, financial stress or just plain greed may push them into a bad place; a place where they lie to you about the animals produced.

I hope it has never happened and I hope it never will …but c’mon, this is the reptile business.  Some of the greatest people I have ever met are in this business and so are some of the most deceitful.  If you decide to enter into a breeder loan be sure that your character judging skills are well polished.

Conclusion

I love being a  ball python breeder.  I find it personally fulfilling.  Hatching a morph for the first time or, better still, hatching a morph that has never before been produced is such an incredibly rewarding experience.  Those rewards come at a price, though.  Animal husbandry is dirty, repetitive, expensive and monotonous.  I spend multiple hours every day maintaining my ball python collection.  By the time I finish it is time to begin again.  The financial costs are impressive and money always seems to be flowing in the wrong direction.  From feeder rodents to building supplies the annual costs of breeding are far from trivial.  It takes multiple tens of thousands of dollars each year (each month for some breeders) just to break even.  People don’t create money pits out of love.  They do so with aspirations of a payday.  For me, the breeder loan is the antithesis to my efforts to make a profit.  Business is about balance, calculated risks and the rewards or failures that follow.  The breeder loan is a case study in “risk versus reward”.  Does it make sense to put so many things at risk?  Friendship, other animals, your wallet; all are on the block when you decide to co-mingle collections.  My analysis is that it is not worth it.  My ball pythons will breed with my ball pythons and yours can breed with yours.  Produce something cool and I’ll buy it from you.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver
East Coast Reptile Breeders

…hope you enjoy your stay.

The one moment in time toward which all other efforts point; that brief instant when a baby snake pops its head out of the egg for the first time.  After all these years I still get excited.   364 days of cage cleaning, record keeping, feeding, water bowl changing and male/female pairing all comes to a conclusion at this moment:

Bumble Bee Ball Python Hatching

And it is so worth it!  I’ve seen it time and again but it never loses it coolness.  Earlier today I was checking eggs (and happened to have my camera) and caught this bumble bee just as he pushed his head out for the first time.  Seeing their first tongue flick is such a cool thing to witness.  In the photo this little guy is about 3 seconds old.  How awesome is that?!

This is the best time of year.

Click the image below for a close-up.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

My name is Colin Weaver.  I am a ball python breeder.  My best customer is named Colin Weaver.  He is also my biggest problem.

I can’t seem to get it right.  I’m in the ball python business to make money.  That’s not something I keep secret.  If I owned snakes purely for the love of snakes I’d own fewer than ten of them.  Instead I own hundreds.  I don’t know anybody who keeps hundreds of anything out of love.  Most people who keep things in quantity do so for financial gain.  I’m not different.

If you start out as a hobbyist you may find that you are lured into monetizing your operation.  You buy a pretty snake and say, “Hey, it would be cool to get another one of these and try to breed them.”  You buy a mate for your animal and that’s the first step down a long and expensive road.  With ball pythons it’s not so simple, though.  The color and pattern variations produce some very real problems that cause you to become a burden to yourself.  Let me explain.

Suppose you buy a male pastel jungle ball python.  They are pretty and quite affordable these days.  You also really like spider ball pythons so you buy one of those, too.  Your spider is a girl so you decide to pair the two up with each other.  Eggs are laid, incubated and hatched.  When all goes well what will you get?  A bumble bee (hopefully a few).  You could sell that bumble bee for some nice cash but are you really going to do it?  I’ll wager no.  You don’t have a bumble bee and they sure are pretty.  So you keep it.  Now you have (at least) three snakes.  What should have been a money-generating event actually turned into a collection-size increasing event.  You keep your bumble bee and also add a pinstripe to your collection.  You breed them a few years down the road and now all hell breaks loose.  You produce spinners, lemon blasts, more bumble bees and perhaps even a spinner blast.  Second verse, same as the first. You don’t have any spinners or lemon blasts.  You (like most other people) also don’t have any spinner blasts …until now.  Can you really sell them now that you have them?  Think of the possibilities they represent.  Don’t you want to have these in your collection?  What sense would it make to sell them and they buy them again later?  So year after year, clutch after clutch, you find yourself keeping the best stuff you produce.  You could, and arguably should, be selling these little nuggets but you just can’t bring yourself to do it.  So you become your own best customer and you are your own biggest hinderance to profitability.  It’s a vicious cycle and I’m in deep.

