So here they are: my ball python breeder best principles and practices:

Simple Recessive:  “Hoes Before Bros”

It is a simple and unalterable fact that female ball pythons take longer to reach sexual maturity than males.  Most females won’t breed until their third or fourth winter while males can potentially be ready inside of a year, 18 months almost without fail.  If, in the same buying season, you acquire both male and female hatchlings for a project your male will be ready to breed not less than a full year before the female.  The only guaranteed thing you can do during that time is watch the value of the morph continue to fall.  When examining the original price paid you will see that you acquired and paid for the male at least a full year in advance of when you should have.  You should have purchased only females in year one and waited at least a full year before buying the male.  Doing this makes it more likely that you will have both of them reaching sexual maturity at the same time.  This minimizes your losses from depreciation.  So the next time you are looking to start a simple recessive project, buy your females first; pick up the males a year later.

This best practice may not appear to make sense if you already have other females that will be ready when the male is a year old (give or take).  But that all-too-common scenario really just illustrates the point.  The females you already have that will be paired with the male were acquired (or born) long before the male, which is exactly what I am suggesting should be done with simple recessives.

Dominant/Co-Dominant:  “Bros Before Hoes”

If you are going to visually see the product of your breeding in the first generation of offspring (e.g. dominant/co-dominant genes) it is a better decision to invest in males first and turn your attention to the acquisition of females in the following year(s).  Dominant and Co-Dominant (incomplete dominant) prices fall fast.  In order to have a chance at seeing a return in a reasonable time period you have to work for very fast turnaround.  Many males can be ready to breed in less than a year and, assuming they perform, you will see the product of your efforts in the next breeding season.  This allows you to begin recouping your investment after only one season of depreciation.  If you are using females to get yourself into a particular co-dom project you will have to patiently suffer through 2-3 seasons of depreciation before seeing the first dollars in return.  This is too painful for most people to bear and is not an ideal use of investment capital.

A corollary to this principle is that the eventual investment in co-dom/dominant females is required.  It is only when both the male and female are genetically special that we see the really exceptional designer morph advancement.  It should be abundantly obvious that true genetic progress only comes when both male and female are contributing genetic awesomeness to the mix.  Four, fix & six gene snakes don’t typically get made because all of the genetic mutations come from one side of the family; both mom and dad have to be sufficiently morphed-up in order to make really morphed-up kids.  It’s all about genetic synergy.

Pair Genetically Greater Boys with Genetically Lower Girls …But Never the Other Way Around
(Put Another Way:  Never Breed a More Expensive Female to a Less Expensive Male)

It is reasonable to buy a male dominant/co-dom morph and use it to make more of the same (e.g. breed it to a normal female).  However, you should never do that with a female.  When you acquire female dominant/co-dominant morphs it should be with the full intent of breeding it to a male whose genetics are different (and typically of greater financial value than hers).  It is economically effective to acquire a male dominant/co-dominant animal and breed it to a genetically lower female.  The opposite is never true.  Do not acquire a dominant/co-dominant female and breed it to a genetically lower male.   Please note that ‘genetically lower’ refers to the financial value of the morph.  For example:

• It is sane to buy a pastel male and breed it to a normal female.  It is insane to by a normal male and breed it to a pastel female.
• It is sane to buy a champagne male and breed it to a pastel female.  It is insane to buy a champagne female and breed it to a pastel male.
• It is sane to buy a silver surfer male and breed it to a ghost female.  It is insane to buy a silver surfer female and breed it to a ghost male.
• It is sane to buy a male albino and breed it to a het albino female.  It is insane to buy an albino female and breed it to a het albino male.  Please note that your sanity is also in question if you breed an albino male to an albino female.  At the very least breed female albinos with a male who is albino plus something else (albino spider, albino pinstripe, albino black pastel, etc.).
• Do not buy a pastel female with plans of breeding her to a pastel male (even though you can make super pastels).  It is no longer true that breeders intentionally produce super pastel ball pythons; they are almost always the product of missed opportunity in a different pairing (e.g. lemon blast x pastel lesser can produce super pastels but it is not what the breeder was trying for).  A female pastel bred to any other co-dom morph will, in the best case, always produce babies that are worth more money than a super pastel.

I almost gave myself an aneurysm this breeding season when I pulled a clutch of eggs from a bumble bee female and realized I had bred her to a pinstripe male.  This is a classic example of wasted female potential.  My decision to breed that particular pair of animals was rooted in my lack of males to go with all of my females.  I have a lot of 3, 4 and 5-gene males …but I have a lot more females.  Rather than breed her to nothing or try to stretch a male too thinly I, at some point, decided that the long odds of making spinner blasts was better than nothing at all.  The problem is that the odds of making spiders and pinstripes is much greater and that negates the value of such a great female.  Don’t make mistakes like that.

Diversity is a Detriment

Quality never goes out of style.  This does not require much elaboration.  But quantity…

Quantity of production of a particular morph is a benefit.  This is obviously true from the simple “more is better” perspective.  But quantity of production is also important for a breeder because the acquisition of many of your morphs will come out of  your own production and it is only after the needs of your own collection are satisfied that you can begin to easily entertain the notion of selling the results of your production.  You will forever be your own best customer and that is not a financially good thing.  If, because of limited breeding stock, you only produce a tiny handful of the morph you are shooting for you will be hard-pressed to sell when you finally hit on the odds.  How many times have you heard yourself say, “Yeah, I’ve got to keep this.”?   This could mean that your ability to sell your productive efforts is pushed back by a full breeding season and that push has a tangible financial value.

If you only produce a single clutch of clowns how can you easily sell them when you don’t have all of the clowns you need for yourself?  If you sell them without first satisfying the needs of your own collection you are effectively decreasing the worth of your collection (while increasing the quality of your competitor’s collection).  Ball python breeding groups are always depreciating in value and, as such, must continuously be upgraded to keep them even with the market.  If the diversity of morphs in your collection is out of proportion to its size you will probably produce comparatively few of each kind of morph.  The desire to keep them will be powerful and each animal you keep is less money in your pocket this season.  If you focus less on diversity and more on quantity you will be more likely to produce an abundance of a particular morph.  The decision to sell becomes easier and all you need to do is decide which animal(s) to keep rather than if there is an animal to keep.

