Later this year someone is going to break into your house while you are sleeping. They are there to take things that do not belong to them; things you worked for, things you earned. Awakened by the noise they are making you confront them and are stunned to find that the thief is someone you had thought to be a friend. You toss him a loaded gun and scream, “Please don’t shoot me!” A few minutes later, as you lie bleeding on the floor, your precious possessions gone, you cry out, “I was always so nice to him. I can’t believe he shot me.” For reasons unknown it never computes that you put the gun in the thief’s hand. It was you that armed him with the weapon he used to wound you.  Who did you vote for in the last congressional election?  How about the last presidential election?  Who will you vote for in November?  More to the point: why did you vote for them? I can venture a few guesses. They include:

• You always vote [Democrat | Republican | Independent].  The candidate doesn’t matter.
• You vote for whoever is [Pro-Choice | Pro-Life].
• You vote for whoever is [for | against] amnesty for illegal aliens.
• You vote for whoever is [black | white | hispanic | asian].
• You vote for whoever is [male | female].
• You vote for whoever is [for | against] gun control.
• You vote for whoever is [for | against] stronger environmental controls.
• You vote for whoever is [for | against] unions.

I’m willing to bet that many people who read this voted the way they did because of their candidates position on as few as just one of these items/issues.  Some issues are so important to us that they act as blinders to everything else going on around us.  The pro-life/pro-choice debate is as good an example as any.  I know many women who want to know one and only one thing when deciding for whom to vote:  who is the pro-choice candidate.  Done.  Vote cast.  This is not a blanket statement, of course.  I know several women who vote for pro-life candidates, too.  What is important to understand is that the system in the United States is effectively a 2-party system; republican and democrat.  We can pretty safely categorize the republican and democratic tickets by the answers to all of the ‘for|against’ questions listed above.  But in the United States we do not vote on issues, we vote for candidates.  And in our current culture the elected candidates almost always vote along party lines.  This means that a vote for the pro-choice candidate is also a vote for the candidate who supports a larger, more powerful government, more entitlement programs, less individual accountability, amnesty for illegals, stronger gun control, more environmental regulations and stronger unions.  A decision made to only support the pro-life candidate is a vote for smaller government, more personal accountability, no amnesty for illegals, less gun control, fewer environmental regulations and no unions.  How do you feel about those other issues?  Did your vote for one issue just help to elect someone who does not reflect your position on the others?  Oops.

If you know how your candidate will vote when it comes to abortion, amnesty, gun control or unions ask yourself one more question:  will he or she vote for or against more controls (or bans) on the ownership of reptiles?  And is that position important enough to you to change the way you vote?  That’s a tough one, isn’t it?  If you are a snake breeder/keeper that feels that unions are a good thing and vote for the pro-union candidate you should only do so with full knowledge that you also just voted away your right to keep reptiles.  In our current culture of party-line voting you can’t have one without the other.  The decision to cast your vote based on a single issue may mean that you end up supporting things you didn’t intend.  It’s sad.  But that makes it no less true.

So here we have our conundrum.  “Leave us alone” we all shout.  The reptile community does not need regulation.  We don’t need the federal government telling us what kind of pets we can keep and we are sick of the continuous assault on the rights of responsible keepers.    But then about half of us vote for a candidate that is going to support that exact end result.  It’s a lot like giving a gun to the person who just broke into your home.  You let them in, you gave them the weapon and you are still wondering why they used it to hurt you.  Please wake up.

So let me cut to the chase and alienate about half of my readers:  When you vote for a Democrat there is an incredibly strong chance that you simultaneously vote to put an end to reptile ownership in the United States.  If you don’t believe me ask Congressman Bobby Scott (D), Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D), Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schulz (D) or Congressman Thomas Rooney (D).  Animal extremism (which includes fear-based bans on exotic animals) is mostly a party-line issue.  No, it’s not 100%, but it is heavily skewed toward Democrat support.  The fact is that if you voted for Barack Obama in 2008 you supported the creation of the perfect storm that led to the amendment of the Lacey Act in 2012 and if you vote for him again in November 2012 you need to do so knowing that you are supporting four more years of ever-increasing loss of reptile owner rights.  Barack Obama appointed Ken Salazar as the head of the Department of the Interior and it was Salazar that made the Lacey Act amendment happen.  Don’t be naive and think that Salazar did that without Obama’s blessing.  If re-elected I can assure you that Obama and Salazar are not done adding snakes to the Lacey Act and the HSUS is not done trying to use Congress to pass laws that strip you of your rights.  For whatever reason Democrats tend to support the objectives and aims of animal extremist organizations like the Humane Society of the United States.  If you don’t believe this please research which side of the aisle receives the bulk of campaign contributions from the HSUS.  The HSUS doesn’t support candidates that won’t support their agenda.

The decision to vote for a democrat is yours to make, of course.  But if you do please do me a favor:  be quiet about reptile-keeper’s rights.  Stop lamenting the increase in government control over pet ownership.  You condoned it at the ballot box.  Please stop supporting the fight for reptile keeper’s rights.  Do not contribute your money, your words or your time to the cause.  Please do not  give money to USARK, PIJAC or any other organization that claims to support the rights of exotic animal owners.  You are wasting either your money or your vote with your dichotomous actions.  If you vote democrat, please send your money to the HSUS or to Defenders of Wildlife instead.  You are supporting them with your vote so please have the courage of your convictions and support them with your dollars.  And yes, I am being sarcastic when I suggest making a financial contribution to the HSUS.  Every reptile keeper should have both a negative visceral and intellectual reaction at the suggestion to give them a single dollar.  So I can only wonder why the same reaction is not felt when you check the box to elect the candidate who is going support taking your snakes away from you.

Regards,

Colin Weaver

I recently read my daughter a bedtime story (for the 987th time) which centered on a young dragon taken in by Princess Aurora (of Sleeping Beauty fame).  Starting with her husband, Prince Phillip, and continuing with each encounter with the story’s other characters Aurora is met with storybook disdain for her new pet.  The universal reason:  dragons are dangerous.  The dragon, in an effort to fit in, tries to emulate other animals who do not suffer the same unearned contempt.  But dragons are what dragons are and each attempt to be something he is not leads to moments of chaos involving, as you might guess, fire.  It’s not until the end of the story that the dragon comes to terms with what he is and finds a place in the life of the story.
None of the characters in the story offered anecdotal evidence as to why dragons are dangerous; they just knew them to be so.  Lacking direct negative personal experiences with dragons their seemingly innate knowledge must have come from somewhere.  But where? I can only conjure one place:  it was learned.  This learning was not from direct experience, it came from others.  It is second-hand knowledge from somebody else’s second-hand knowledge.  It’s exponential hearsay.  Hearsay isn’t sufficient to garner a conviction in a courtroom but it is happily accepted by people as gospel in many other situations.  So why is it that dragons are always hated in fairy tales?  Well, because somebody said they were dangerous and worthy of hate, that’s why.  Now I have never encountered a dragon in real life.  Despite this I know them to be dangerous.  How?  From a very young age every story I read and every person who shared told me so.  But the people who assured me of their viciousness and ferocity had never met a dragon either.  So how did they know they were dangerous?  Someone else told them, of course.  And I’m thinking it’s a safe bet that those people had also never met a dragon. 
Now, to be fair, I will admit that dragons do have two characteristics that help them earn their reputation:

1. They look mean.  And to borrow from Eddie Murph in Raw, “[a dragon] don’t look like, you know, like he can’t fight. He looks like he can whip some ass, right?”  But looking mean doesn’t make someone mean, does it?  Like Jessica Rabbit said, they are “just drawn that way”.
2. When provoked they actually can wreck stuff.  Having just typed that I wonder if that is really true.  All the wrecking I have seen done by dragons has been done in stories conjured by people who were brought up with the same misinformation that was spread across my impressionable grey matter.

