Not really a tough question, I suspect. Money in-hand is tangible and usable; it represents capability. In order for me to convince you to wait for money in the future it has to be more than what you can have today. But how much more? If the offer was $5,000 today or $5,200 in four years I feel pretty confident that you would still reject the deal and opt for today as the payday. The capacity for progress created by having money in hand will trump the promise of a meager future return.  What the exact future return needs to be in order to entice someone to take the deal is going to vary from person to person. But barring extreme and pressing financial need most people will eventually agree to wait for a future payday. Assuming you are looking to make some type of investment you need to decide what that number is and then make educated and rational decisions on how to achieve it. Enter the ball python; far from a pet the ball python has long since become one of the world’s many mechanisms of speculative investment.

I have an increasingly long history of trying to analyze the economics of the ball python industry (http://ballpythonbreeder.com/2010/04/on-the-economic-viability-of-ball-python-breeding/).  There are times when my contemplations on the topic consume me and I have lamented the pricing of ball pythons on several occasions (here and here).  Is it really an arena in which financial prosperity can be obtained? Or is it a money pit, a hobby that pays only part of its way with financial returns, leaving a hefty portion of the ‘profit’ to be paid in less tangible forms such as personal satisfaction and enjoyment? As a person who treats ball pythons as an investment in my financial future I really need to know. If the answer is ‘no’ I need to make some dramatic changes to my approach.

The number one place most people think to invest money is the stock market. It may not always be the best or most lucrative but it is fairly easy to do. How easy?  Simply open an investment account, fund it, and  then sit back and watch. Investing in mutual funds is almost completely hands-off. You need to keep track of the funds you have selected and adjust course from time-to-time but the day-to-day buy/sell decisions are off-loaded to professionals who do it on your behalf (for a fee).  It’s a pretty easy way to invest money.   Like many of you I invest in a retirement plan through my employer.  I also have a brokerage account, IRA’s and a few mutual fund accounts. Each month money from my bank account simply vanishes into them. Aside from the required attention I must pay to their performance I don’t do anything other than earn the paycheck that feeds them.  Pretty simple. How much of a return will these investments earn? I have absolutely no idea. But when I play around with the numbers I always assume that over a long period of time my investments will earn an average of 10% (compounding). Having spent some time around the investment world I have consistently seen 10% used as the variable when speculating future results (please note the emphasis on the word ‘speculating’).  And for the purposes of this ball python investment exploration I would like to use that as the baseline against which we measure everything else.

Let’s suppose you have $5,000 and want to invest it in something.  Should you invest in ball pythons, gold, diamonds, orange juice or mutual funds?  If (and this is a very big ‘if’) we assume that the stock market will provide you with a 10% return during the next four years we can figure out how much your $5K investment today will be worth some 1,500 days from now.  Here is the equation:

FV = P • (1+%interest)ⁿ

• FV – Future value of your money (how much money will you have at the end of the investment period)
• P – Initial Investment ($5,000 in this example)
• %interest – The return you expect (10% in this example)
• n – the number of years you will leave the entire investment (P) untouched.

So:

• FV = $5000 • (1.1)⁴
• FV = $7,320.50

This means that at 10% compounding over four years (e.g. you don’t touch the money at all during the investment period) your $5K investment will earn you $2,320.50 before taxes.  If you take those profits at the end of the four year investment period we will assume that you will pay a 35% tax on the profits (total tax = $812.18).  That will leave you with a net profit of $1,508.33.  Now let’s take a moment to ask the initial question again:  Would you rather have $5,000 today or a net of $6,508.33 four year from now?  Before you answer let me remind you that you won’t have to do any tangible work to make that money.  The only thing you will have to do is go without the $5K for four years.  Is that $1,508.33 going to be enough of a return?

Please also keep in mind that this calculation assumes that you actually have $5,000 in your hand today.  If you borrow the money with interest (credit card) you will have to deduct (from your net profit) the money you pay in interest to the credit card company.  I won’t try and present those numbers here but it should go without saying that borrowing $5K at 12% interest so you can invest in something that might pay 10% interest is not going to be very lucrative.

But wait, there is more to consider!  At this point we are supposing that we can turn $5,000 into $7,320 in four years.  But it is important to remember that $7,320 in four years will not be worth as much as it is today.  It is a mistake for you to think about future money using today’s perspectives.  The buying power of money is going down.  It always has and always will.   So what is today’s value of your future earnings?  I’m going to make an unscientific guess that across the board we are experiencing about 2% inflation.  Please note that I know that the real rate of inflation is a highly political issue.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) suggests that the current rate is just over 1% but other people have compelling arguments that suggest it is practically closer to 8 or 13%.  I’m not educated enough on the nuances of the topic to argue it so I’m just going to make up a number that seems plausible but not excessive.  If you’re an economist please don’t bother trying to bust my chops on this point.  The make-believe I am playing doesn’t determine policy nor is it used to pass laws.

Here is the equation to calculate today’s value of a future return:

CV = FV • (1+%interest)^-n

• CV = The current value of a future return
• FV – Future return (e.g. how much will you actually be paid at some point in the future)
• %interest – The amount you will pay in interest (inflation in this case).
• -n – The number of years until you will receive the payment.

So what is that actual $5,000 in your hand today going to be worth in four years?

• CV = $5,000 • (1.02)^-4
• CV = $4,619.23

And what is today’s value of the $7,320.50 you might have in four years?

