One of the interesting things about my collection is that I work mostly with snakes I can find in the wild...several localities of Emory's rats, Slowinski's corns, green rats, Sonoran gophers, desert kings and Cal kings, for instance. I like being able to work with them in the wild too, as well as the fact that I can collect my own breeder stock. Producing babies is fun, but I only do it when I need to continue the line, such as with my Brazos Island ratsnakes.

I believe a keeper needs to really like the species they work with to be the happiest with what they are doing. I may start up with a couple Asian species again now that I know that I have a good climate and operating room for them. My bimacs and diones have done very well for me here and I believe I could do well with a couple more like Orthriophis sps and/or mandarinus.

Cheers....Terry


>>Matt - I know what you are saying, but if everyone sells off their breeders of "unpopular" species, then who has those snakes? Will they breed them / sell offspring - represent them properly? I've thought many times about getting out of meahllmorum because they don't sell well - but I don't because I really like them - and maybe some day, others will start to value them as I do...
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>>BTW - there is nothing wrong with taking a break from breeding a species. It has been 3 years since I bred meahllmorum - I will be trying the possible het reverse-striped which are also Nueces County locale this season...
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>>And... This might be somewhat controversial for some - but I don't have a problem with folks feeding unwanted babies off to other things (indigos, kings, snapping turtles, whatever..) and have even given some of my extra babies to a friend for food for his animals. I think this might actually be preferable to selling a bunch of babies to a wholesaler and then seeing your babies in the classifieds selling for way too little for a year or more - BEEN THERE - won't do it again...
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>>-----
>>-Toby Brock
>>Southwestern Center for Herpetological Research

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