It is not as exciting to keep a larger number of the same morph but it is definitely more profitable.  On the other hand, a diverse collection is more fun to look at but, since you are more likely to keep the best of your production, you are more of a hobbyist than a businessperson (and I’m not really writing for the hobbyist at the moment).

This principle also has a few corollary’s:

1. When you produce a particular morph in quantity you have more to choose from when selecting quality.  You get to pick the very best of what you produce to keep for yourself rather than having to hold on to whatever you get.
2. There can be a lot of variation in feeding response with ball pythons.  If you have several of the same morph you can hold them for a few weeks/months to see which are the best feeders.  You should always keep the best-looking, best-feeding animals for yourself.  And no, this is not an ethical issue.  A negative-minded person will read this and say that I wrote, “keep the good stuff for yourself, sell the crappy stuff to your customers.”  I’m not suggesting that at all.  Bluntly:  I suggest that you keep the very best for yourself, sell the remaining excellent product to your customers and, if you have anything of “low” quality (unattractive, poor feeding response, etc.), sell it to the wholesalers.  And yes, that should serve as a warning to people who buy the cheapest snake they can find (which is usually from the wholesalers).  Trust me on this one; the great deal you just got on that snake may not be as great a deal as you think.  As is often the case in life, you get what you pay for.

Nobody is going to tend to your collection but you.  If you don’t take steps to make sure it is the best is can be …who will?  If you give your friend’s first pick they will take the very best of what you produce and expect the lowest price.  If you put the very best of what you produce up for the world to buy, it will sell and people will applaud you for your quality.  But at what cost?  If you build your own collection from the leftovers how long can your collection remain superior?  Hopefully that question is rhetorical.  Never feel bad about keeping the best for yourself.  It is your responsibility to do so.  Altruism has no place anywhere on this planet, including the ball python business.

Refinement is a Religion

As you read this article the financial value of your ball python collection is falling.  The only way to keep it even or, dare I say, growing in value is to constantly increase its genetic quality.  If you have single-gene males now you need to upgrade them to multi-gene males for next year.  If you have a large number of normal female breeders you need to upgrade them to pastels, black pastels and other single-gene co-dom girls.  If you already have a solid base of single-gene breeder females you need to upgrade them to multi-gene girls.  And as soon as that upgrade is complete you will need to begin to do it again.  You cannot maintain profitability in a market as volatile as the ball python trade without constantly upgrading.  It, like the different combinations of morphs that can be produced, is endless.

Be mindful of the size of your collection as you go through this process.  The desire to keep the old while adding the new can quickly lead to an excessively large collection.  Big collections come with big caging bills, even bigger rodent bills and endless maintenance requirements.  The key here is to constantly increase the quality of the collection, not its size.  As one girl comes of age she should be moving into, not next to, the slot of another girl.  Don’t get me wrong, though.  If you want to grow your collection, do so.  But know how it is growing.  Collections in growth-mode need to grow in size and quality simultaneously.  Don’t keep older, less valuable, animals into infinity.  A $100 female breeder eats just as much as a $1,000 female breeder, requires the same amount of time to care for and generally produces animals that are worth significantly less.  A person who is breeding ten $1,000 females is going to make as much or more money with less effort and less overhead than the person breeding fifty $100 normal females.

2.0 Males

Keep multiple males of the same morph.  2.0 Pastel Genetic Stripes, 2.0 Pieds, 2.0 Pastel Lessers and 2.0 Honey Bees.  Not all males are good breeders and not all females are receptive to any male.  If you want to maximize the percentage of females that lay viable eggs each season you need to make sure they have as many opportunities as possible to be with a male.  Rotating at least two males of the same morph with each female will do this.  Yes, it is more expensive and no, it is not as exciting as having a bunch male morph diversity.  But this isn’t about having the prettiest collection; it’s about having the most productive collection possible.  The addition of a second male should easily pay for itself in the form of a higher rate of oviposition.  If the addition of another male can increase the number of females who produce each season by 10% he will pay for himself (and then some) in one year.

How many people ever see your collection anyway?  I can still count on two hands the number of people who have actually been to my facility over the past few years.  Would you rather “ooh and aah” over  your snake rack or your bank account?  Pick one and then act accordingly.  Very few of us can do both.

The One Who Dies with the Largest Ball Python Collection Does Not Win

Quality versus quantity.  Consider a tale of two breeders; one hatches 2,000 ball pythons each season with prices ranging from $8 – $10,000.  The other breeder hatches 300 babies with most prices ranging in the $500-$5,000 and up range.  Both are making money, no doubt.  But the guy with 2,000 baby snakes is busting his butt every day, has a crew of people helping him and has massive overhead.  The guy producing a comparative handful of snakes is doing it on his own, mostly in the evenings.  He enjoys spending time with his animals and has paid his house off over the past five years.  Both paths are a way to make money but one is a harder life.  The decidedly American mentality that “more is better” is tough to shake; it’s everywhere around us every day.  A smaller, higher-end collection is worth a lot more in time spent and overall quality of life.  But that is just an opinion, not a fact.