• CV = $7,320.50 • (1.02)^-4
• CV = $6,763.01

In four years your original $5,000 is only worth the equivalent of $4,619.23 in today’s money.  The $2,320.50 you made in pre-tax profit is only worth the equivalent of $2,143.78 today.  So just what does this all mean?  It means that without accounting for the ever-decreasing value of money you can’t make a direct apples-to-apples comparison of money that you have in your hand today with money you might have in your hand at some point in the future.  Stick with me because this is important.  You have to understand the future value of money in a way that is meaningful to you today.  This is called “net present value”.  Getting $1,500 today is not the same as getting $1,500 in the future.  In order to understand the future value of money you have to be able to look at it from today’s perspective.  The after-tax value of your future profit (four years from now) is worth only $1,393.46 in today’s dollars.

And now I can ask the question one final time, in a slightly different, yet much more meaningful, way.  Would you rather have $5,000 today or today’s equivalent of $6,393.46 in four years?  Now we have a meaningful comparison of money across time.  If the stock market can actually produce a 10% return over a four year period your $5,000 investment will yield an effective profit of $1,393.46 (taking taxes and inflation into account).  At this point you are either seeing the light or bleeding from the ears.

Ok.  The baseline is set:  $5K invested.  Fours years of waiting.  Net profit of about $1,400 (in today’s money).  What about taking that $5K and investing it in ball pythons instead?  Can that investment provide a better potential return?

The calculations for a snake breeding project are not quite as simple as putting money into a mutual fund.  There are a lot of moving parts that need to be considered.  Investing in the stock market comes with many unknowns.  Investing in ball pythons has just as many, if not more.  On the Scale of Risk an investment in ball pythons is arguably more risky than the stock market but not quite as wasteful as buying lottery tickets.  The benefit to this is that increased risk should bring greater potential for reward.  The risk versus reward theme is a constant.  The bigger the bet, the bigger the gain.  Or, if things don’t go well, the bigger the loss.  I have said it many times:  breeding ball pythons for profit is a game of calculated chance.  No matter how well you control the variables the end game is usually nothing less than a toss of the dice.   How many females lay how many eggs?  How well did you do on the odds and are the babies the “right” gender?  None of these things are under your control.  And that’s not too unlike the stock market; technology stocks can tank, there could be another accounting scandal or that pharmaceutical company you invested in could have its most profitable product recalled because it kills more people than it cures.  Not matter the mechanism, investment is full of risks you can’t completely control.  So is the profit potential when breeding ball pythons worth the risk?  That’s the question.

What are the moving parts that need to be considered in an evaluation of a ball python investment?  They include (but are not limited to):

1. Will there be any startup costs?  This includes caging, water bowls, hides, room preparation, etc.  Many of these costs are, for the most part, one-time costs.  If you buy quality cages today they should still be serving you well in 10 years.
2. The initial (and continued) investment in animals.
3. The costs associated with raising animals to an appropriate breeding size.  This mainly includes food and environmental necessities (heat, cleaning supplies, etc.) and, rarely, vet bills.
4. Your time.  How many hours per week will you spend taking care of your investment?  How much do you get paid to do it?  For most of us, for-profit breeders included, that answer is close to zero; we don’t pay ourselves to take care of our snake collection.  We rationalize this decision by telling ourselves that our payday will come in the future, when babies are hatched and sold.  One way or another you are expecting to get paid for the time you spend.  But by excluding the value of your time you are artificially skewing the numbers to a more positive outcome.  At the very least this is a healthy dose of denial.  Companies can’t calculate their profits without accounting for the cost of labor. Would you go to work every day at your “real job” for no paycheck?  If this reptile thing you are doing is a business why do the hours spent working on it count differently?  It’s OK for you to defer your pay.  I did it for a few years when I started my IT business.  All I’m saying is that you need to account for it as you do.  It’s part of the real cost of being in business.
5. Market value depreciation.  Ball python prices are both fickle and arbitrary.  They frequently fall very fast.  It can be depressing.  Do not look at the animal’s value today and use that as a measure of your profits tomorrow.  You will be very disappointed if you do.  For the purposes of our discussion we will assume that co-dominant morphs lose 45% of their value each year.  And we will assume that simple recessive animals lose 30% of theirs.    This can be quite variable from one morph to the next but the numbers I have seen over the years (despite making me sick to my stomach) suggest this is not unrealistic.

It is impossible to account for every eventuality when considering ball pythons as an investment.  This fact alone may make it unsavory for some people.  I am reasonably confident that most people who take time to read this really want ball pythons to be an excellent investment.  I know I do.  But I endeavor to be pragmatic on the topic so I can make the most responsible investments.  I am, after all, no longer in this because it is a hobby.  These snakes need to pay for a good portion of my future.  Can they do that?  If not, I need to direct my investment dollars in another direction and let this whole snake breeding thing fall back into the category of ‘leisurely hobby’.

The first thing we need to do is invest our $5,000 in some snakes.  To keep things focused on the animals we will assume that the appropriate environment has already been established.  Cages, water bowls, etc. have already been acquired and we don’t need to dip into our investment capital for these things.

Here is what we buy:

• 0.3 Normal Adult Females @ $125 each
• 2.0 Visual Males (Single Gene, Simple Recessive) @ $850 each
• 0.3 100% Het Females @ $500 each
• 0.2 Visual Females (Single Gene, Simple Recessive) @ $1,100 each

Total value of investment:  $5,700.  Whoops!  We already blew the budget.  But we’ll assume we got a discount on the whole package and our total price was $5,000.  Sweet.

With the exception of the adult normal females all of these are current year (hatchling) snakes.  Here are some general assumptions we will make about this group of animals:

• The 2.0 males will be big enough to breed the following breeding season.  This is why we invested in the normal females.  They are an affordable way to get some production early in the investment period and the sale of that production will help offset the cost of raising the others.
• We also assume that two of the heterozygous females and one of the visual females will be ready to breed in 18-20 months.  The remaining het and visual female will require an additional year before achieving a good breeding size.  This is a relatively safe thing to assume.  Not all females get up to size in 18 months but some do.  It is not unusual for females to take upwards of 36 months to get up to size.
• Every female of breeding size will not lay eggs every year.  Most breeders will agree that in any given breeding season you should expect only 50-70% of your females to lay eggs.