I have witnessed this form of false knowledge exchange first-hand.  When I was young I was terrified of snakes because my parents, who, in my youth, were sources of unwavering truth, told me they were bad and dangerous.  An oft heard quote from my father while growing up was, “The only good snake is a dead snake.”  Unfortunately, there were a handful of times that snakes died because we happened to cross their path.  The memories of those events, which were celebrations at the time, are sad in hindsight.  Had it not been for a few select events during my college years I would still hold an angry fear of reptiles.  Through no intentional effort I was able to break the cycle of fear and see reptiles for what they really are.  The irony of my being a snake breeder having come from a seemingly long line of snake haters is not lost on me or my parents.  My parents, I’m glad to report, have been reformed.  They aren’t snake fans by any stretch but in recent years my father has coaxed a snake or two around his house into a bucket and let them go in the woods a few miles away.

Now let’s consider a recent poll from foxnews.com where the the question was asked, “Should people be allowed to keep exotic animals as house pets?“  As I type the 25,000 or so respondents are split with 45% saying “no” and 44% saying “yes”.  The missing percentage points are people who are otherwise undecided.  I’m a yes-voter, of course, so I am left to wonder why almost half of the respondents said no.  I’m going to wager that the answer can be distilled down to one word:  fear.  Fear, unfortunately, is a very powerful thing.

• Fear is an emotion the inhibits rational thought.
• Fear is a weapon used to manipulate the opinions of others.
• Fear is a barrier to the expansion of knowledge.
• Fear is a motivator that leads to aggression.

People in a state of fear are not open to logical discourse.  I know a woman who is so fearful of snakes that even seeing a snake on TV or snake jewelry causes her to become panicked.  How can I ever hope to have a rational discussion about keeping reptiles as pets with a person like that?  In short, I cannot.

Ours is a culture that has long let fear be the impetus for casting derision on snakes.  From Adam and Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden to Samuel L. Jackson battling it out with Snakes on a Plane snakes have been cast as the sinister enemy that is actively, thoughtfully and intelligently scheming toward your demise.  The fact that someone would want to keep such a malevolent creature as a house pet is, well, unthinkable.  When we look at it that way the fact that only half of the people say that snakes (exotics) shouldn’t be kept as pets is a pretty low number.  As skewed as our culture is toward snakes that number should probably be a good bit higher.

And so here we are, trying to be left alone to keep the animals we choose as pets in the midst of a culture that believes them to be dangerous.  Fear is the fuse and government control is the dynamite.  Animal rights groups (e.g. HSUS) are both the match and accelerant, constantly scheming to ‘start something’ and make it happen quickly.  Dragons!  Dragons!  Run for your life!  Dragons!  They are going to eat your children, kill all of the native wildlife and disrupt the continent’s ecosystem.  They are going to lower your home value, eat your dog and wait in your toilet to bite you at night.  Crazy keepers are going to let them go and marauding groups of snakes will be cruising your neighborhood stealing cars, knocking over mailboxes and spray painting graffiti on fences and bridge overpasses.  And heaven help us all if a snake gets loose on a plane…

Dragons, they are!  Or as close to the real thing as exists.  They are dangerous and dangerous things should not be kept as house pets.  That was the exact message being sent to Princess Aurora in my daughter’s story.  The most vicious barrage from a corn snake or a ball python isn’t going to cost me more than a few drops of blood so I know that snakes are not dragons.    A larger or more aggressive species can do a little bit more damage and are worthy of some additional respect to be sure but anybody who has ever kept snakes (even big ones) knows that I am way out of line to accuse snakes to be in the same danger category as dragons.  But there I go again; accusing dragons of being dangerous despite having never met one…

My own fear of snakes didn’t go away until two things happened.  First, I was removed from the source of information that reinforced that snakes were dangerous (e.g. I left my parents house and went to college) and found myself in an environment where people felt just the opposite.  Second, I mustered the courage to not only be in the same room as the snake but I actually touched and then held one.  And it was then that the wall of fear melted away.  Once my irrational notions had been dispelled I began to see things more clearly.

I can’t force people who have a fear of snakes into a room and make them hold a snake (nobody forced me).  For many that would only intensify their anxiety and push them further from where I would like them to be.  Therapy of this type is likely to only succeed in perpetuating their fear.  And that fear would prevent the rational thought I need them to have to understand that these animals are not dangerous.

It has long been apparent to me that the basis of the efforts to ban or otherwise legislate reptiles is, at a fundamental level, rooted in an exploitation of fear.  Misinformation, intricately intertwined with truth becomes almost indistinguishable; the ability to separate fact from fiction becomes increasingly difficult and clever wordsmiths can get people to agree to things that are in direct contrast to their stated objectives.  Salt the recipe with fear and people will react in very predictable ways.  Our society’s attitudes towards snakes and the recent modification of the Lacey Act are exhibits A and B to this point.

So how does it happen? How does the fear of snakes continue to be perpetuated?  And more importantly, can we do anything about it?  The sources of fear are:

1.  Our parents and teachers.  When I was growing up I remember my mom telling me something to the effect of, “Babies have a natural fear of sudden loud noises, falling and snakes”.  What the…?  How’s that for mixing a lie in with some truth?  The first two seem perfectly valid so the last one, despite any reason why, must also be true.  When you’re five it’s easy to believe and tough to argue with mom.  My mom didn’t have an evil-must-mislead-Colin agenda.  She had a fear that she had carried her whole life and she was imparting that fear to me.  One of the key things that makes humans different from other animals is the ability to pass knowledge to each subsequent generation …even when it’s wrong.

What to do about it?  Not much, really.  People who appreciate snakes for what they can add to their life will impart that same love and wonder to their children.  People who are afraid of snakes will pass that fear on to theirs.  My daughter loves snakes.  From day one they were presented to her as, “look how pretty”, not “Dragon!!!  Run for your life!”  The difference in her attitude compared to her classmates is as stark a contrast as you could see.  I have even found that her teachers are great purveyors of fear, teaching that snakes are bad and “they will bite you”.

2. Hollywood and the media.  In addition to an overwhelming lean to the left, they will say what sells.  Focusing on the things that instill fear is what sells movie tickets and gets people to ‘stay tuned’ through the commercial break.  Forked tongues, eating prey whole, constriction, fangs, venom, slithering, scales, escape, massive size, etc.  All the stuff that makes snakes seem so mean is what they focus on.

What to do about it?  Sadly, there is little we can do.  Buy a television network  if you can.

3.  Reptile keepers.  Huh?  The same people who love being able to own a reptile as a pet are participating in the spreading of fear?  Yup.  How so?  I have more than a thousand pictures and videos of my dogs stored on my computers.  Almost every single one of them is of them doing something cute, funny or otherwise endearing.  I don’t have any pictures or videos of my dog killing a squirrel and eating it.    I don’t have pictures of my dog baring its teeth at the person who knocked on my front door, either.  And even if I did do you know what I would not do?  I would not post them on YouTube or elsewhere on the Internet.  But that is exactly what people do every day with their snakes.   We make videos of our snakes feeding and post them on YouTube for the world to see.  We show videos of fresh blood flowing from our recently bitten hand and we show video after video of them lunging at keeper and camera.   Let me taunt my dog to the point that it is angry, annoyed and fearful enough to bite me.  Better still, let me video it and then post the encounter on YouTube for others to watch.  Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?  Just as stupid as videos of people taunting their snakes to bite them in some body part.

What to do about it?  I should hope it’s obvious.  Stop acting like the media, posting only the things that have shock/coolness value.  That lighting-fast strike and constriction and the scream of the rat is cool and fascinating to you but it’s fodder for other people’s fear.  Stop feeding that fear.  Doing so will help make sure you can keep feeding the thing you really want to feed:  your snake.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

As a ball python breeder I constantly evaluate the best ways to get a maximum return on my investment.  This makes me no different than any other business person, regardless of the choice of profession.  I endeavor to be pragmatic when it comes to expected profitability and I have come to believe that there many ways to do this snake breeding thing right.  Alternately, there at least as many ways to do it wrong.  What’s right and what’s wrong can vary based on circumstance and is often a matter of perspective. If the end result is little more than baby snakes poking their heads out of eggs then I know I am right to say that what’s right and what’s wrong is chock full of opinion and personal preference.  I know this because I have seen too many people be successful using too many variations of what I consider “right”.  Right, in this instance, is grey.  What’s right for me right now may not be so in a year and it may never be right for you.  From feeding to breeding to incubating I have seen a wide range of choices that all lead to success.  What works for you is what you should do.  But therein lies the rub; how to figure out what works without making a lot of costly mistakes along the way.  We learn from each other but we don’t have to completely emulate each other’s techniques and processes.  Ball python breeding is more flexible than many people realize and the grey areas provide a good bit of wiggle room.  Having written that I believe there are certain best practices and principles that, when carefully considered and/or implemented, can put you more on the side of doing things right.  I don’t intend the advice I am about to offer to be anything other than suggestions for your consideration.  I have violated almost all of my own best practices in the past and have little doubt I will do it again in the future.  I endeavor to remain keenly aware of the violations when I make them and I remain fully conscious of the risks and accept, in advance, the consequences.

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, five & 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

As an American I am chronically aware that many of my fellow citizens don’t pay much attention to what is going on in other countries.  By no means is that an across-the-board statement; it’s just something I have made note of in my interactions with others as I travel about the country.  It’s not unusual for Americans to be so unabashedly and ignorantly ethnocentric that they don’t have the slightest idea of what is going in the rest of the world.  Who am I kidding? Many don’t even know what is going on in this country.  Jay Leno is good at pointing this out from time-to-time in his late night talk show antics (and here). Most Americans know that something is going in in Iraq but many don’t realize that Iran is different than Iraq and they certainly don’t know why Israel is so despised by them.  Most of us know that Princess Diana died a while back but don’t know that the recent royal wedding was that of Diana’s son.  And I can almost guarantee that many, if not most, Americans don’t know that owning a gun is pretty much completely illegal for citizens in the United Kingdom.  That’s right.  The only people carrying guns in the UK are the criminals.

I am about as pro-gun as any person can be so I consider it appalling that people in the UK have been stripped of their right to protect their life and property.  Criminals don’t abide by laws so the gun-carrying thief breaking into somebody’s home in the UK must feel pretty confident about his chances; he knows that the odds are in his favor that any opposition he encounters is going to be unarmed.  If a UK citizen owned a gun in defiance of the law and used it against the thief he would be in as much (or more) trouble as the robber.  In the UK, they would both be considered criminals.  I find this to be very, very sad:  defend your family and your property and become a criminal for doing so.  Rest assured that if that same guy broke into my house here in Virginia he would have a six-pack of Coke can sized exit wounds in his back.

But how did guns become illegal in the UK?  Was it done in one fell swoop?  Nope.  It was done in stages, a tactic often used to disarm (literally in this case) the opposing voices.  Despite my pro-gun position I didn’t sit down to write about gun control.  I continue to be concerned with the fate of reptile ownership in the United States.  But the history of gun control in the UK serves as a excellent timeline that illustrates our likely fate unless we get our act together in very short order.  Here’s how things went down in the UK:

• 1988 -  In the wake of the “Hungerford Massacre” the Firearms (Amendment) Act of 1988 was passed.  This law made it illegal to own semi-automatic rifles, pump-action rifles and military weapons that shoot explosives.  The law also implemented registration requirements and a requirement for “secure storage” of allowed shotguns.  Handguns (pistols) were not impacted at all by this law.
• 1997 – In the wake of the “Dublane Massacre” ownership of almost all handguns was banned.  One of the key selling points of the law was that a very limited number of people would be impacted (fewer than 1 in 1,000).
• 2006 – The Violent Crime Reduction Act was passed and this made it illegal to buy/sell air weapons by mail order.  This includes things like Airsoft guns.  Yep, in the UK it is even illegal to own a fake gun because it looks too much like a real gun.  Hilarious.  Tragic.  Sad.

The path from there to here was implemented through a simple concept:  divide and conquer.  In the late 1980′s UK pistol owners were apathetic about the proposed ban on rifles because it didn’t affect them.  “Why should I care if they ban shotguns?”, they said.  “I only keep pistols and bolt-action rifles.”  In an act of self-preservation they stayed silent, letting their rifle-owning neighbors have their rights extracted through the legislative process.  Those same people who thought they were safe found their rights removed less than a decade later.  The politicians who pushed this law through the UK’s legal system were smart to leave pistol owners out of the fight in 1988.  Attacking the whole gun-owning population of the UK would have been tantamount to the Humane Society of the United States trying to make pet dogs illegal in the wake of an escaped Nile Monitor killing someone’s Terrier.  Patient and resolute the anti-gun movement capitalized on high-profile tragedies to further their agenda.  Baby steps.  Little-by-little they got it done.  And look at the UK now…

Now let’s turn our attention to things here in the USA.  Large constrictors are under attack.  Most of us know that.  And many bearded dragon breeders, ball python breeders, corn snake breeders and leopard gecko breeders could care less.  Why?  Because they don’t keep large constrictors, of course.  That should sound eerily similar to the same apathetic mindset held by UK pistol owners back in 1988.  And look what happened to them less than a decade later.  Every time there is an isolated incident in the exotic animal community the anti-pet movement gains a little more traction to push through another limiting piece of legislation.  Whether it is done state-by-state, the Lacey Act or through the federal law making process, they are as patient and as resolute as the anti-gun zealots in the UK were.