I, like many other breeders, keep back large numbers of my very best production every year.  I should be selling it, taking the cash, paying off my house and buying nice cars and saving for retirement.  But I don’t.  Instead I’m cash-poor and snake rich, always trying to one-up my own collection.

I can’t seem to drink my own Kool-Aid.  Sometimes you have to take the cash, sell the snake …even when it hurts.  But it’s oh, so very hard to do.

Colin Weaver

I think he meant to write, “Ivory and Pastel Ivory, locked together in perfect harmony”.

Or something like that.  Anyway, I can’t see much bad happening from crossing an Ivory with a Pastel Ivory.  Seems all good to me.  Sorry for the bum picture.  I didn’t want to mess with my boy’s mojo so I snapped it in a hurry with my iPhone.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

The Silver Streak Ball Python.  Less often known by its real name; the Super Pastel Black Pastel Ball Python.

Like many breeders I have male Silver Streaks in my collection.  These days you almost have to.  It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with the big breeders so having males with some genetic firepower is a non-negotiable essential.

But for the past few years I have also been working to add female Silver Streaks to my collection.  I’ve manage to add several to my breeding arsenal but this girl

Is the biggest one I’ve got.  She’s a hefty 2700 grams at last weigh in and this is her second year in breeding rotation.  I’ve been breeding her with a Pastel Lesser Ball Python so I’m hoping to get some really cool stuff from her eggs.

• Pastels (Please, Lord. Please!  No.  Could I be soooooo unlucky?)
• Super Pastels
• Pastel Lessers
• Super Pastel Lessers
• Black Pewters (Meh.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad to produce em’, just not excited about getting them from this particular pairing)
• Black Pewter Lessers
• Silver Streaks
• Silver Streak Lessers (Booyah!!!  Since I don’t have any of these I’ll be hard-pressed to actually let it go if I should be blessed enough to have one poke its head out of the egg.  If I produce a male, it isn’t even a discussion.  I’ll keep it.  I’ll actually keep the first 2-3 males I produce.  Females will be a different story.)

If she would hurry up and ovulate I’d be a much happier guy.

One of the things I like so much about the reptile business is that there is no uninteresting time of year (ball python breeding in particular).  You’re always doing something with your animals.  Feeding, cleaning, cycling temperature, adjusting humidity, feeding, cleaning, varying light cycles, breeding, incubating, feeding, cleaning, hatching, selling, trading, buying …and feeding and cleaning.   There is no down time, no off season.  It’s not too unlike professional sports, actually.  Football players start the season focused on making the playoffs.  Once in the playoffs they focus on getting to the championship game.  Once they win the championship game they focus on the Super Bowl.  After that little event they focus on training for the following season so they can do it all over again.  It’s a cycle and it never ends.  Reptile breeding is just like this.  You fatten up your females as best you can and start breeding in the fall.  You start getting eggs in late winter/early spring.  Hatching starts in early spring through late summer.  As soon as eggs drop you start fattening up again.  At the same time you are working to sell or trade the years production.  The animals you keep or the one’s you acquire have a little sub-routine that runs in parallel; you feed them to get them up to breeding size in a timely fashion.  Baby snakes have a much more basic cycle:  feed, clean, feed, clean, clean, feed, clean, feed, clean, clean, feed, clean.  It is not lost on me how many incredibly intelligent people who are in the reptile business who have somehow chosen to clean snake poop as a career/favorite pastime.  It’s a testimony to the general awesomeness of reptiles that we’re willing to endure such dirty work to have the magical moments that successful husbandry provides.

Right now I’m at the stage where I’m wondering if I’m going to make the playoffs.  I do it to myself every year at this time.  I’m at that stage where females are ovulating and going into pre-lay sheds.  And it’s at this time of year when you start to wonder if you’ve done everything right.  If you’re anything like me you can easily talk yourself into a panic.  You start to think that you aren’t going to have any clutches at all, or maybe only a tiny fraction of what you are expecting.  Year after year I drive myself crazy with worry and year after year it turns out to be unfounded.  Everything works out fine.  Worrying is part of the cycle for me.

Now the genetic odds on what pokes out of the egg in about 2 months is a completely different story.  And that’s actually next up in my cycle of things to drive myself insane over.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver