>>The rest of the people are the the ones with $30.-$100. in their spending quota and thats not going to carry the colubrid market. So at this time there is zero interest in colubrids.



You bring up a good point and one I touched on in a reply above. I think the Colubrid breeders are staying away because they can't hope to cover all their expenses especially when they're not selling animals with starting prices of $500 - $1000 or more. The thing that scares me is that this could have a really bad impact on Colubrid breeding because people from here on out might expect to be able to make seriously big money on any breeding project. Can you imagine everybody jumping on the bandwagon to try and breed Coxi or Gonysoma?



It'd be cool to see lots of tables selling those snakes, but only initially. Then you'd see the artificial price controls on the market - people breeding Coxi and complaining because someone else is selling cheaper and ruining their profit margins. Or worse yet, people selling Ratsnakes and touting themselves as breeders of 'Investment Quality' animals. I about gagged every time I saw that joke of a catch phrase on someone's booth.



I only hope that if Colubrids come back into popularity in the next couple years that it isn't at the expense of the hobby and by that I mean selling only ridiculously high-dollar animals that only other breeders or people with tons of disposable cash can touch. That, and I hope that the 'new' generation of herper is still able to appreciate normal average snakes and not just some high-dollar manufactured cultivar of an animal, because after all that's all these morphs really are, just the snake version of some fancy rose. Something completely unnatural and manufactured, solely to make something new and different and to ulimately make money. It's a sad day when the average hobbyist will cease to appreciate a normal snake for what it is.
-----
Matt Campbell



"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." John Muir

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