I know how the end of reptile ownership is going to happen.  If we continue on our current path it will mirror what happened in the UK.  The voices of opposition in the UK screamed, “you can’t legislate a madman”, meaning that a ban on firearms would not stop the next massacre from happening.  If someone wants to get a gun and go on a shooting spree it will happen.  No law is going to prevent that.  My screams as a reptile owner have been of a similar vein.  I oppose any legal limitations on the rights of responsible pet owners.  No matter how responsible a pet owner I am there will always be someone out there who is not.  That person will do something stupid and my rights will be removed as a result.

But why?  Why do the actions of a few lead to restrictions on the many?  The answer is simple:  Legislation is a bludgeon tool.  It lacks finesse.  Laws have not, can not and will not deal with subtlety and nuance.  They are a widely cast net that frequently catches huge numbers of unintended victims.  I have already heard it said.  “Our inspectors are not trained tell the difference between a Burmese python and a Boa Constrictor so the most simple course of action is to ban them both.”  If that’s the case then how would a local law enforcement official tell the difference between a blood python and a burmese python?  Simple: He can’t.  Well, we better ban blood pythons too …just to be safe.  And when the time comes to ban ball pythons you can rest assured that Angolan pythons will be thrown out with them.  They look too similar.  And so it will happen; our compartmentalized herpetocultural community will fall in small group after small group.  And each group will remain silent as the others are attacked.  It will probably take the next decade or two to happen but the writing is on the wall.  The anti-pet movement is more than ready to wait us out and I have not seen evidence of the community having the stomach for a long fight.

Is there an alternative to legislation?  Yes!  It’s called self-regulation.  And this is where there is a fundamental divide within society.  Proponents of large government believe that it is the government’s responsibility to take action to provide for and protect its citizens.  Supporters of small government believe that protection is indeed the government’s responsibility but ‘providing’ is the realm of private industry and government should stay out of it.  The government should not regulate the commercial interaction between provider and consumer.  In a system of self-regulation the industry controls itself from within; it’s a commercial ecosystem that has its balance upset when the dirty fingers of legislation are inserted.  Whether we are talking about banking, exotic animals or pharmaceuticals the concept is the same; the industry regulates itself and acts in a responsible manner, no government intervention needed.  In the end the consumer is the real regulator because it is only where there is mutual benefit in a transaction that the transaction can take place.  Even though I would rather not pay $130/month for my iPhone I still do because I find value in the trade.  If my iPhone bill were to double to $260 I would no longer see the value and I would discontinue my service.  The provider is always going to push the edge of course; they are a for-profit entity and will always work to get as much as they possibly can without pushing me past the limits of my perceived value.  In this delicate balance between consumer and provider we don’t need the government to come in and control mobile phone price plans.  Doing so screws up the natural balance of commerce.

When an industry fails to self-regulate it provides a powerful foothold for the supporters of government regulation (banking and health care come to mind here).  And that is where we are today in the reptile world.  There is no shortage of idiocy in the reptile trade.  Someone out there is not securely keeping their reticulated python or rhino viper.  Another guy is selling Burmese pythons and eyelash vipers to 14-year old kids at a trade show.  And let’s not forget the guy who is keeping hundreds of snakes in horrible filth with no food, water or climate control.  None of these people are you, right?  Of course not.  It always seems to be someone else that is screwing things up for the hobby.  The problem is that the consumer:provider mechanism for self-regulation is seemingly absent.  The only thing an individual can do is take care of his/her own business; keep their animals secure, well-fed, watered and in a suitable climate.  They cannot control what another keeper is doing.  This appears to suggest that government regulation is a viable solution, doesn’t it?  Without changing what we do as a community, the answer, unfortunately is ‘yes’.  The ability to own a reptile in the United States will not survive if we stay on our current path.

But how do we self-regulate?  This is a tough question.  As a person purchasing a green anaconda I know what my responsibilities are.  But what about the seller?  It would seem like a no-brainer to say that a person would not sell a baby anaconda to a minor but that has been proved wrong more than once.  Should the seller take steps to make sure the person buying is fully prepared to responsibly undertake the long-term ownership of the animal?  Is that realistic?  No, it’s not.  The retail community doesn’t support it.  If I put somebody through a gauntlet of questions before selling them a green anaconda at a trade show they are just going to go to another table and buy it from the wholesaler who picked up a 20-lot of them earlier that day and could care about nothing other than their method of payment.  The long-term impact:  I am not economically viable and another person owns a green anaconda that is doomed to get sick and die …but not before it escapes a few times because he thinks that putting a book on the screen top of his aquarium is going to keep the snake from pushing its way out.  Because the community is unable to regulate itself it is primed and ready for government intervention.

Reptile community self-regulation seems viable only if there is widespread individual self-regulation and this illustrates the “you can’t regulate a madman” problem.  The reptile community is too large and too diverse in both number and intelligence for there to be any realistic chance to self-regulate.  Aside from “lock in a sock” forms of keeper-on-keeper physical violence I don’t know what the answer is.  But I do know that if things don’t change we are going to start losing our rights at an ever-increasing rate.  And the only people we can truly blame when its over will be ourselves.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

“Do something awesome …something amazing.”

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

The Humane Society of the United States has at least one (that I know of) full-time employee whose sole function is to communicate the organization’s message using social media.  That’s it!  Be an evangelist for the cause using the constantly evolving Internet as a tool.  The existence of that job represents their commitment to reaching out to a whole new generation of people.  They also have an entire division (attorney’s included) focused exclusively on advancing their agenda through the courts. Now think about how many people work for your favorite pet owner advocacy group.  I’ll guess ten.  A dozen, maybe.  Fifty, tops.  I often wonder how many hats people in those organizations must have to wear and how effective they can be when constantly switching back and forth between roles.

The HSUS, PETA, Defenders of Wildlife and other radical animal extremist organizations like them are large, well-funded, well-organized and, most of all, driven by a common goal that is kept on track through its leaders.  Most of them have been around for a long time and have had plenty of opportunity to create a solid base from which to operate.  Their leadership consists of affable personalities who focus exclusively on their agenda.  As much as I dislike his message, Wayne Pacelle is doing a lot of things right to further his organization’s agenda.  Don’t get me wrong, though.  I despise his ideas.  His organization is one of the worst things to ever happen to animals and their responsible owners.  But he believes them and he is focused on seeing them become a reality.  While his beliefs are dangerous to every responsible pet owner it is his ability to get others to also believe that makes him the threat that he is.  It’s his leadership and the orchestration of the teams of people behind him that makes him dangerous to pet owners of every kind.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the advocates of responsible pet ownership are woefully inadequate by comparison.  The leaders of the organization’s that trumpet our causes are largely invisible and unknown to a world that needs to hear them.  The longer we go without comparable focus, cohesion and leadership the closer the country will move toward HSUS’ goal of ending pet ownership for everyone.