The Timeline

The animals are purchased in May of Year One.  Beginning in November of Year One the males are bred to the 0.3 normal females.  Breeding continues through late February.

In June of Year Two (13 months after the initial investment) two of the three females lay a total of 12 eggs.  In late August 5.6 hets hatch.

For completely arbitrary reasons the price of simple recessive animals drops by approximately 1/3 each year.  Using the value of the animals in the previous year as a reference we can speculate that the value of the heterozygous animals one year later will be:

• Male Hets:  $70, down from $100 the previous season.
• Female Hets: $350, down from $500 the previous season.
• Male Visuals: $600, down from $850 the previous season.
• Female Visuals: $775, down from $1,100 the previous season.

The total value of our production in Year Two (all of which we will sell) is:

• 5.0 Male Hets @ $70 each = $350
• 0.6 Female Hets @$350 each = $2,100

Because we acquired our initial stock at a 10% discount we will assume that we also sold your production at a reasonable 10% discount.   The value of our Year Two production is ($350+$2,100) – 10% = $2,205.  The hatchlings were in our possession for a total of ten weeks before being sold.  They were fed twice weekly during that time.  Subtract the first 10-14 days for their first shed and subtract two additional weeks when they were again in shed and we were feeding them for a total of six weeks.  That works out to ($.90 x 2) x 11 animals for six weeks.  By the time they are sold we will have spent approximately $120 feeding them.  Subtract this from your total and your net for Year Two production is $2,085.  As a reminder, that $2,085 is not the same as $2,085 today.  The net present value of that $2,085 you will earn in one year is $2,024.

Now let’s jump forward to the tail end of Year Three.  This season you got eggs from one normal female (7 eggs), one of your young het females (6 eggs) and one of the visual females (5 eggs).

• From the normal female you hatch 3.3 hets (one egg went bad during incubation)
• From the het female you hatch 2.1 visuals and 1.2 100% hets
• From the visual female you hatch 2.3 visuals.
• Total production:  4.5 hets, 4.4 visuals

Prices at the end of Year Three are as follows:

• Male Hets:  $50, down from $70 the previous season.
• Female Hets: $250, down from $350 the previous season.
• Male Visuals: $425, down from $600 the previous season.
• Female Visuals: $550, down from $775 the previous season.

The value of your Year Three production:

• 4.0 hets: 4 * $50 = $200
• 0.5 hets: 5 *$350 = $1,750
• 4.0 visuals: 4 * $600 = $2,400
• 0.4 visuals: 4 * 775 = $3,100
• Total production value:  $7,450

In Year Three we will again assume that you sell your production at a reasonable 10% discount.  This drops your gross to $6,705.  Using the same sales time line as the previous season (with a slight increase in rodent prices), hatchling feeding costs for Year Three are: ($.95 x 2) x 17 =  $193.80.  Subtracting this from your Year Three production gross leaves $6,511.  The net present value of that $6,511 is $6,137.

Finally let’s jump to the end of Year 4.

This season you got eggs from two normal females (11 eggs), two of your het females (12 eggs) and both of the visual females (11 eggs).

• From the normal females you hatch 7.4 hets
• From the het females you hatch 1.3 visuals and 3.5 100% hets
• From the visual females you hatch 7.4 visuals.
• Total production:  10.9 hets, 8.7 visuals

Prices at the end of Year Four are as follows:

• Male Hets:  $35, down from $50 the previous season.
• Female Hets: $175, down from $250 the previous season.
• Male Visuals: $300, down from $425 the previous season.
• Female Visuals: $375, down from $550 the previous season.

The value of your Year Four production:

• 10.0 hets: 10 * $35 = $350
• 0.9 hets: 9 * $175 = $1,575
• 8.0 visuals: 8 * $300 = $2,400
• 0.7 visuals: 7 * $375 = $2,625
• Total Year Four production value:  $6,950

In Year Four we will again assume that you sell your production at a reasonable 10% discount.  This drops your gross to $6,255.  Using the same sales time line as the previous season, hatchling feeding costs for Year Four are: ($.95 x 2) x 34 =  $408.00.  Subtracting this from your Year Three production gross leaves $5,847.  The net present value of that $5,847 is $5,402.

The Tally

At the end of three full breeding seasons (which will put you into year four on the calendar) you will have earned (expressed using Net Present Value):

• Year Two:  $2,024
• Year Three: $6,137
• Year Four: $5,402
• Total:  $13,563

After subtracting your initial $5,000 investment you have a profit (still expressed in Net Present Value) of $8,563.  Well that looks pretty nice but don’t start grinning just yet.  You need to subtract your expenses, the biggest of which is your rodent bill for your adult breeders.  If you buy rats at an average of $1.30/rat I estimate the bill to feed ten ball pythons for three years is about $1,600.  Subtract that from your profits and you have now netted $6,963.