Never Breed Recessives a Year After Dominant/Co-Dominants

If you breed a dominant/co-dominant male to a female in one breeding you should avoid breeding that female to a simple recessive carrying male in the following season.  If you do there is a chance, albeit a small one, that the babies might not be the hets you think them to be.  Ball pythons can and do retain sperm across breeding seasons.  No, it is not terribly common (I believe it to be very rare) but I know more than one breeder who has witnessed it.  I have produced many thousands of ball pythons and have not had it happen …that I know of.  But one thing I am powerfully motivated to never do is sell someone a het and have it not prove out.  For that reason I am careful in pairings not only within the same breeding season, but also from one breeding season to the next.  In order to to this you must keep excellent records.  Consider the following pairings:

Pairing #1:  Risky and too stressful for me

• Year 1:  Pastel female x Pinstripe male – Possible offspring includes pastels, pinstripes, lemon blasts and normals.  None are het for anything.
• Year 2:  Pastel female x Ghost Pinstripe male – Possible offspring includes pastels, pinstripes, lemon blasts and normals.  All should be 100% het ghost.  But what if the female had some retained sperm from the previous season?  You are certain the production is 100% het but it may not be …and there is no way to tell until years down the road when your customer experiences the fallout from the mistake.  There was no deception on your part but the mistake is still your responsibility and, with your reputation on the line,  your problem to correct.

Pairing #2:  A slightly safer bet

• Year 1:  Pastel female x Pinstripe male - Possible offspring includes pastels, pinstripes, lemon blasts and normals.  None are het for anything.
• Year 2:  Pastel female x Ghost Mojave male – This is a slightly more bearable situation.  The best things to produce from this pairing are mojaves and pastel mojaves, which have no choice but to be 100% het ghost.  The pastels and normals that result from the pairing are almost certainly 100% het ghost but you can only be 99.5% sure.  There is an outside chance that the pastels and normals are from the previous season’s pairing.  If I were to do a pairing like this I would sell the normals and the pastels as “normals”, not hets.  Yes, they are more than likely going to be actual hets but I would not want deal with the fallout several years down the line if they weren’t.

Pairing #3:  Warm and fuzzy feelings for everyone

• Year 1:  Pastel female x Ghost Pinstripe male - Possible offspring includes pastels, pinstripes, lemon blasts and normals.  All are 100% het for ghost.
• Year 2:  Pastel female x Black Pewter male – Possible offspring includes silver streaks, black pewters, super pastels, pastels, black pastels and normals.  None should be het for ghost but it is remotely possible that the pastels and the normals are actually hets.  It should go without saying that you cannot sell them as such.  They are sold as the normal, non-het, animals you suspect them to be.  The worst case scenarios is that they are actually carrying the ghost gene and someone gets a happy surprise several years down the road.

Second-Hand Hets are Not a Good Bet

Buying hets is risky business.  The simple fact of the matter is that you have to buy hets either from A) someone you know and trust or B) someone who has a verifiable and trustworthy reputation.  The operative word in both options is ‘trust’.  Over the years  I have had a few bad experiences and I know plenty of other people who have lived through the pain of an animal not proving out.  Because of the time involved it’s really depressing.  Buy a lottery ticket and you’ll know in short order if it’s a loser; buy a het and it can take years to realize that you won’t be getting a return on your investment.  Adding insult to injury is that the het is supposed to be a winner.  At least with a lottery ticket you know you’re taking a chance and could come up empty-handed.  I have written at length about the danger of buying hets.  Rather than beating that horse any further let me refer you to the article called Genetic Provenance, Insanity and Spoiled Milk (http://ballpythonbreeder.com/2010/11/genetic-provenance-insanity-and-spoiled-milk/) that I wrote on the topic.

The article referenced above deals mostly with buying hets directly from the person who has (supposedly) produced it.  But what about buying hets from the person who bought the hets?  I guarantee my hets and I am willing to guarantee hets that I have purchased from others that have proven for me.  But I won’t guarantee or knowingly buy a het that passed through more than one person’s collection.  The only hets I am ever willing to buy are one’s the come from the person who produced them.  At least that way there is a measure of accountability.  If you buy your hets from a wholesaler you need to be at peace with the fact that they are selling them to you under the assumption that the person from whom they bought them wasn’t ripping them off.  Graft in the het business rolls down hill and if it’s you putting male to female it’s you and only you who is going to come out the loser when the het doesn’t prove out.

Avoid Sweet Deals on Other People’s Problems

You simply must exercise Due Care and Due Diligence when buying adult ball pythons.  I have written on this before.  Please read my article titled Sweet Deals on Other People Problems (http://ballpythonbreeder.com/2009/12/sweet-deals-on-other-peoples-problems/) for a detailed discussion on this topic.

Cover Your Assets

Whenever I sell hets I include a Certificate of Genetics that includes a photograph of the animal and describes the genetics it carries.  I also include information on the pairing that was used to produce the animal.  I do this to give my customer a high degree of assurance that the animal is what I claim it to be.  I will not last long in this business if I sell fake hets (which I call “Fets”).  My willingness to sign a document that holds me personally accountable for an animals’ genetics goes a long way to helping people feel better about their purchase.  But I don’t do certificates just for my customer; I do them to protect myself as well.  If I sell a het and years later the person comes to me complaining that it didn’t prove out I have no real defense if there is no photographic record of the animal.  How do I know that the animal they are claiming didn’t prove out was really from me?  I don’t.  This would be a delicate situation and I would like to avoid it.  I do that by making sure that I also have a photographic record of the animal being sold.

Happy Breeding!

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

That was the job description given to me a long time ago just before I accepted a position at a small start-up IT company.  I was trying to break out of the life-drag called Corporate America and during the interview process I asked for more details on my potential job duties.  And the quote above is was what I heard in reply.  When I realized he wasn’t kidding I was …moved.  I was so inspired that I wanted desperately to do something, well, awesome and amazing.  It was everything I needed to hear at that point in my life.  With that one sentence I had been both empowered and granted personal accountability.  The trust coupled with expectation that was handed to me was nothing less than food to my starving motivation.  In the year that followed I gave more of myself to that organization than any other before it.  I wanted to.  I was personally invested in making sure my job description was expertly executed.