The HSUS expertly uses lies and misinformation to extract almost $200 million each year from a misled American public.  Their benevolent sounding name is the cornerstone of their fantastic lie and they have a sympathetic media and most of the Democratic party on their side.  If a single pet-ownership advocacy group has 15,000 members who give $50/year they will still only have $750,000 in revenue.  Who would you like to bet on?  An organization running on a shoestring budget with a react-only game-plan or the financially successful and laser-focused machine with educated and articulate leaders orchestrating the attack from multiple fronts?  It’s not really a competition, is it?

The target of interest for both sides of this fight is the pet.  Animal extremists want to ‘protect’ animals by putting an end to pet ownership.  They believe that the very best way to protect animals is for them to not exist as pets.  Extremists attack the exceptions to the majority of us who properly care for and respect our animals.  They use the sensational as ammunition to push their agenda and feel justified in limiting the rights of everybody in order to address the irresponsible few.  They twist facts, perpetuate irrational fear and wordsmith information in order to lead people to false conclusions.  And they are good at it.  In contrast, pet owners just want to be left alone to enjoy their pets.  This means that most pet owners have not sufficiently developed a fighter’s mentality.  They are standing unwillingly in the ring, hands down, being punched repeatedly in the face by the animal extremism juggernaut.  And they take it, punch after punch, reeling with each blow.  Without money, leadership, better organization, and well-marshalled volunteerism, the eventual fate of the pet owner seems obvious.

To all the responsible pet ownership groups out there:  Do a better job of leveraging your support base.  Don’t just ask them for their money; ask them for their time and their skill.  There is an army of responsible pet owners out there.

And to all the responsible pet owners out there:  Pick a group to support.  Reach out to them.  Give them money if you want to; no doubt they need it.  But you also need tell them your skill and let them know you want to help support the rights of pet owners with more than just money.  For now, be willing to give your time freely, in support of the cause.  It is quite probable that your payment  will never be money.  It will come in the form of your right, and your kid’s right, to keep the pet of your choosing.  That’s worth a lot more than money, don’t you think?

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

I have more than a few opinions in support of for-profit animal husbandry.  On many occasions I have shared some of those opinions in the blog posts and articles I write. And as you might expect I receive a lot of comments.  Most of them are emailed directly to me and most of them are decidedly supportive.   But sometimes people come after me with varying levels of aggression and disdain for what I do.  Some dislike my love of capitalism and attack me for charging more than $20 for any ball python I produce.   They suggest that all ball pythons, even the incredibly rare and difficult to produce multi-gene morphs, should be available to everybody regardless of their ability to afford one.  “Unto each according to their need“, is the message buried in their words.  Intentionally twisting Karl Marx’s inane words I respond by saying, “No.  Unto each according to their ability.”  Other people have attacked me for my blatant hatred of animal extremists who seek to advance irrational legislation through misinformation and fear.  I generally write these people off as being confused.  They have to be.  How else could they be in support of such silliness?  And others have launched verbal assaults that label me an abusive animal exploiter who mistreats animals for personal gain.  I suspect that most of the latter would also attack me for killing the mosquito that bites my ankle.  The latest email insinuating that I was a person of low character for keeping and breeding snakes came a few days ago when I received a seemingly benevolent email from a someone named Casie.  In her email she wrote:

At the time of her email, Casymay’s included link to Petfinder.com, a national registry whose purpose is to re-home animals currently residing in shelters, contained a whopping 34 pythons, six of which were listed as being in Canada.  Both amused and annoyed by her email, and without knowing anything else about the sender,  I sent the following curt response:

Casey didn’t reply back.  Should human procreation be put on hold until all the world’s orphaned kids get homes?  Would Casey subscribe to that suggestion, too?  In order to see if I could learn a little more about the person who disproved of my actions I decided to do a quick Google search for Casie’s email address.  That search led me to another page where her profile suggests that she is 14 years old.  This realization changed the paradigm with which I had viewed her question.  Young people, many of whom have parents that have unknowingly let them watch too much thinly-veiled animal and environmental extremism in the form of Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go, are filled with a legitimate yet often misguided desire to help animals.  I am confident that this young woman’s intentions are pure; why would someone buy an animal when perfectly good one’s are available for adoption and, better still, why would someone intentionally make more when the same conditions remain true?  Those seem like honest questions and legitimate concerns.  And with many more orders of magnitude these questions are also portable to dogs and cats.

Nobody can argue that there are animals in this world that are abused, abandoned and irresponsibly cast aside.  One good thing about them is that they get people’s attention.  But that’s also a bad thing for the majority of animals that are on the other side.  You know, the one’s that have caring and considerate owners who give their companions the very best in care.  They provide excellent nutrition, a warm and comfortable place to sleep, companionship and prompt and regular medical care.  But those animals are so incredibly uninteresting.  Video of my dog sleeping happily next to me on the sofa isn’t going to help the Humane Society of the United States get any donations.  It also makes for a very boring storyline for Diego and Dora.  The evening news reporting on the secure, healthy and otherwise happy black throat monitor living over on Scenic Avenue isn’t very interesting either.  You see, there’s no money and no story in the animals that are well cared for.  No sound bite, nothing to tweet about and nothing to go viral on YouTube.  Instead we dig for and find the 34 pythons that have lost their homes for who knows what reason and focus on them.  Their plight is evidence enough for young Casie that a breeder like me is in the wrong; that I am the one who is perpetuating the abandonment of more pythons later down the line.  Casie seems to be suggesting that the best solution is to bring captive breeding to a halt because a tiny minority have not received proper care.  I do not share her opinion.

To rescue from a shelter or to buy from a breeder, that seems to be a recurring topic of discussion in the pet world.  I have a friend whose opinions, perspectives and insights on this topic are often different than mine.  She sees the world through the eyes of someone who works in a shelter and has repeatedly seen the tragic end-result of animals, mostly dogs and cats, that are dumped by incapable or otherwise irresponsible owners.  She regularly sees, first-hand, how some people obtain and dispose of living things with callous whimsy.  The animals dumped on the doorstep of her shelter are victims and the perpetrators simply drive away, hands washed of an inconvenience that has a heartbeat.  Those experiences have steeled the resolve she has on her opinions and I know that there is nothing I can ever say that will change her mind.  In a recent exchange of emails she and I had another friendly debate/discussion on buying dogs versus rescuing dogs.  She was uninspired by my reasons for leaning toward a respectable dog breeder rather than a rescue for my next dog.  One of her arguments was that “puppies suck”.  She suggested that a one year old rescue would likely be house trained, past the chewing stage, able to be left alone, have its shots, etc.  And you know what?  She is 100% accurate in all of those things and when looked at from such a pragmatic point of view I might buy into her assertion.  But using the same empirical logic I know another thing that sucks when young:  human children.  They pee and poop on themselves for the first two years or so.  They vomit with some consistency and at incredibly inopportune times.  They can’t talk and, even after months of interaction, can’t communicate their wants with any consistency.  They make loud noises, don’t sleep through the night, cost a ton of money and disrupt virtually every other aspect of your existence.  As a parent, the logical approach is to say screw it and avoid taking the ‘puppy route’ when expanding the family; we should all rescue 18-year old college students who have full scholarships at Virginia Tech.  They won’t cost as much and, despite their tendency to abuse alcohol on the weekends, are almost certainly potty-trained.  Someone else has already taught them the basics and their vaccinations are sure to be up-to-date.