A few more estimated expenses that were incurred during the multi-year process:

• Mulch/Bedding: $487
• Electricity: $720
• PayPal/Credit Card fees:  $406 (assumes 1/2 of the $13,563 was payments via credit card or PayPal at 3%)
• Misc supplies:  $300

After factoring those into the equation our profit is down to $5,050.  That’s not bad, really.  We are still $3,657 ahead of the comparatively meager $1,393 we earned in our mutual fund.  But don’t forget what is missing:

• Taxes: At 35% your $13,563 would be chopped by $4,747, leaving you with a total initial profit of $8,816.  Important Note:  There would be plenty of deductions that would push that number back up, of course.
• Caging: We didn’t budget the cost of caging into these calculations; we assumed it was already there.  If that isn’t true you could quickly see your profitability drop below zero.
• Your Time: Invest in a mutual fund and make $1,393 while doing almost nothing for four years.  Or bust your butt in the reptile business and make $5,050.  You worked a lot harder for the return.  The time you spent has financial value, doesn’t it?  Had you been paying someone to do this all along how much would you have spent in payroll?  Even if you spent a lowly 8 hours per week taking care of your animals (a low number, I think) and paid $10/hr you would have spent $4,160/year in payroll.  Actual payroll over the total investment period would approach $15,000 …more than the total amount earned.  Every business owner knows that payroll is the single biggest bill that has to be paid.  This also helps us understand why we don’t pay ourselves for the time we spend tending to our animals.
• Selling Difficulty: I generously assumed that you would quickly sell your production.  If your babies spend more time on the rack you could easily add a few hundred more dollars to your rodent bill.
• Marketing Costs: This includes fees to sell using on-line classified sites, web site hosting, trade show table fees, display cases, etc.  All of these costs could add up to a lot over a four-year period.
• Catastrophe: The production numbers each season were pretty darn fair.  Subtle swings in the odds could radically change the numbers.  What would have happened if an animal got sick and needed vet care?  You could easily lose them for an entire breeding season (or worse).

One criticism of this particular analysis is that the collection of animals remains stagnant over the investment period.  I admit that this is not the normal way ball python breeders do things.  Most of us continue to upgrade the quality of our collections.  At the end of the first breeding season we could have acquired other multi-gene animals to increasingly work toward making something other than the same stuff year after year.  While this may be the more common approach it was not my intention to muddy the waters with additional investment capital being poured into the mix.  What I want to know is if an investment in a project can be profitable by itself; no continuous cash infusions needed.  Trying to determine profitability when buying new collection members is a topic for another day.

The end analysis in all of this is that ball pythons have the potential to provide a better return that what it typically expected from the stock market.  But it’s not a sure thing; nothing is even remotely close to guaranteed. There is a lot of risk and expenses are significant.  I remain confident that there is money to be made for some people in this business …but not all of us.  Most people simply don’t make plans to be profitable and, as a result, they won’t.  I once had a teacher tell me that “failing to plan is planning to fail”.  How true…

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

“Because they know all they sold ya’ was a guaranteed piece of shit. That’s all it is, isn’t it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time.”
-Tommy Callahan

Several weeks ago I read posts on the Burmese Python Forums (Small Burms and Fake Hypos) that discussed sellers on some notable reptile classified web sites offering both dwarf and hypo Burmese that really were not what they claim.   Apparently someone was selling hypo-like animals that were not genetic hypos and dwarf burms that were not genetic dwarves.  This sort of stuff is fairly common and I see it every now and then in the ball python market.  I’m sure it happens in every little crevice of the reptile world.  Less than scrupulous people are willing to stretch the truth, tweak the photos or flat-out lie in order to extract a few extra dollars from a sale.  It’s a bane of the business, an unfortunate feature of the reptile trade.  People in-the-know see these types of ads and react with laughter and general disdain.  A tiny handful will take time to contact the seller to tell them that their misrepresentation (intentional or accidental) did not go unnoticed.  An even smaller number of us will contact the administrator of the site on which they happen to be listed in an effort to get the ads removed.  But most of us either don’t notice or don’t care.  After all, only two people will be hurt by such listings; the seller (in the form of his diminished reputation) and the buyer (being unnecessarily parted with his cash).  That’s true, right?  I’m not selling and I’m not buying so it doesn’t effect me, does it?  I say it does, actually.  Possibly profoundly so.

As much as I don’t like it I recognize that a large number of breeders figure out how to price animals by seeing what others are posting on reptile classifieds.  I have reflected more than once on the stupidity of such behavior. When someone misrepresents an animal on a classified site and sells it for a discount it influences prices.  This is true even when the animal is not a legitimate example of the morph.  When people see the animal being sold and the price being asked they begin to think that the animal must be worth that much.  The simple presence of the ad starts the cycle of people saying, “I saw them on a reptile classified site for $_______.”  Because price is such a focal point for people the lack of genetic authenticity is lost in the shuffle.  This is also true of genetically accurate animals that are poor examples of the morph.  The discount Internet seller, even the illegitimate one’s, gradually erode the value of an animal.

A large number of people who love herpetoculture can’t resist an apparent good deal.  While there are many who look for quality animals first and let price come in a close second, most of us don’t.  Like it or not, price is usually king.  Quality is a novelty for many, a thing for people of more discerning taste.  If someone is selling any particular morph or species locality for an oddly low price people won’t hesitate to jump on the deal.  They simply can’t pass it up.  Their Spidey-senses are tingling as they do it but they want to believe they are getting a deal so badly that they let good judgement go by the wayside.  Needing to convince themselves of their own buyer’s-vigilance they interrogate the seller with a standard array of doing-your-homework style questions.  Questions like:

• Where did the animal come from?
• Who produced it?
• How long have you had it?
• Is it feeding?  If so, what is it eating?
• Why are you selling it?
• Why is it so cheap?
• Are the genetics certain?
• Do you offer a guarantee?

As long as the answers are somewhere in the realm of plausibility the desire to believe that the deal is a good one allows them to rationalize and internalize any answer.  With apparent due diligence having been performed they drop coin on table and complete the transaction.  At that moment they are proud of themselves; they have just beat the system by getting an animal for way less than the going rate.  Basking in their own fabricated bliss they proudly pat themselves on the back for their shrewd acquisition.  They think they have an animal that carries some particular gene but it doesn’t.  They just don’t know it yet.  Did the seller make an honest mistake or was it an intentional fabrication?  Who can say for sure from one deal to the next.  But one thing is frequently true regarding these unfortunate transactions:  It will likely be YEARS before the buyer realizes he didn’t get what he paid for.  And by the time he does, the opportunity for legitimate recourse has become painfully limited.  Let’s explore.