When I reflect on the years that have passed I tend to recognize that as the moment I realized I was meant to be an entrepreneur rather than an employee in somebody else’s business.  Yes, I realize how that statement is initially dichotomous; becoming an entrepreneur while accepting a job to work for someone else.  A person will mentally be an entrepreneur for some time before they amass the means to actually be one.  Rather than looking to my bosses for kudos and acknowledgements for my efforts I became more interested in how I felt about the work I was doing.  Other people were ultimately secondary.  If I was happy with the results of my work I seldom needed to wonder if my bosses would be good with it.  I held myself to a higher standard and it was reflected in the quality of my production.  Excerpts of my inner-monologue included:

• “If you are going to do something, do it well.”
• “If you’re going to do it you might as well do it exceptionally well.”
• “If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all.”

And over the years it’s that last quote that has caused me such angst.  Being excellent at a few things is do-able.  We can all do that.  Being excellent at a lot of things is challenging.  And not doing things because you can’t do them exceptionally well can be a problem.  The choices I have made (e.g. being in the live animal business) require that certain things must be done; they cannot be ignored or neglected.  And over the years I have crafted a life that impossibly requires me to be excellent at too many things.  As a result, a vicious cycle is at work.  If I can’t do it well, I won’t do it.  Since I want (or need) to do it I must do it well.  Doing a lot of things very well is difficult to maintain.  Trying to do too many things exceptionally well means you end up doing many of them not so well.  Realizing that you are not doing some things well means you have to either A) quit doing those things, B) work harder (or longer) at doing them well again and/or C) stress yourself out over the fact that you aren’t doing things as well as you should be (while trying to decide if you should be doing A or B).

I have become something of a mental train-wreck on this topic.  Like no other time in my life I feel torn between multiple radically different worlds.  I own and operate an ever-expanding reptile business.  I also own a thriving information technology company.  While the computer stuff comes in handy from time-to-time in the reptile world I can’t say that the opposite is true.  Computer people seldom need my herpertocultural skills.  As a result, I live two incredibly different professional lives.  Both are full-time jobs and they regularly conflict with each other.  I am accountable to my animals and I am accountable to my IT business partners.  Fortunately I don’t have much of a social life but I do have a family life that is more important than any of my other roles.  I have to balance the three and I continue to insist on being excellent at each.  The family part is relatively easy.  If I start to not be an excellent husband or father I have always said I will quit the other two without notice.  Neither of them mean much in comparison.  But part of being a good father and husband is being a good protector and provider so continuing to also be excellent at the money-earning components of my life is a requirement of the most important part of my life.  It’s a bit of a circular conundrum.

Like many reptile breeders, I have help.  I have good people that sometimes help me clean cages and keep my facility tidy.  But even with all of the help they give me I am still constantly struggling to keep up.  I need more.  As any keeper of a large number of animals knows, the dirty work is endlessly repetitive.  I clean enclosures every single day, usually for multiple hours.  And it is incredibly common that the enclosure I cleaned last night will need to be cleaned again the next day.  Snakes have an uncanny habit of waiting until you clean their house before fouling it up.  Sometimes I think it’s a game they play.  Because I have an obligation to my animals I can’t let them sit in a dirty cage.  This compels me to check their cages very regularly and give them the attention they need.  Because of the quantity of snakes I keep this takes a lot of time.

As a medium-sized reptile breeder I need to spend my time doing four different things:

1. Feeding
2. Cleaning
3. Breeding
4. Selling (and buying)

Once your collection hits a certain size you will begin to struggle to do all four extremely well.  And this is where my philosophy on how to do thing is causing me problems.  The size of my collection and the other demands in my life are making it increasingly difficult to do all four very well.  There is another nasty cycle at work.  I currently spend more time feeding and cleaning than I do selling.  And from one perspective, that is just dumb.  No margin, no mission, right?  I should be aggressively selling every day, but I don’t.  I should be working through my client list, making calls and putting together deals.  But I’m not.  Why?  I’m too busy cleaning and feeding.  I often have animals that I know are desirable to others that go for months on the rack and never get offered for sale.  And because I’m not selling as aggressively as I need to be I don’t feel financially comfortable committing to the money it will take to hire somebody else to do the feeding and cleaning.  My problems are not new; I’m not the first to live them.  Every single small business owner who went from a one-man shop to a larger enterprise did what I have been reluctant to do:  leap.  On this point I haven’t been drinking my own Kool-Aid.  One of the guiding philosophies of my life has been “leap, and the net will appear.”  But with the growth of this reptile business I still haven’t successfully done it.  I can’t stop feeding and cleaning in order to sell.  So I am left with two choices:

1. Reduce the size of the collection to something that can be easily managed.
2. Leap.

Choice number one isn’t going to happen.  It’s simply not what I want.  That leaves only option #2.  But hiring somebody (leaping) means turning over a function that must continue to be done extremely well.  And one thing is true:  nobody will ever do it as well as me.  No, that’s not ego, it’s fact.  The same is true for everybody.  Remember the old adage, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”  The truth in that statement is not that I am the best at something, it’s that nobody else is likely to be as personally invested in making sure it is done right.  And why would they be?  It’s not theirs.  People who work in corporate America often hear their bosses encouraging them to have a “sense of ownership”.  Every employer dreams of their workers feeling this way because it helps to increase the quality of production.  People who “own” are more personally invested in the outcome and are therefore more likely to do something better than those who do not.  If you live in the United States you have almost certainly encountered the general level of apathy in many of the workers you encounter during your daily meanderings.  Whether it’s poor service by a cashier at the grocery or the inattentive waiter we all regularly see the product of people not owning their work.  As annoying as it is being a customer on the receiving end imagine how scary it is for the real owner of the business.  You create and nurture your business.  You pour your soul into making it successful.  That success forces you to hire help.  And it is quite possible that the help will suck.  In a perfect world the help you have will continue to nurture, to “own”.  But the world is not perfect so you must come to terms with the fact that there will almost certainly be a reduction in quality from what you, the owner, would do.  But if I want to grow my business I cannot forever be all things to all people.  I have to let go.

These are not new dilemma’s for me.  Because I choose to be in the live animal business I also choose to provide excellent care for my animals.  I cannot neglect the production capacity by not keeping my animals well fed and clean.  But at the same time I have to do a better job of actually trying to sell the animals I produce.  All aspects of the cycle must be given necessary time and attention.  Stephen Covey calls it the P/PC balance (Google it).