I hope that sounds as silly to you as it does to me.  Almost every parent on this planet knows that there is no way they would ever trade a day of their child’s youth.  Despite sometimes being dirty, stinky, and inconvenient, they are incredibly rewarding.  But it’s not the dirty diaper that makes it so wonderful; it’s the relationship that is formed in the process.  And it’s that relationship that makes everything else so worth it and so wonderful.  And for me, having the puppy equivalent of that relationship with the exact breed and provenance I want is my prerogative.  The rescue animal may work for many people but it does not work for all people.  I respect my neighbors decision to adopt a dog from the local shelter and do not cast derision upon him for doing so.  So why does it happen in reverse?  Why do animal rights advocates throw scornful glances my way for buying rather than adopting?  There are many reasons, I suppose.  But one of them is not as plain to see.  There is a pervasive idea growing in our society that suggests that the less fortunate and otherwise downtrodden are not just worthy of the capacity of the more fortunate; they deserve it.  Those who ‘have’ should be compelled to give what they have to those who do not.  If you have more money you should pay more taxes.  If you come in first place you should share your glory with those who came in 2nd, 3rd and, increasingly, even last.  Nobody should be allowed to be better than anybody else because that’s not fair.  You should work harder so you can give more to others.  You shouldn’t get the puppy (or snake) you want when there are other animals who need your capacity.  You should give up your desire to have your needs satisfied in order to satisfy the needs of someone (or something) less fortunate.  “I really want a Weimaraner puppy,” you say.  “But I can’t get what I want when there are mix-breed puppies at the shelter who need homes.  Their need for a home is greater than my need for the breed that makes me happy.”  Under this illusion, the so-called ‘greater good’ trumps any need of any individual.  This notion, which is both a centerpiece and a rallying cry of the liberal mentality, is so perverted and wrong to me that I struggle to think that another person could arrive at the conclusion.  But reason is not automatic and logic is not always appropriately applied.   I do not subscribe to the notion that the “greater good”  supersedes my needs as an individual.  I believe that I need to take care of and be responsible for myself and my family.  I do not live a life where the benefit of others comes before the benefit of my family.  I know there are many who will disagree with me but I’m impervious.  If you do disagree with me do you know what I am to you?  I’m one less person with their hand out, asking you to freely give me the product of your efforts.   And these ideas are far from new.  The first time I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand I was floored to see that she was writing about the same issues in the 1950′s.

Whether it’s dogs or snakes I support the rights of the breeder to create a ‘product’ that is demanded by the buyer.  So long as there is a market for snakes I will produce and sell them.  Moreso, I support the decision of each buyer (or adopter, as the case may be).  If you want to buy an animal because it is the exact animal you want, do it and feel good about it.  If adopting/rescuing makes you happy, rock on!  But do not think negatively of someone who chooses differently than you.

So here is why I breed (and why I do not):

• I breed snakes because I find them beautiful and enigmatic.
• I breed snakes to financially benefit me and my family.  I do not breed snakes in order to benefit others.
• I breed snakes because I believe in an individual’s ability to choose the animal, regardless of what it is or where it came from, that makes them happy.
• I breed because there is a demand for the animals I have the capacity to produce.
• I breed the animals I choose because they satisfy a need I have.  People who see value in the animals I produce and who have a need, will buy one.  Nobody is compelled to buy from me just as nobody is (and never should be) compelled to pick an animal from a shelter.
• I do not abstain from breeding because someone out there has abandoned their snake.
• I do not abstain from breeding because some people do not practice good husbandry.  I breed because most people do.  I do not tailor my actions to address the shortcomings of the lowest common denominator.

I do not encourage people to adopt simply because an animal has a need.  I encourage people to buy or adopt in direct accordance with their own needs.  If purchasing an animal meets your specific need, open your wallet (or purse).  If adopting does the same, drive to the shelter.  But do not give up on your needs simply because someone else appears to be more needy than you.  And while it may make you feel good inside there is no absolution in sacrificing yourself to the want and needs of others.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

As I type my 40th birthday is barely two years away.  And I don’t know if it’s my age combined with the times or if it’s the times by themselves but over the past few years I have become keenly aware of a rapidly increasing divide between the people of the United States.  I know, I know, every generation laments the passing of the ‘good ol’ days’ and things were always better yesteryear.  Time has that sort of scrubbing effect; it distorts the very perception of our own hindsight.  But I sense that what is happening now is something more dark and angry.  The happy-go-lucky naivety of my youth has passed.

The current state of affairs is that we can break the thinking people in our society into two general groups of people:  liberals and conservatives (some people may prefer ‘statist’ and ‘libertarian’).  There are many reasons why liberals and conservatives are different but sometimes they are actually in agreement on a particular thing that needs to be accomplished.  This agreement is only on the surface, though.  The devil is in the details.
Suppose for instance that you are sitting in a cold house and would like to get warm.  The liberal tells you to turn on the heat while the conservative suggests that you wrap yourself with a down comforter.  They are both describing a way to achieve an end result but their opinions on how to get there are quite different.  You, the cold person, are being sold two different approaches to satisfy your need and both seem to be genuine and sincere in their desire to address it.  But if you aren’t paying attention you will miss the larger picture; the reason those two methods are being offered is that they represent some aspect of a larger agenda and there is a good chance that neither of them really care about your warmth.  For example, the liberal may tell you that heating the whole house is the best way because it gives everybody in the house an equal ability to be warm; nobody is made to be warmer or colder than anybody else.  The conservative tells you that the down comforter is more appropriate because it is cheaper and the ability of an individual to achieve warmth is directly related to how well they wrap themselves.  How each came to the conclusion that their way of warming cold bodies was the right way could be rooted in their life experiences and upbringing or it could be that they are being directed by less often seen third parties: lobbyists.  The liberal receives large campaign contributions from the HVAC Worker’s Union and the conservative is being backed by the IAIDP, the International Association for the Infiltration of Down-Containing Products.  Once this realization is made we can begin to understand that making people warm is secondary to the way in which people are made warm.  Everybody has an agenda; something to accomplish.

The treatment of pet owners and the reptile trade is no different.  In general politicians aren’t concerned about snakes; special interest groups are.  Each side of the argument has found a sympathetic ear in the form of the liberal and the conservative.  Sweet nothings have been whispered, campaign contributions have been made and like Rock Em’ Sock Em’ Robots the politicians have been put into the ring, punching and jabbing and all the while it’s special interests (like the HSUS) who are pushing the buttons.

The HSUS and other animal extremists made a brilliant move in 2010 when they decided to temporarily de-emphasize the law-making process.  They performed an end-around by using the USGS’ biased report on large constrictors as a means to get the Department of the Interior to add the nine constrictors to the list of injurious species in the Lacey Act.  And, considering the outcome of the 2010 mid-term elections,  what a brilliant move it was.  They didn’t need any members of Congress to take this path.  All they needed was a liberal in the Oval Office to appoint a liberal to head the Department of the Interior.  Now the decision is no longer up to “the people”; it is now in the hands of an impossibly small few within the Department of the Interior.  And one of the biggest ways it is being sold:  fear.  I have heard politicians and other bureaucrats say, over and over, that one of the reasons that large constrictors need to be controlled is because of a “threat to public safety”.  In 2010 I sat in a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee and listened to Florida House Representative Thomas Rooney (a Democrat) read a statement that said exactly that.  But it’s a big lie.  Large constrictors are not a public health concern; they pose an impossibly small risk to humans.  Your odds of being killed by a large constrictor are about 1 in 584 million.  For a little bit of perspective on how that compares with other ways to die please read this post I made about the odds of being killed by a python.

