Many enthusiastic ball python hobbyists answer “yes” to at least one of those questions.  If you’re a ball python breeder the answer to most or all of the above should be a foregone conclusion.  For many breeders they are project staples.  Considering only the single gene males for a moment, do you need any more of the same in your collection?  Probably not.  If you are not already doing so I’ll wager that you are focused on getting the existing males in your collection to the next level;  albino spiders, black pewters, honey bees, etc.  How exactly are you going about that particular process?  There is a long road and a short road to getting there.  Some of you are adding the next-level males to your collection by breeding your own (the long road) while others opt to buy or trade with someone to add them to the mix (the shorter road).

Sure, sure, many of us are still missing a wide variety of single gene males in our genetic armory.  Champagne males, ultramels, lavender albinos, and candy/toffee ball pythons are still pretty darn desirable and highly sought after. To not have them means you know what it is to covet.

What is true for a majority of us is that we are actively producing single-gene carrying animals like spiders, pastels, albinos, black pastels, pinstripes and piebalds.  Single gene females in your production output are always a valuable commodity because most breeders are glad to add more females to their breeding groups.  Larger breeders may have dozens of females of a particular morph.  But how many more single-gene males are they adding to their group?  Of the more common morphs I’ll wager the number is close to zero.  Since production efforts each season will certainly produce many single-gene males and neither you nor I need any more I have to ask the looming question:  To whom are we going to sell them?  The answer to that is simple:  fewer and fewer breeders, more and more hobbyists & pet owners.  Once the so-called ‘box’ is checked on a male for a particular morph (or two, I’m a big advocate of multiple males) the breeder need is satisfied.  The desire to add more of a particular single-gene morph to a collection shifts to having multiple females.  More males are no longer on the agenda.  How much you might want to sell one to me for is not a factor.  I don’t need them, regardless of how cheap you want to make them.  On the other hand I don’t think I can have enough females.  As the number of people who want to add single-gene males to their collection decreases I have to find my customers from an ever-changing pool of people.  My clients, like yours, include:

• Breeders new to the hobby.  Many single gene males have become very affordable and provide a quick and financially easy way to produce some very cool morphs.
• Long-time reptile enthusiasts who have recently decided to get into the ball python market.  There is a steady stream of people who once focused on boas, colubrids or other types of pythons who are making their way over the the ball python arena.
• Other larger scale breeders/wholesalers.  I can wholesale my single gene males out in large quantities for small dollars to a breeder with a larger client base than me.  With a larger base of clients they can move them more quickly than I can.  Granted, I will get quite a bit less money for them but they will all be gone instantly, no maintenance required.
• Pet owners.  Some people just like to have beautiful snakes.  They aren’t interested in breeding them.  Because the single gene morphs have finally become affordable, they are much more attractive to pet owners.  The pet owner/casual hobbyist need is an interesting one; many of these morphs cost several thousand dollars a few short years ago.  They were fun to look at but owning one as a pet was a luxury afforded to only the more affluent herper.  That is no longer the case.

Hang around me long enough and you’ll hear me say it:  “Satisfied needs don’t motivate.”  I regularly apply this to a host of scenarios in life.  Eating at a restaurant, having a headache, propane sales, selling snakes, the list goes on.  The food you eat is never worth as much to you after you have consumed it.  Do you have a headache right now?  If not, do you appreciate it?  I doubt it.  But when you do have a headache you are all too aware of how good it feels to not have one and you would be very grateful to return to that state.  Do you remember when you wanted a male spider ball python really bad?  Now that you have one how do you feel about them?  If you have all the single-gene males you need in your collection I am are not likely to be able to sell you another one no matter what price I put on it.  Imagine for a moment that I am a propane salesman.  I show up at your house and offer to sell you propane.  “No thanks”, you say,  “I have electric heat.  I don’t use propane.”  I proceed to explain to you that my propane is the cleanest burning you can buy and it’s cheaper than everyone else in town.  “Oh!”, you say, “In that case I’ll take a six month supply.”  Ha!  Yeah, right.  You actually tell me to go pack sand.  “Look, buddy.  I don’t use propane.  I don’t want to by any propane.  How cheap you make it isn’t going to change my mind.”

Two items of interest arise when trying to sell propane to people who don’t need it:

1. No matter how low you price it, they don’t buy it.
2. Because you tried to lowering the price to entice non-propane users into buying some you will find that those with a real need for propane now expect it for less.

What do you do if you go to a trade show with a pinstripe ball python to sell and nobody buys it in the first half of the show?  Do you lower the price?  What if the animal doesn’t sell at all?  Do you lower its price at the next show?  Industry-wide the answer is often a resounding “yes”.  How about on-line?  If you list your pinstripe in a classified ad and it doesn’t sell after two weeks do you lower the price?  Again, the industry seems to say “yes”.  But it’s silly.  The reason you didn’t sell your pinstripe probably wasn’t because it was too expensive; it’s because the people who came by your table (or read your ad) didn’t have a need for the animal.  Lowering the price does nothing to make them want it more.  It’s the same with propane; people who do not use propane do not suddenly become interested just because it is cheap.  The only thing it does is set the expectation in the minds of your table visitors that pinstripes are now cheaper than they were last week.  When the time comes for them to sell their own pinstripes they think back to the price you had on your table and they offer theirs for the same or less money.  And so the cycle begins anew.