In the end analysis I know what I need to do.  I knew it before I started writing.  Business is not static; you are either growing or you are contracting.  I am growing.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

I’m self-employed.  I have been that way for almost a decade.  In addition to my reptile enterprise I am a founding owner of a small information technology (IT) company.  Because I have a passion for computer networking and information security I long ago decided to start my own business doing the thing I love.  That is a theme familiar to a lot of self-employed people and if you are not currently self-employed I’ll wager that a good number of you aspire to one day be so.  For those of you not currently at the helm of your own enterprise let me remind you of an expression I’m sure you have heard before:  “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.“  Owning your own business does nothing to eliminate the stress and frustration you experience in your current job.  Often times it’s quite the opposite.  When you own your business the stresses simply multiply and take on a different form.

It was a little over a decade ago that I found myself increasingly frustrated that other people were making lots of money because I was good at what I did.  With great frequency my bosses would come to me in order to implement some intricate piece of computing voodoo for one of our clients.  When the job was done I got my regular paycheck while the company owners were moving into ever larger houses and driving ever nicer cars.  I have to admit that I spent a good amount of time annoyed and disenfranchised with the arrangement.  Thankfully, I had a moment of clarity, a simple epiphany that changed things.  I came to terms with the fact that my employer had offered me a certain sum of money to do a job and I chose to accept that money.  By accepting that sum I gave up the right to be angry about actually doing the job they had hired me to do.  Despite being no longer happy with the pay I was receiving I had, quite literally, sold my right to whine and complain about it.  As long as I chose to accept the money they were paying me I also chose to accept the other circumstances I did not like.  I alone was responsible for the situation and that was a powerful realization.  I chose to no longer accept the money they were paying me and that meant I could do one of two things:  renegotiate my salary or quit.  I decided that even if they doubled my salary they would still be making too much money off of my off my particular skill set.  So I quit.  I did not, however, quit on the spot.  I developed a plan and spent the next year acting on it.  About ten months after I decided that I would be the one to earn the greatest profit on my skills, I gave my notice.  Two weeks later I hung out a shingle of my own.

My maxim during that time was, “leap …and the net will appear.”  And leap I did.  It was about two paycheck-free years later that the net finally appeared.  Gambling against common business practice my partners and I chose to forgo salaries in exchange for reinvestment and getting the business solidly in the black.  It was a tough time for my family.  Our household income had been cut by more than half  and the impact on our qualify of life was profound.  More than once I thought we weren’t going to make it.

But that was a long time ago.  Today the company I started is a success and it has led directly to the financial betterment of my family.  I am in charge of my own financial fate.  It would seem that I have achieved one of my original objectives.  But I find myself reminded of another famous (and over-used) saying:  “Watch what you wish for because it just might come true.” Despite having a successful business I long ago realized that the reasons I started it were at least partially flawed.  My motivations were not technically wrong, mind you.  The flaw was that I had come to the incorrect conclusion that being passionate about doing a certain thing meant that I should start a business doing that thing; that doing the thing you love and owning the company that does it was a desirable pinnacle of achievement.  The reality is that if you start a business doing something you love you are in grave danger of that ‘love‘ turning into ‘loathe‘.  You may one day wake up and realize that the thing that once brought you joy has become a passionless burden; a thing no longer done for the soul but a thing now done to pay the mortgage.  What a terrible thing to do to your passions.

In the years since I started my IT company I have come to one very sobering conclusion:  I do not own a business.  I own a job.

My business does not make money unless I am there to deliver a product.  The more I work the more the company makes.  If I don’t work the company doesn’t make money.  And that responsibility is exactly what I wished for ten years ago.  Oh crap!  My wish came true!  One problem is that I am a finite resource, limited by many things, the number of hours in a day being one of the most menacing.  But that’s not the worst problem.  I realized long ago that I wasn’t going to get any sleep until I am dead.  The biggest problem is the reason why I started the business has gradually been sucked out of me.  Years ago my fascination with computers was just a hobby.   The hours spent on my hobby eventually landed me a job in the industry.  With my focus still firmly on the technology, I became excellent.  And then I made the same mistake that many others had made before me.  I concluded that a love for technology can be taken to the next level by becoming the owner of a technology company.  A more wrong conclusion could not have been made.  This ‘thing’ that once provided nourishment for my soul has now become necessary.  I have to do it.  And that takes much of the fun out of it.  The responsibilities of being an owner have changed my perspective and my original passion along with it.  What was once a labor of love has been reduced to …work.

But my technology company is only one of my enterprises.  I also own and run an exponentially-expanding reptile business.  And what was the motivation that led to the beginning of East Coast Reptile Breeders?  Same as most of us, I suspect.  I am fascinated by reptiles and have a passion for working with them.  Long ago it was a hobby and because I love reptiles so much I could think of no better way to immerse myself in them than to start a business breeding them.  Uh-oh!  Second verse, same at the first!   Those motivations sound eerily similar to the one’s I had when starting my other venture.  Does this mean I am doomed to watch the joy I derive from reptile husbandry morph into a passionless repetition of daily process?  I hope not.  It goes without saying that is not why I started doing this.  Many years ago I went headlong into reptiles as a business with the same seemingly pure intentions as before: I wanted to make money doing something that I love.  That’s the sales pitch we have all been given (and I bought).  And today I am having a conscious confrontation with the possibility that, if left unchecked, I will one day grow to loathe reptiles.  Does that mean I need to take a preemptive action and distance myself from them (e.g. become a hobbyist again) in order to preserve the joy they bring me?  That question is rhetorical for me because I can’t see myself ever doing that.  Regardless of the long-term outcome, I continue to grow the size and reach of my reptile business.