The other big argument for controlling pythons is the environment.  The USGS’ horribly biased, self-serving and repeatedly debunked report (here, here, here and here for starters) on nine large constrictors paints a picture of these snakes taking over much of the country.  The reality is that they pose a risk to southern Florida at best.  And in all seriousness, if pythons and boas are such an invasive species why are only the large one’s being targeted in these attacks?  Invasive is invasive, regardless of size.  The real answer is simple.  They are easier targets because they prey on people’s  fear.  Many people have an irrational and media perpetuated fear of snakes.  And big snakes, one’s that can eat big things are worthy of additional fear.  The truth is that laws have been proposed and the Lacey Act is about to be amended because of fear.  Not public safety, not the environment.  Just fear.  And it’s such an easy sell.  Imagine a reporter walking up to you and saying, “Do you want giant, man-eating pythons living in your back yard where your children play?”  Who in their right mind would answer anything other than no to such a leading question?

So is it really possible for a government to legislate based on fear?  Sadly, yes.  As evidence of such efforts let me direct your attention to a seemingly unrelated topic:  guns in schools.  If you were to ask every American whether or not it was OK for children to take guns to school you would find that 99.999% are in agreement that it is not.  And in 1990 Congress passed a law that said exactly that.  The Gun-Free School Zone Act of 1990 made it a federal crime for anyone other than law enforcement to take a gun onto school property.  I am VERY pro-gun and I completely support the idea at work; no guns in schools.  Well, not long after being enacted the law was challenged in the courts.  And in 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court shocked everybody when they agreed, striking down the law as unconstitutional.  The attorney’s for the federal government had argued that the law was valid under what is called the Commerce Clause in the Constitution.  Their primary argument was that Congress was within it’s legislative authority because the presence of guns in schools would lead to people being fearful and being fearful would lead to an environment less conducive to learning.  Without quality education people would be less prepared to be economically productive and this would significantly impact interstate commerce.  And Congress does have the ability to legislate interstate commerce.  Now I don’t want guns in schools any more than any other sane American but the crux of the government’s argument was that they could legislate the People because something might cause someone to be afraid.  And if they could ban guns in schools because of fear what other aspects of a persons life can they control using fear as the justification?  To say this is a slippery slope is an unprecedented understatement.  The Supreme Court vote was 5-4.  One vote in the other direction and legislative branch would have been given the power to legislate based on fear.  Please note that there is more to the case (United States v. Lopez) and the rational of the Justice’s decisions.  Please take some time to read about it yourself.

So is it now legal to carry guns in schools?  Nope.  Was it a decision made by the states?  Nope.  It is a federal law.  But how?  The Supreme Court said the law was unconstitutional.  Well, some smart lawyers and politicians revisited the original wording of the bill that Congress passed, changed its language and reintroduced it.  Let’s call what they did what it really is:  they twisted the wording to make the Constitution work for more federal power.  In the re-worded bill they made it a crime to take any gun onto school grounds if that gun had been involved in interstate commerce.  The manufacturing of a gun involves a lot of individual pieces, most of which came across one state line or another.  By linking the desired result (no guns in schools) to ‘things’ used in interstate commerce the re-worded bill was passed by Congress and, though not yet taken up by the Supreme Court, has withstood Constitutional challenges in lower courts.  Despite my support for the end result, the mechanism used to achieve it scares the hell out of me.

It should go without saying that I am glad that guns are not allowed in schools.  Am I glad that the federal government passed a law for it?  Not particularly, no.  I think the states could have handled it on their own and I am quite confident that each state would have done so.  Even though the end result of this decision was a good one it should serve as a scary reminder for every citizen that the federal government can potentially control every aspect of your life if they can correctly wordsmith a bill in Congress to link it to one of their enumerated powers.  And the commerce clause (in conjunction with the “necessary and proper” clause) has been repeatedly used to expand the federal government’s power over the states.  And today the fate of much of the reptile trade hangs in the balance.  Whether through Congress or the Lacey Act the federal government is poised to leverage fear in order to control the interstate transport of a ‘thing’ (a snake).  States should decide which reptiles are allowed in their communities, not the federal government.  Once something becomes federal law it binds us all; there is nowhere to go to be free of it.  It suffocates.  If Florida wants to ban the ownership of Burmese pythons, let that state’s citizens decide to do so.  But geographically speaking, Minnesota is a different planet than Florida.  Minnesotans don’t need the same protections when it comes to such concerns.

Regards,

Colin Weaver

Shipping reptiles is part of the business.  Though we are many in number we are often far apart and it is a frequent occurrence that the person who has the snake you want lives somewhere other than across town.  And so we ship.  And it’s expensive.  From FedEx to UPS to Delta Dash there is no inexpensive way to do it.  And because it is expensive it is often a point of negotiation in a sale.  Everybody wants the best deal possible when buying a reptile, myself included.  “Give me the very best animal for the lowest price …shipped”, they say.  And so the negotiation begins.

On higher dollar snake purchases it is easier for the seller to absorb the cost of shipping (within the United States).  A normal ball python that weighs 500 grams costs just as much to ship as a 500 gram panda pied ball python.  It is almost a foregone conclusion that more expensive snakes yield higher profits for the seller.  And for this reason many sellers usually agree to pay the shipping when the dollar amount hits a certain point.  For example, I pay shipping when a deal totals more than $1,000.  For multi-thousand dollar deals it is often not even discussed, it becomes a service included in the sale.

Because I produce 99% of what I sell I am personally invested in the animal being shipped.  I have a lot of time, energy and money invested in the production of my animals so I am powerfully motivated to not have something bad happen to them on the night they travel to their new home.  For this reason (and because I don’t ship every day) I always take my animals directly to the shipper’s hub in my city.  It’s about 20 miles each way (mostly highway miles) and it is usually a special trip made in the early evening.  I do this to minimize the amount of time the animals will be exposed to sub-optimal conditions and temperatures.

So how much does shipping really cost?  Well, it’s more than just the shipper’s fees (FedEx, UPS, etc.).  Depending on how large a breeder you are, where your animals are kept and a variety of other factors you will have different costs associate with shipping.  Some people have daily pickup’s scheduled with FedEx while others drive their animals to a local shipping drop-off.

In order to know how much it is really costing to ship that box you have to look at all of the associated costs.  And here they are:

1. Shipping material costs (insulated boxes, snake bags, deli cups, heat/cold packs, etc.)
2. Travel costs to shipper drop-off location (or pickup fees)
3. Actual shipper charges to forward the box the the recipient
4. Payroll costs (time spent generating paperwork, building boxes, packing animal, etc.)