Suppose it was you who bought one those codom hypo burmese pythons mentioned earlier.  It will likely be a few years before it reaches an appropriate size for breeding but eventually it will happen; oviposition, incubation and hatching.  And …oops!  No hypos!  What are the odds of that happening?  Assuming it was a large enough clutch of eggs (Burmese pythons tend to have significantly larger clutches than ball pythons) the odds are reasonably small that you will completely miss.  If there are 25 eggs and not a single hypo is in the clutch there is a pretty strong case that a mistake was made (or a ruse perpetrated) regarding the genetics.  Could you have missed on 50/50 odds 25 times in a row?  Sure.  But it’s not likely.  There is a 1 in 33,554,432 chance that you can flip a coin 25 times in a row and have it comes up heads every time.  For comparison, there is a 1 in 64 chance that you will miss every time on 50/50 odds when you have only six eggs.  Don’t be confused if those numbers seem a bit backwards.  I’m talking about the likelihood of completely missing on the odds, not hitting the odds.  If the genetics are correct your odds of hitting increases with the number of eggs.

If the buyer thinks he didn’t get what he paid for he has to contact the seller to talk about it.  But keep in mind that it is quite likely that several years have gone by since you made your purchase.  While you are far from done with the results of that transaction the seller mentally washed his hands of it a few minutes after it was completed.  Can the seller even be found?  People come and go in this business with speed matched only by frequency.  Assuming the seller can be found it is likely that he will be reluctant to admit fault and offer any form of compensation.  Inaction on his part is defensible on many possible fronts:

• You, the buyer, must have mixed up your animals during breeding.  This is an especially easy argument if it comes to light that you have multiple animals.
• Because there is no photographic history of the animal the seller has no way to verify that the animal in question was even sold by him.  For all he knows you got this particular animal from someone else and are now representing it as the one he sold you.
• The female must have retained sperm from the previous breeding season.  This can and does happen.  I know multiple people, myself included, who have produced animals from the male who was used two breeding seasons ago.
• You were  just unlucky and missed on the odds.  Try again next year.
• You are the only person who has contacted the seller with this problem so it must have been a mistake on your end.
• The seller insists on the genetic certainty of the animals he sells.  It must have been the other animal in the pairing who didn’t carry the gene (this is especially effective when addressing het-to-het pairings).  Yes, I know this does not apply in all genetic pairings.
• It is also quite common that the person from whom you bought the snake actually bought it from someone else.  You got the snake from Luke who bought it from Aaron.  Who knows where Aaron actually got it.  If the genetics aren’t right who is responsible?  I can assure you that in almost all cases your conversation with the person from whom you bought the snake will end with him washing his hands of the situation by giving Aaron’s contact information.  Unless there is an existing relationship I can also promise that contacting Aaron isn’t likely to yield any results.  The genetic provenance of second-hand animals is almost always completely unverifiable and equally indefensible.

With a little creativity we can continue to add to the list of reasons why the seller is going to be reluctant to accept responsibility.  Unless the person who sold you the animal has a tremendous amount of personal and professional integrity (and assuming you are also a person worthy of trust) you are unlikely to get anything.  When the seller is unwilling to make things right you are left with four mechanisms of recourse:

1. File a civil suit. Take your case to the courts and have a jury listen to your arguments.  A civil suit would be interesting and I am aware of only a handful of cases dealing with reptile genetics that have been taken to civil court.  I am also aware of the ease with which these suits can be filed.  Educating a jury about reptile genetics might be a tough job, though.  A healthy portion of our population is so misinformed about the true nature of reptiles that an impartial analysis of the facts is not guaranteed.  Fortunately, civil suits do not require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt”.  Instead they only require a “preponderance of the evidence”, which basically means that your argument must be more compelling (e.g. more likely to be true) than the opposing party.  Translation:  Document, document, document.  The one who keeps the best records wins.  This makes it very easy to win as most reptile breeders keep notoriously bad records.
2. Take your case to the Board of Inquiry (BOI) on the faunaclassifieds.com web site. This is tantamount to taking your case to the “court of public opinion”.  I believe that taking your gripe to the BOI is a waste of time.  Many will disagree with me on this point.  The BOI is only examined by a tiny subset of the reptile community (and an even smaller portion of them care what is written) and if the seller logs on to the forum to defend himself in a reasonably professional manner he will be able to cast an equal amount of doubt on you.  If you follow “bad guy” posts on the BOI you have seen how the OP (original poster) often finds himself in the hot seat rather than the supposed “bad guy”.  In the end you will likely accomplish little more than further alienating the seller, making him even less likely to do anything for you.  Yes, a well-articulated BOI post will cause a handful of people to shy away from the seller but it won’t do any real (long term) damage to their business.  There is a long list of people who are regularly ‘BOI-bashed’ but every single one of them continues to sell tons of animals.  It is blatantly obvious that the BOI posts don’t negatively impact their sales, isn’t it?  If not from new sales gone bad where else do the fresh negative BOI posts come from?  If the BOI had any real weight in the industry we would not keep seeing the same names over and over because their lack of sales would drive them out of the trade.  Pay attention and you will see that many people in the reptile community can’t learn from their own mistakes, much less the ones made by others.  Seller’s with less than stellar reputations are constantly given the benefit of the doubt by buyers lured in by low prices. The cycle is simultaneously depressing and hilarious.The buyer’s ability to talk himself into a purchase is predictable.  They see an animal on a classified site and then check the BOI to learn more about the seller.  They discover that there are some negative posts.  Unable to walk away from such a good deal they convince themselves the seller will be different this time.  But what are they really telling themselves?  Something like this:  Yesterday someone left a note on the refrigerator saying, “Milk is spoiled!  Do NOT drink!”.  “Hmmph.”, they say.  “That note is from yesterday.  It doesn’t apply to me.  Today I’ll bet the milk will be better.”  No matter how much you think the rules don’t apply to you, milk doesn’t fight through bad and turn good again.  And neither do shady reptile sellers.  Things are what they are.  Complaining about getting suckered when all the warning signs were right in front of you isn’t going to change the fact that you let a cheap price twist your otherwise good senses.  And in the end your BOI post is little else than your own effort at personal catharsis.  In the long run you will do better to stand in your back yard and scream until your throat hurts.
3. Use Twitter, Facebook, Internet forums and your personal blog as a platform to rail against the seller. I’m a big believer in the power of words and the Internet is nothing less than amazing for its ability to disseminate information.  That being said I have seen many sites with many messages about some of the more nefarious names in our industry and the volume of what has been written about them would be damning in many other lines of work.  But they are still here.  The Internet has desensitized us; it usually takes more than a forum post to touch the masses.  But sometimes the words you write can become viral within the community.  They can quickly spread from site-to-site and from mouth-to-mouth.  Blog posts automatically update Twitter and Facebook and followers and friends cross-post your messages on other sites and in a very short amount of time you can reach a lot of people.  The speed with which your words can be seen across the Internet is amazing.  While the Internet is a great way to spread information nothing has as much impact as sharing your  experience with friends who are also in the trade.  Think about it:  if there are (in theory) fewer than six degrees of separation between you and every other person on this planet imagine how few people there are between you and every other person in the reptile community.
4. Physically threaten and/or assault the person you feel has cheated you. While quite possibly the most therapeutic, this is the least intelligent thing you can do.  Everybody sues everybody in our society these days.  Resorting to threats and/or violence won’t do anything other than make you a defendant.  Victims become defendants when they lose their cool.  Try to remember that as the rage takes control (and then refer back to option #1).

I have been writing the past few paragraphs trying to act as if the seller actually was an honest person who made a mistake.  This can (and does) happen and truly honest sellers will make amends in some way.  While that is possible we also have to acknowledge that there are a healthy number of people who will look us directly in the eye and lie to every question asked about an animal.  They are skilled at doing it and are frequently very compelling in their false sincerity.  They knew they were lying when they sold the animal and they have no problem continuing to do so several years later.  It is, quite frankly, a cornerstone of their business model.

The dishonest seller is one of the most difficult realities of our business.  But even honest sellers can be troublesome to work with when genetics turn out to be wrong.  There are not a lot of financially sound reptile breeders.  Most of us struggle with our finances the same way the rest of the population does.  If you pay someone $1,000 for a snake I can all but guarantee that they will spend the money within days of receiving it.  Even if you came back to them a week later with a legitimate concern it is unlikely that they can conjure the money to issue a refund.  The problem is compounded when years have gone by.  Let me give you a real situation that happened in order to illustrate the problem.  A friend of mine bought a hatchling snake that was supposed to carry a certain number of genes.  Because the animal was rare at the time of purchase it carried a significant price tag.  More than a year  was spent raising the animal (a male) to its breeding weight.  After hatching eggs from multiple females it became obvious that the animal did not carry the genetics it was supposed to have.  The original seller was contacted and the problem was explained.  After seeing the evidence the seller apologized for the mistake.  But what do you think the seller could/should have done?  The solution may be easy to say but tough to achieve.

If you are sold a snake that is supposed to carry certain genes and it turns out that it does not you are due some form of compensation, right?  It makes sense.  But how much?  Should you get a full cash refund?  With interest?  How about replacement animals of similar value to the money you spent? How about a cash refund plus compensation for lost production?  How about animal credit for the initial value plus credit for lost production?  If you think you should be paid for your lost opportunity in addition to your initial investment how are you going to come to a value for the lost opportunity?  Do we turn to statistics to find a settlement?  If not, what do we use?  Suppose the buyer in the above scenario paid $5,000 for the original animal.  Let’s also suppose the Punnett square shows there to be a 1:4 chance of producing the desired offspring.  If a total of 25 eggs were produced from different females there should have been (statistically) six of the desired animal produced.  Suppose those six animals have a retail value of $3,500 each.  That’s $21,000 of unrealized financial gain because of a mistake made by the seller.

The problem is likely to become compounded because we almost always give the benefit of the doubt to the animal and try a second breeding season before passing final judgement.  In an effort to be optimistic we chalk the first year up to bad breeder’s luck and try again the following year.  If we suppose that a total of 20 eggs are produced in the 2nd season we should see (statistically) five of the desired animals poke their heads out of the egg.  But again no animals (which are now worth $2,500) carrying the desired genes are produced.

Let’s do some math:  $5,000 was paid to acquire the animal.  $21,000 was not realized during the first year of breeding and an additional $12,500 was not realized in year number two.  In the eyes of the buyer a (statistical) total of $38,500 has been lost.  But how will the original seller see it?  Is he going to agree and quickly send a cashier’s check for almost forty-grand?  Let me be the first to assure you that there is a zero percent chance that will happen.  Even if the seller had that kind of money you would have to kidnap his family to get it from him (and that might not even work).  And this pulls the covers back on the biggest, dirtiest secret in the reptile business.  Here it is: If you ever come up on the losing end of a genetic “mistake” you will almost never be indemnified.  Put another way, you will never be fully compensated for your loss.  Even in the most agreeable of resolutions you are not going to come out at the level that you could have if the genetics had been true.  It’s not right, I now.  But it’s the way this business seems to work.  I don’t know why but there is an underlying part of our hobby’s culture that makes it OK to make amends in a manner that ultimately works out better for the person who made the mistake (e.g. the original seller).

If you’ve never been on the receiving end of a genetic mistake take a moment to imagine this scenario:  You just spent real money on a new male for your collection.  You spend the next year getting it to breeding size.  You then spend an additional two years trying in vain to prove its genetics.  The seller has apologized for the mistake and wants to make things right.  One of the most frequent offers of compensation is for the seller to give you current year babies as replacements.  Knowing that you are not likely to get anything else from the seller (without going to court), you agree.  Are you satisfied?  Most people are.  But take a moment to assess your situation:

• The real money you originally spent is gone.  You have a ‘worthless’ male that you have spent years raising.  There is measurable time and money involved in getting the animal to adulthood.
• Your breeder females have laid eggs for you two years in a row.  The likelihood of them going three years in a row is small.  Even if you were offered an adult male as a replacement it is not likely that you will get eggs a third year in a row.
• You have a new baby male given to you by the breeder as compensation for the mistake.  Depending on the time of year it will probably be the following breeding season before it is ready to be paired with the girls.  This means yet another breeding season will go by with no egg production that benefits you.
• Prices have continued to spiral downward.  When all is said and done it could be as many as six years later before you ever produce the animals that your original male was supposed to help you make.
• Congratulations!  After six years of effort the money you spent has not advanced your collection or your wallet one single bit. The project you began in your early 30′s has not borne any fruit as you celebrate your 40th birthday.

Let me ask the question again:  Are you satisfied?

My friend who bought the expensive animal with incorrect genetics is still trying to come to an agreement on compensation for the mistake …and the mistake was made almost four years ago.  At the time the mistake was realized the value of the loss was about $12,000.  And that was just to account for the amount that was over-paid for the original animal (yes, it was a very expensive animal); it did not include the value of lost production.  As is usually the case, the original seller offered baby ball pythons as compensation.  The total retail value of those animals (at the time) was just under $2,500.  When my friend told him that was unacceptable the seller looked at him with an expression that clearly said, “What else do you expect me to do?  Do you really think I’m going to give you $12,000+ worth of animals?”  If you’re bewildered right now, join the club.  The original seller actually took an additional $12,000 of real money from the buyer and 20 months later, balked at returning the money (in any form) he unfairly took.  Why?  Because the original seller didn’t see it as giving back $12,000 he never really earned.  He saw it as losing $12,000 worth of animals.  Remember, he washed his hands of the original sale five minutes after it was done.  In his mind that was money made.  It is very hard for money to become “un-earned” a year or more after the fact, regardless of the legitimacy of the sale.  It’s crazy, I know.  But this mindset is rampant in the reptile business.

You can’t pass a normal ball python off as an albino.  Nobody will confuse an ivory ball python over a pastel, either.  Some things are easy to discern.  But how many people can tell with certainty the difference between a yellow belly and an unusual normal?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a snake described as “yellow belly-like”.  How about the difference between a lesser and a butter?  Seen any pastel ivories lately?  Can you tell the difference between a pastel ivory and a super pastel ivory?  Can you pick out the fire in a pile of very pretty normals?  What about a spector?  Can you pick one of those out of a lineup?  Het Genetic Stripe, Het Ghost, Het Albino, Het Clown, Het Piebald, Het Axanthic, Het Caramel Albino. Het, het,het, het, het, het, het.  Buying hets is nothing less than taking a leap of faith in the person from whom you are buying them.  Sum it up in one word:  trust.  You need to have a lot of trust in the person from whom you are buying hets.  You can’t just trust that they are selling you hets, though.  You have to trust that they can and will make things right if the unthinkable happens and the animals don’t prove out.  You are begging to get burned when you buy a snake from the guy on an Internet classified whose ads always seem to read something like, “I hate to sell em’ this cheap but I really need money right now.  My hard times are your good times!!!” Not only should you not be surprised when the genetics aren’t right but you also should not be surprised when you can’t get any resolution when you realize your problems a few years later.  Caveat emptor.

But it’s not just shady sellers that pass along animals that are not what they are supposed to be.  Legitimate and honest breeders can and do make mistakes.  A breeder may mislabel a tub or  confuse two animals after holding both of them at the same time.  It doesn’t take much to make a mistake with hets.  Breeders who have employees have to be able to trust their workers to be as careful as they would be.  Employees often work unsupervised and a dishonest worker can easily swap inexpensive heterozygous animals for valuable high-end hets.  The breeder has no idea when such things happen but they are left to deal with the fallout years later.  One disgruntled or dishonest employee can wreak havoc on the reputation of an industry leader.  The capacity for mix-ups is a function of any breeding operation.  While prevention is an omnipresent requirement the measure of a breeder is how they handle the rainy day when one of their animals doesn’t prove out.  Do they meet the issue head-on and do the right thing or do they avoid, hem and haw and make you chase them to try and get resolution?  Unfortunately there is no way to measure how a seller will respond years later when things go bad.

Albert Einstein is often credited as having defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results each time.”  Anybody who has an older brother or sister knows the value of watching them screw up.  The ability to learn vicariously from the mistakes of others is a great part of human design.  But for reasons unknown, being a reptile lover seems to diminish this capacity.  I guess people who are casual participants in the trade don’t benefit from spending time browsing the forums and talking with other breeders/hobbyists.  But for those of us who are in and around the business all the time, it is nothing short of insane that we continue to do business with people we know to have shady reputations.  For the most part I’m wide open on my willingness to pick up choice animals from someone I don’t know.  But I do have a mental list of people I won’t buy from.  Do you?