Some of the warning signs are already here.  For example, it was not too long ago I paid a generous sum of money for yet another exceptionally beautiful snake.  This snake is so exquisite a creature that it is worthy of being stared at by groups of people for hours on end.  But what did I do when I got it?  I verified its sex, created a feeding card, labeled a tub and put it in a rack.  As both a living thing and an investment I take meticulous care of it but I don’t spend nearly enough time appreciating it.  There was a time when I used to.  And that is a symptom of some joy being lost.  Unlike last time, however, I am keenly aware of it.  Perhaps I can act on it before it progresses any further.  But how?

And so here I am, in possession of some of the most beautiful snakes imaginable.  Even so, I seldom take time to appreciate them.  But why?  Well, because I, like so many others, am busy being run by my business.  I can’t sit around and stare at pretty snakes all day.  I’ve got cages to clean, bowls to wash, floors to sweep, orders to pack, photos to take, ads to run, phone calls to take, emails to respond to, supplies to order, and paperwork to fill out.  And when all of that is done I’ve still got multiple hundreds of hungry mouths to feed.  With all the to-do’s that come with business ownership who has time to stop and enjoy the reason they are doing it?  I am, quite truly, owned by my business.

Small start-up businesses can often be exclusively run by the people who started them.  A husband/wife team can do a lot.  But when the business is small you spend all of your time working for it rather than working on it.  That is an incredibly important distinction.  There has to come a point when you let go of the day-to-day processes and take on more of a …leadership …role in your company.  You have to transcend from being a hands-on technician to being a leader and that is not always a natural thing to do.  However, if you don’t the business will consume you and you may (will) begin to lose your passion.  I believe it to be inevitable.

Letting go of the technical details (e.g. cleaning cages, feeding snakes, washing bowls)  is often harder than staying in control.  Nobody can care as much as you.  It’s not possible.  When you delegate control to someone else you do so knowing that they are not able to care about your business the way you do.  And so you have to come to terms with the fact that the efforts of someone else will have to be good enough.  If (and I do mean if) you can find the right people you will have a chance.  Unfortunately, finding the correct people can be incredibly difficult and payroll is the single biggest leech on a company’s economic viability.  Churning your way through a few rounds of bad staff can drain your payroll accounts and leave the work still incomplete.  This is particularly difficult in the reptile business because the work is insanely repetitive.  It’s hard for anybody to stay motivated when every day is pretty much a carbon copy of the one before it.

It is now twice that I have been in this position.  I have been unable to let go of the day-to-day operations of my IT shop and I have paid for it with some of my passion for the business.  I have also struggled to let go of the day-to-day maintenance of my reptile collection.  In fact, I am so busy taking care of my animals that I often neglect to take the time to actually sell them.  And that’s just plain stupid.  No margin, no mission.  Because I am so motivated to avoid trading my enthusiasm for control I am forcing myself to go through the pain of letting go.  I no longer want to own a job.  I want to own a company.  For now I have found good people to help me maintain my collection.  Doing so frees me up to focus on developing the business, expanding my customer base and my presence in the community.  But I didn’t just flip a switch and magically let go.  Because I am a control freak I find that baby steps work best.  For instance, I still feed all of my animals, I still check and spot-clean cages on a daily basis and I still do all of my animal pairings during breeding season.  Letting go of the latter will probably not occur for a very, very long time.  When it’s me vouching for the genetics of the animals I sell I just can’t see myself delegating that particular responsibility.

And so that’s where I am.  I’m a business owner with a history of being owned by his business.  I am increasingly conscious of my self-imposed limitations and how my past actions have produced some undesirable results.  My motivation to avoid letting the past repeat itself is prompting me to make some changes in the way I do business.  I’m kinda’ anxious to see where this goes…

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 weigh 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

Why do you do this?  By ‘this’ I mean breed reptiles, of course.   Is it a hobby?  Do you do it for a living?  Somewhere in-between?  If you aren’t doing so already, do you aspire to one day breed snakes for a living?

Regardless of where you are in the reptile husbandry game, do you have a plan?  Does it look a little like this?:

1. Buy snakes
2. Breed snakes
3. Sell snakes
4. Count crazy amounts of cash
5. Repeat

What is the last snake you bought?  Why did you buy it?  Was it a smart buy or did you buy it on impulse?  Did it fit into any current breeding project?  How about the snake before that one?  Did you buy it because of its price or because of what it was?  How many times have you let your reptile purchases guide the direction of your reptile collection?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?  Shouldn’t your collection guide your purchases?  Shouldn’t you have a plan; an honest-to-goodness business plan?

I’m not good at rationalizing things.  I am flat-out awesome at it!  In the game of rationalization, I’m a rockstar!  When I set my mind to it I have yet to come across something I couldn’t talk myself into.  My decisions are good.  The are solid and they are just.  I have rationalized my way into many, many snake purchases, each of them a brilliant, strategic and soon-to-be-profitable decision.  With a punnet square, an Excel spreadsheet and available credit I can design a plan for world domination and financial nirvana within a matter of minutes.  On paper I am well on my way to living the dream.

The reality?  I have lived in the same house and driven the same truck for the past eleven years.  Neither are impressive (but I’m not complaining).  Year after year I’m a year away from making good money.  More than once I have run up to the precipice of profitability, stared longingly and lovingly at it, and then turned and walked back down the trail.  By my definitions I am not yet successful.  Some people who know me would argue otherwise.  If three years ago I had the reptile collection I have today I would have said that I am very successful.  But today I want the collection I will have three years from now.  I just can’t seem to get my reptile collection and my timeline to sync up.  I wonder if it’s because I don’t really have a plan any better than the one above.  Who am I kidding?  Step #4 doesn’t exist for me.   After step #3 I jump straight back to #1.  That’s me:  buy, breed, sell.  Repeat.  Snake rich, cash poor.