Reptile Shipping Calculator

Click here to download a free excel spreadsheet that will let you put in your own numbers so you can calculate your actual reptile shipping costs.

After factoring in all of the ancillary expenses I find that it costs me around $75 to ship a single 12x9x6 box. (assuming the shipper fee is $45).  There are a lot of factors that can make this number go up or down (box size & weight, distance being shipped, other shipments being processed at the same time, whether you process your shipments on-line, etc.).  The larger you get the more careful attention to you need to pay to managing these costs and implementing efficiency improvements when possible.

There have been times in the past when I posted a snake on-line for, say, $250 plus shipping.  And it happens without fail that I get calls, texts and emails asking me if I will do “$175 shipped”.  Knowing that it is going to cost me almost $75 to ship the animal what the person is really asking me is to do is to sell the snake for $100.  If a buyer was face-to-face with me at a trade show I doubt he would try to negotiate a $250 animal down to $100 (it wouldn’t go well) so it’s borderline confusing to me that it happens on-line.  To those kinds of price offers I usually nicely decline.  I’m sure there have been times when I didn’t even respond.

In the end we are the same as when we started:  we all want to get the best deal we can.  I respect that because it’s what I also want.  But as a person who spends an almost equal amount of time as the buyer and the seller of reptiles I am keenly aware of what is (or is not) being absorbed by each side during a transaction.  When I spend a few thousand dollars with a fellow breeder, I expect him or her to pay the shipping.  But no matter if I’m the buyer or the seller, if the deal is only a few hundred dollars, buyers should expect to pay shipping (even when it’s me).  Keep that in mind the next time you make an offer on a snake you see on-line.  You are more likely to make an offer that is agreeable to the seller when you take time to appreciate and respect the fact that there are a lot of costs associated with selling reptiles.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

P.S. – A few notes:

• FedEx charges a $15 pickup fee unless you have pickup service with your FedEx account.  If you ship regularly you can schedule a weekly pickup for less than $15/week.  I personally don’t like the idea of pickup service because my animals have to spend the remainder of the day riding in the driver’s truck before ever getting back to the dispatch office.  I know they will probably be fine but I don’t like the idea of it.
• Recycling old shipping boxes, deli cups and bags is a great way to save money.
• You can change your policy to state that you only ship one day per week in order to minimize the costs associated with driving to the shipper’s drop-off location.

Last year, amongst many other things, I bred a ghost mojave to a 100% het ghost black pastel spider (black bee).  Sounds like a cool pairing, right?  To my knowledge the ghost mojave black bee hasn’t been produced yet and I was gunning to be the first.  With eight eggs in the incubator I was feeling optimistic; all I needed was a little love from the Odds Gods and I would hit on something amazing to share with the world.  I watched with hopeful anticipation as the eggs finally pipped.  And like a popped water balloon I felt the excitement rushing out of my body as I checked the contents of each egg.  Disappointment.  Disappointment.  Disappointment.  To say that I got murdered on the odds was a bit of an understatement.  But I didn’t just miss on the ghost mojave black bee.  The clutch didn’t produce a single ghost black bee, honey bee, ghost mojave, ghost black pastel, black bee, black pastel or spider.  The clutch yielded a few regular ghosts, a mojave het ghost, some normal hets and a single female mojave black pastel het ghost.  ‘Brutal’ is the only word I can think to describe my treatment by the odds.  As clutches go, it was an epic fail.

I’m pretty much over it now, of course, but I was feeling pretty picked-on that day.  Missing so badly on the odds was one thing but I rubbed salt in my own wounds when I thought about the time, money and effort I had put into the parents; both of which I had raised from hatchlings.  All I could think about was how financially invested I was and how the production yielded nothing better than I could have made with a much less genetically impressive pairing.  For this clutch I was producing at a level that was genetically many seasons earlier than where I should have been.  With money on the line, that’s a tough pill to swallow.

Misses like this one are a seasonal reminder that ball python breeding is packed full of randomness and chance.  When you swing for the fences you run the risk of striking out.  And I’m doing it again this season.  I have pairings that have the potential to make some truly amazing things …if I can hit on the odds.  But when I hit on something big I’m notorious for holding it back; very little of my highest-end production makes its way into the collections of others.  Yes, sir!  I’m a morph hoarder.  And every year I rely on a lot of  luck to take me to the next level.  Luck, unfortunately, is a fickle friend.

Producing something next-level is a relative thing.  The animals that I am lamenting missing on today will be commonplace in the near future.  Perspective is important.  But lately I have been contemplating the intelligence of trying to hit on long odds.  The wisdom behind the answer to my contemplations can only be had after-the-fact, when I am  looking at the results of my production.  My decision will be interpreted as shrewd if I meet or beat what the Punnett Square suggests.  When I miss on the odds I can’t do anything other than think that I chose poorly.  But why did I try for such long odds in the first place?  Three reasons:

1. To make money
2. To take my collection to the next level.
3. I can’t afford to buy the super-crazy, cutting edge, designer morphs.

If I produce something amazing there is a pretty good chance that it will become a permanent resident in my collection, something I plan to use in the future to take me to even higher levels.  I’m using genetic luck to kite myself to ever higher heights.  The fact that I keep the coolest stuff I produce means that I am letting the betterment of my collection trump my desire to make money.

I’m starting to think that I shouldn’t be doing it this way.  As time goes by I am beginning to realize that it’s not smart business to try a hit tiny sweet spots and incredibly long odds.  This is especially true considering my admission that I’m just going to keep the best of the best that I produce.  The more intelligent bet is to re-align my pairing strategy to maximize the production of genetically less impressive (and statistically easier to produce) animals.  I wouldn’t produce much in the way of super-amazing combinations but I would produce a lot of moderately-priced, easy-to-sell, animals.  And if you don’t already know, it is fairly easy to sell lots of animals that are $1,000 and under before you sell a single $3,000+ animal.  The pool of buyers increases many-fold when the price falls to a certain point (usually under $1K).  This means that if I stop trying to go next level on every pairing and start trying to maximize lower-end morph production I will have many more babies to sell …and then I can buy the super-crazy morph from someone else who did take the chance.  Let someone else swing for the fence …and miss.  But I’ll be there, with cash in-hand, when they hit.  Let them be the one’s who count on long odds while I  produce lower-end animals in greater quantity, sell them easily and quickly find myself with all the cash I need to buy the morphs I covet.  I can sidestep the brutality of the odds, letting somebody else take all of the risk; I lose nothing when they miss and stand to gain when they hit.  There are plenty of people out there who are trying to hit on long odds.  Most of them will miss.  But some will hit on something silly-cool.  They took the risk, not me.  And by not even trying to do it I am guaranteeing that I won’t be one of the disappointed many that misses on them.  But, because I have so much desirable and affordable production to sell, I can safely conjure the cash (or trade) to make their animal my reality.  And the best part is that it’s still a win/win; everybody makes money.  I’m just doing more to guarantee mine.

This all makes a lot of financial sense.  But in the end I’m not sure I can do it.  The desire to make something cool, despite how painful it is when I miss, is a really tantalizing lure.  It frequently overrides my desire to make money.  I guess that means that this is more than just a business to me.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver