I love these discussions. I especially love it when all of us holier than thou "I guarantee all of my snakes are 100% purebred x or y species" are trying to convince someone to not breed two "subspecies" of snake together because it is going to "pollute the gene pool". Let me ask a couple of questions:
1. What gene "pool" are we referring to? Unless you are talking about the 2 actual species of snakes that there is a DNA regisrty for, then there is no "pool" that we know any real facts about. Theoretically there was at one time a 100% pure gene pool for each species of snake in the world, but in case you haven't been around this hobby long, we screwed that up about 30 years ago. If we wanted to keep these lines pure, we needed to start that back then.
2. Where did you get your current stock from? There are 3 possibilities here. A. You obtained them from someone who told you they were "pure". I'm sure they were well meaning and so were you, but that guarantee isn't worth the paper it wasn't written on. B. You caught them from a wild population yourself. In which case you are no more sure if it is 100% pure than if you obtained it from the well meaning person who guaranteed it was. Or C. You produced it yourself either from the animals from A. or from B. above, and these offspring cannot be guaranteed 100% pure any more than their parents
3. Did you have your animals DNA tested? If you say yes, please post those results for us to see. I will be the first to applaud you and say that anyone wanting to purchase 100% pure stock should be willing to pay a premium for your animals. If you say no, then please stop telling people to not do what you are already probably doing yourself.
4. Do you really think you can tell every subspecies intergrade from that of 100% pure stock just by looking at it? Firstly, you would have to have a guaranteed 100% pure stock animal to compare it to, which I'll bet you don't. Continued on next post if your not too mad

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