Because ball pythons are so diverse there is an underlying and [perhaps] unconscious drive to have all of them.  Your collection must have pastels, spiders, pinstripes, black pastels, albinos, mojaves, clowns, piebalds, ghosts, lessers, butters, yellow bellys, fires, axanthics and cinnamons.  Right?  But that’s just to start.  With all the ingedients you can make all of the magic!  But is that really the most profitable way to go about it?  Maybe for some.  I’m not sure it’s right for all of us, though.  I think you need to explore your motivations before you buy any more critters.

Why do you breed ball pythons?  You probably fall into one or more of these categories:

• For the love. Making money isn’t that important to you.  You just like to breed snakes.  You love the whole process and derive joy from successful husbandry.
  • If this is you, congratulations!  Your desires are pure.  Please collect your group of normal ball pythons and make your way to the back of the room.  From there you can listen at a distance, safe from getting any of my capitalism on you.
• To be the first to produce a new morph, to be a recognizable name.  A pioneer in the ever-emerging ball python genetics/morph game.
  • Bring your wallet.  You will need it.  If your wallet is mighty and equipped with sufficient stamina, we will all one day know your name.
  • Fame in the ball python world is real but small.  While I know the names of the big breeders, my parents do not.  Nor do my friends and neighbors.  Being a big name breeder makes you look cool in only the smallest of circles.  Keep your ego in check when you get there.
• To produce a diverse and eclectic array of ball python morphs while making a profit.
  • While the profit part may be elusive these days I suspect that many of us fall into this category.  As your collection expands it becomes more diverse.
• To produce the animals that will make you the most profit, regardless of how you feel about them.
  • You are a pure capitalist.  Whatever sells is what you are selling.  Some may call you a heartless, money-hungry bastard.  Me?  I admire your motivations and envy your lack of  personal attachment.
• Some other motivation. There may be some other category into which you fall so put yourself here if that’s true.

So who among this list is in the worst position?  It’s the people who want to ‘produce a diverse and eclectic array of ball python morphs while making a profit’.  Why?  Your motivations are at odds with each other.  A diverse ball python collection of 100 animals (or 50, or 25, whatever) will allow you to produce a good number of morphs.  It’s exciting and cool when you open the cages and see all the colors and patterns.  But stop for a moment and really think about what’s happening with your collection.  For ease of discussion I will talk about Clown Ball Pythons.  Clowns are not cheap but they are within reach of many breeders.  The most common gateway into breeding clowns is to buy a male clown and some female het clowns.  So let’s say you buy 1.2 (one male, two females).  Chances are good that you buy them as babies.  In about 2-3 years you will have raised your females and are now producing clown babies for the first time.  What are you going to do when they come out of the egg?  Sell them?  Really?  Don’t you remember what you just went through to produce these?  You just spent almost 3 years of your life raising these things up and now, there they are:  baby clown ball pythons produced by YOU!!!  If you sell them you still only have your breeders.  How are you going to grow AND refine your ball python collection if you sell them?  You gotta’ keep some.  And as soon as you decide to do that, you’re screwed.  The cycle has you.  But if you do sell them you’ll still only be producing a few clowns the following year (you are breeding het females after all).  You will never get any bigger and your collection will never get any better than it is today.  That’s the rub.  Keep your production and you’re screwed.  Sell your production and you’re screwed.  Neither is the end of the world but neither is getting you to the world you worked up on your Excel spreadsheet a few years earlier, either.  What to do?

I know it’s easy to write this and not have to talk about the money behind it but  if you are going to breed clowns, BREED CLOWNS.  Don’t buy 1.2 clowns and 1.2 albinos and 1.2 ghosts and 1.2 mojaves and 1.2 spiders.  Buy 2.8 clowns instead.  No, it’s not as exciting but when you do produce clowns you are more likely to produce a bunch of them.  When you have 25 clown babies to sell it is A LOT easier to sell them without emotion AND keep a few back to raise up.  When you are only producing a few clowns you often can’t bear to part with them.  Because they are few they are precious to you; a cherished commodity.  And they are the source of your problems.

So into your business plan you need to integrate VOLUME when it comes to a particular morph.  Resist the desire to expand both size and diversity.  If you are expanding the size of your collection do it with a morph you already have.  Don’t add new morphs to the collection until you have a sufficiently large production capacity with one of your other morphs.

This philosophy holds true when you start producing multiple-gene animals.  How are you ever going to bring yourself to sell that silver streak when you only produced one of them?  If you want to produce silver streaks, go all in.  Produce them by the dozens.  Two black pewter males and a slew of pastel females is a very affordable project (relatively speaking, of course).  Don’t even get me started on white snakes.  I’m sick of hearing people refer to them as being “just another white snake”.  You know the one thing that is always 100% true of white snakes?  They sell like you wouldn’t believe.

If you continue to insist on building a diverse collection of animals without focusing on building a larger production capacity for specific morphs then you are acknowledging that making money is secondary to your love of ball python diversity.  And that’s a tough thing to realize about yourself; what is more important?

In summary, if making money in this business is important to you:  Have a plan.  Produce any particluar morph in sufficient quantity that you can sell them and keep some without being conflicted.  Focus less on diversity, more on quantity.

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

…and the things you’ll learn.

Way back in high school I took biology (we all did).  We talked about Gregor Mendel and genetics.  The girl who sat behind me was gorgeous. I spent most of my time talking to her rather than trying to learn about genetics.  My eyes are not blue and discussing the fact that I am het for blue eyes was less interesting than her.

In college I took courses in biology, physiology, epidemiology, genetics, chemistry and biochemistry.  None of it seemed like it would ever be relevant (to me) in the real world.  I began with the mindset that I was there to ‘check a box’ (e.g. get a diploma).  Pass the tests, move along; that was my initial perspective. By the time I graduated from college I knew I was wrong.  I  had become a reptile breeder (albeit a small one).  The ball python jubilee was still almost a decade away so the more exciting genetics considerations at the time were the albino and anerythrystic genes (yes, I know there was other stuff going on, too).  Much of the awesomeness we know today in the genetics of burmese pythons, reticulated pythons, ball pythons, blood pythons, boa constrictors, etc. was still a long way off.