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

Fortunately, most of us keep perspective and never forget that this particular commodity is a living thing and is deserving of necessary care and attention. Despite giving each animal what it needs to thrive the reality doesn’t change; many breeders of reptiles have multiple dozens, hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of animals in their care. When the volume gets high the inability of a single individual to adequately tend to the health of the animals is compensated for with manpower. We task our staff with creating a physical environment in which the animals can thrive. The never ending needs of the reptiles are satisfied. In exchange for this wonderful and diverse volume of creatures we, the one’s who love reptiles so much that we decided to dedicate our lives to breeding them, generally give up the chance at making any sort of connection with individual animals. Don’t get me wrong, though. As much as I love them I do not believe that reptiles have the ability to form bi-directional connections the way humans and dogs can. Reptiles are satisfied when their physical needs are taken care of and they associate their owner more along the lines of “he’s not going to eat me” rather than, “he’s my friend”. Humans, however, are not so callous. Our tendency to anthropomorphize allows us to establish bonds with the pets in our lives, regardless of their ability to reciprocate. They become important to us beyond any financial value and when lost, we hurt.

Over the past twenty years the total number of snakes I have owned numbers in the multiple thousands. Through them all I vividly remember the first one. It was one of the only snakes I ever named. Like so many others it was a ball python. He was the first snake I ever watched feed, my nose an inch from the glass. He was the first snake to bite me (my mistake, not his) and despite his meager financial value he was the first snake to which I ever felt a personal attachment. As soon as I made the mental shift to ‘breeder’ I stopped thinking of the animals as pets and began to think of them more as mechanisms of profit. That’s not as emotionless as it sounds. I still have a passion for reptiles, I’m just not passionate about any one reptile.

Some of my reptile breeding peers have lingering warm sentiments toward a select animal or two. I know a few breeders with collections many of us can only dream about that still have their original male pastel or their original het albino male. The animals no longer serve a purpose in their collections but they still can’t bring themselves to let them go. Whether its an emotional attachment or an unwillingness to sell an animal for a few dollars that they probably paid several thousand for isn’t something on which I can speculate. I just know they still have them and won’t let them go. I don’t have any such animals right now. And it has been a long time since I felt connected to any particular python. I know another breeder whose original leopard geckos are over nineteen years old. Those animals mean something to him; something more than any possible money they could bring.

Last week I was in New York for a reptile trade show. We always drive up the night before and stay with some friends. Ever since we have been going up to that show my friends have had a prehensile-tailed skink in their living room. This time, however, the cage was in its usual place but the skink was gone. They explained that after more than 17 years, the skink had passed away. As they told us the story of how it died I caught the two of them briefly make eye contact and in that moment I caught a glimpse of just how sad they were at the loss of their pet. They reflected on the little things the skink had added to their lives, how it had been a fixture of this and several previous living rooms; living rooms that spanned almost two decades. They talked about how the now absent sound of the timer that controlled the cage environment had been a source of comfort in the house; a sound of safety and of home. Their words were not emotional but I could feel their sense of loss. And as much as I could see that they missed their pet I became keenly aware that I have not felt that way about a reptile in a long time. And that has caused me to do a lot of personal reflection. You see, I don’t have any reptiles in my home and it has been that way for a while. I made the decision several years ago to move my entire operation into a facility separate from the place where my family spends its time. At the time the decision was a practical one; reptiles have a distinct smell, the caging I used was not terribly decorative, and I was tired of balancing the environment needs of animals with those of my wife and daughter. I had plenty of reasons. But now I think I need to reconnect. I need a reminder of what it means to have a pet reptile rather than a reptile business.

But even as I type this I wonder if that’s the best thing for me to do. I already have a dog and she is my friend and constant companion. I often lament on how dogs live just long enough to become an incredibly important part of your life and then emotionally rip you apart when they die, frequently by your own decision to put an end to suffering that old age brings them. I constantly wonder if the years of joy they bring to my life is worth the pain I feel when they are gone. Isn’t it easier and less painful to just not have one in the first place? I guess my answer resides in the fact that my dog is lying next to me as I type. As bad as it is going to hurt when she is gone I am glad for this moment right now. But dogs are special. Comparing their capacity for emotion to reptiles is unfair. But remember, it isn’t reptiles who are forming the emotional attachment: we are. And it’s us who will feel the pain of their death. My friends skink lived for 17 years. That’s got to be a lot of hurt. I’ve never had a dog that long. Despite the possibility of pain I think it’s time for me to add a pet reptile back to my life. It’s been too long without one.

For obvious reasons I can’t have a pet ball python. Choices, choices… that’s one thing the world of reptiles brings to us in abundance.

Breeding season is always an exciting time for me.  I guess it’s that way for all ball python breeders.  Breeding/Copulation leads to ovulation which leads to egg laying (oviposition) which leads to egg hatching!!!  I keep meticulous records on my animal pairings.  I write everything in a notebook and also use 3×5 index cards on each cage to record who is with who and what I observed when they were together (e.g. did I observe copulation?).  I reconcile what’s on the 3×5 cards with the log book I keep and then transfer all of it to a database for long-term record keeping and analysis.

When my animals are paired I ususally look in to see what’s going on.  Do I see courtship behavior?  How about a good lock (e.g. breeding)?  In order to make sure I don’t disturb anything going on I always open my cages slowly and peek in just enough to see what I need to see.  To make sure I know that two animals are together I always put a white stone in front of the drawer.  This keeps me from accidentally pulling a drawer open too fast, causing coitus interruptus.  Over the years it has turned into something of a superstition for me, too.  The rocks have to be very white and very smooth.  There can’t be any roughness to them.  In my mind I want the breeding to go smooth so I thing I subconsciously decided that the rocks needed to be smooth, too.  A bit odd perhaps, but it’s how I do it.

Coming into my facility and seeing rocks all over the place makes me happy.  It’s a season:  breeding season!

Colin Weaver