I’m not writing to suggest that male pinstripes should still be $2,500.  There is an ever-expanding and viable market for animals as their prices drop.  Finances keep many of us on the sidelines when it comes to high-end reptile purchases.  It is a fairly small subset of the reptile community that will drop several thousand dollars on a single animal and a whole new crop of customers begin to appear when prices come out of the stratosphere.  Today, albino ball pythons are in the realm of affordability for the reptile connoisseur who has no particular need to build a breeding colony.  In practical application it is the single gene male that is leading the way for the ball python morphs to become a staple of the pet trade.

On more than one occasion in the past I have lamented the downward spiral of ball python prices.  Regardless of how much you initially pay for one they will be worth quite a bit less by the time you are producing your own.  Opinions regarding the nature of the free market and an individual’s right and/or responsibility to price animals in a certain way are as diverse as the community itself.  Prices will fall.  Nobody can stop that.  I wish they would not fall as fast as they do but I can’t stop that, either.  The Internet economy has taught us that there is always someone cheaper out there, another seller who is willing to undercut your price in order to sell the animal.  This is the nature of competitive business.

The ultimate point I want to make is that price matters.  It is not, however, the sole factor in the value of an animal.  Increasingly, price has less and less of an impact on the ability to sell an animal.  But this is true in more ways than one.  Buyers are always looking for the best animal for the smallest price.  This is a universal truth.  As a buyer myself I do the same thing.  But once the need is satisfied, price no longer matters.  Remember that the next time you put a price tag on one of your snakes.  Are you taking the lead on the downward spiral?  Do you think that lowering the price is really what is going to make the snake sell?  It might be.  Or maybe not.  Maybe all you really need is some extra patience.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

I’ve been in and around the snake business for almost 20 years. I took a hiatus for a few years when I got married back in the latter part of the 90′s but I’ve been back in it full-force for many years now. While these days I am mostly a ball python breeder I spent a lot of time with a lot of different animals in my earlier years. Ball pythons in the early 90′s were not even a little bit what they are today. Most of the people who read this already know that.  Back in the 80′s albino burmese were the big deal and things like albino kenyan sand boas and hognose snakes were just getting rolling.  Pete Kahl and Brian Sharp were starting a firestorm in the boa community with their albino strains.   Jungle carpet pythons were the coolest thing in the carpet world and all that mattered in the world of chondros was that you could actually breed them successfully; never mind all this locality stuff we’ve got today.  Juno road in Texas was Mecca for grey banded kingsnakes and blackhead pythons and womas were borderline mythical.  I remember seeing a pair of womas at Tom Crutchfield’s place in the early 90′s and thought I had seen the holy grail of snakes.  I also remember seeing the first albino alligator around the same time and thought it wasn’t real until it blinked.

Anyway, to my point.  Somebody once said that hinsight is 20/20.  I can’t begin to express to you how true that is.  One of my fondest and most embarrassing memories about being in the snake business took place at the Mid-Atlantic Reptile Show (MARS) somewhere around 1994 or 1995.  I can’t remember the year exactly.  Anyway, Ian Gniazdowski and I had been friends from college for several years and I often helped him at his table during the shows.  Back in the 90′s the MARS show was actually a cool show.  All the big names were there (even though they weren’t necessarily “big” names yet): Barczyk, McCurley, Gniazdowski, Barker, this list goes on.

None of the other parties of this conversation will remember this but me (and it will be evident why after you read it).  Ian and I were standing at his table and Kevin McCurley from NERD walked up carrying a ball python.  It was a bit unusual looking but it didn’t immediately grab me.  Ian and Kevin were talking about ball pythons and I wasn’t paying too much attention.  During the conversation Brian Barczyk walked up and joined in on the talk.  Within a minute or two Brian had agreed to buy the ball python from Kevin for an amount that is nobody’s business but Kevin’s and Brian’s but I remember thinking, “Why the $%$#@ did Brian just pay that much for a frickin’ ball python?’  Over the course of the next few minutes several more ball pythons were purchased for dollar amounts that I thought transcended insane.  And here’s where I made the single biggest mistake of my life:  I turned away from the three of them, muttering under my breath, “A ball python is a ball python.  Anybody who pays more than $65 for one is crazy.”  And that was the last of it.  I blindly kept my focus on breeding burmese, rainbow boas, kingsnakes and boas.  Little did I know that if I had paid a little more attention, just a little more, I may have been there at a moment when it was all beginning.  Instead I walked away, arrogant and blind to the opportunity.  Had I not been such a fool on that day you might know my name the way you know the others who were in that conversation that day; Gniazdowski, Barczyk, McCurley, and Weaver.  Huh?  Who the hell is Weaver?  Oh, he’s the guy who walked away from the conversation that defined the next fifteen years of the ball python industry.  Smart guy.

The lesson learned that day is that I don’t know it all.  People have insights that I don’t see and I need to be less arrogant and open to the possibilities.  Ball pythons could have been a bust.  But they weren’t  and my close mindedness cost me more than just a few dollars.

Pay attention, something new is coming.  Don’t miss it the way that I did.

Cheers,

Colin (ahem!) Weaver

In the past year we have had several animals stolen from the table.  A male clown ball python was stolen last summer at White Plains.  A Green Tree Python was stolen from the table at the Hamburg show last fall.  A Lemon Blast ball python was stolen from the table at the last MARS show.  I know who took the Lemon Blast and a reckoning will come.  The list goes on.  At the White Plains show  on 1/25/09 we had a Brazilian Rainbow Boa stolen from the table.  Two guys worked together (which is common).  One was actually caught before getting out of the building but the one who had the snake got away.

All show vendors are waiting for the day when we can catch someone with an animal stolen from our table.  The collective group beating that will happen will be vicious.  The frustration of all the snakes lifted from table over the years will rain down upon the one soul who gets caught.  I am balling my fists in anticipation of that moment…