After college I enrolled in graduate school courses.  I wanted more information.  I took graduate level courses in herpetology and genetics.  By this time I had been breeding a variety of different snakes (colubrids, boas & pythons) for a few years.  Technically, this makes me a herpetoculturist, not a herpetologist.  While the difference in spelling is subtle, the meaning is not.  So in my herpetology course I was an immediate outsider.  My classmates were interested in counting differences in subcaudal scales on snakes obtained from the top and bottom of some far away mountain.  I was interested in how to breed them.  The course did not include a section on husbandry and breeding, which I understand but still missed.  Strangely, herpetoculture and herpetology don’t mix like you might think.  This particular group of herpetology students did not embrace the idea of breeding reptiles for profit.  Capitalism and academia are often at odds with each other.

I am not suggesting that all my schooling made me a good reptile breeder.  While it certainly didn’t hurt me I suggest it provided me slim to no advantage over most of my reptile breeding peers.  Pretty much all of my friends who breed snakes arrived at this particular location (e.g. reptile breeder) via different paths.  Some of us began as car mechanics while others were general contractors, stock brokers, longshoreman, pharmacologists and information technology professionals.  And virtually all of them have as much usable knowledge about genetics as I do.  That impresses me.  It doesn’t take college or graduate courses to learn how to do any of this.  It does, however, take motivation and a desire to learn.  And it takes a lot of ‘doing’.  The more I do this the better I get.  Yeah, yeah, we all love reptiles but it’s the attachment of dollar signs that really gets a lot of us motivated to figure this stuff out.  Visit any reptile forum and you will read everyday people talking about Punnett Squares, dihybrid crosses, genes, alleles and loci (locus) just as naturally as they talk about cooking with a microwave oven.   It just goes to show the chinese proverb, “What I hear I forget, what I see I remember, what I do I understand” is as true today as it was  2,500 or so years ago when something like it was first written.

My whole point is this:  We are a community that has become functional (if not proficient) in a field that until a few years ago was reserved for academics.  The past 10-15 years in the reptile industry have been a whirlwind.  We have become better at herpetoculture, breeding and genetics.  Rather than having a bunch of snakes in glass aquariums we have applied science and capitalism to reptile husbandry.  I’m glad to be part of that.

…And then there was H.R. 669.  While not the first (or last) assault on our rights to own, breed, sell, trade and transport reptiles, I witnessed two things happen as a result of its introduction:

1. We galvanized as a community in a way I honestly didn’t think possible.  From the largest breeders to the guy with a single pet reptile I saw people get fired up and say, “What do you need me to do to help fight this?”  People quickly became willing soldiers, ready to fight for their right to own reptiles.  That impressed me.  Using the Internet as our primary vehicle (forums, Twitter, email, web sites, etc.) we all worked to get the word out and get others motivated.  The axe has not fallen on H.R. 669 but, to steal from a famous story, ‘Horton heard a Who’ by the time 4/23/09 came around.
2. We got also got an unexpected education through this ordeal (not unlike the genetics education we have all received over the past 10 years).  I met more than a few reptile people who got caught up on all the stuff they missed in high school about how our government runs.  How many of you reptile fanatics out there now have a much better understanding of how things work in the House of Representatives?  Maybe you didn’t put it all together but there are a lot of us who are much more acquainted with how the process works.  And if H.R. 669 ever makes it out of the House we’re going to all get a lot smarter about how things work in the Senate.  We’ve got to be educated, organized, and vigilant if we’re going to win this.  People who used to say, “I don’t vote.”, are beginning to realize that their voice, when combined with others who share their beliefs, actually does count.

In one form or another, being in the reptile business is an education…

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

Despite their normally pleasant disposition ball pythons can and do bite.   They don’t bit too often but if you work with them long enough you will get bit.  It doesn’t hurt too much, though.  It’s the quickness of it that startles you more than anything.

I’ll wager that 95% or more of bites are on the hands and arm.  People don’t often get bit in other places but I’m sure there are no places on the human body that have not been bit.  In fact, less than a week ago I know of a guy getting in a spot that would make this post no longer PG-rated.

One of two places I have always wanted to make sure I NEVER get bit is in the face; more specifically, the eye. 

Having said that let me introduce you to Mike Hauck:

Mike and I met at the Hamburg snake show on Saturday.  He works for a fellow breeder and on Friday, the day before Mike and I met, he got bit by a ball python.  To be more specific, he got bit in the face.  To be even more specific, he got bit in the eye.  The suck factor on that is pretty darn high.

You know how sometimes things that aren’t funny make you laugh really hard?  This is one of em’.  Mike spent most of the day getting joked by everybody at the show who heard what happened to him.  “Careful Mike, that’s the business end of that thing!”  He was a trooper about it and was cool enough to know that he should be laughing at himself, too.  I suggested a visit to the opthamologist but so far he seems cool with the idea wearing an eye patch if there is broken tooth or two left to fester in his eye.  I’ll go out on a limb and guess that if a tooth had stayed behind he’d be in a heck of a lot more pain.  A fleck of lint under my contact lens is painful so I’ll bet a python tooth buried 1/16″ into the sclera wouldn’t be painless.

The picture I took of Mike was with my iPhone and it kinda sucks so you can’t really tell where the bite is.  What the camera also fails to show is the overall redness of his face and eye.  He looked like he went out with some friends, got drunk and then got beat up.  The sclera (the white part of his eye) was filled with blood and the teeth of the snake even managed to sink into the lacrimal caruncle (the little ball in the inner-corner of your eye).  Ouch!  He said it didn’t hurt any more than a regular bite and, not wanting to ever prove him wrong, will take his word for it.  Here is an enhanced version of the photo that shows just where Mike took his shot. 

I’m sure there are a lot of people who have been bit in the face by snakes but as far as I know, Mike is the inagural member of the “took one in the eye” club. 

Congratulations Mike Hauck on your achievement.  I’m sure other are lining up to join you in your achievement.

Cheers,

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