Mostly on the way you feel about it. Line breeding done for too many generations will start producing offspring that may show some negative recessive traits (technically in the wild, most of the morphs in BP would be considered negative traits. Especially the albinos).



I am working on a russian tortoise breeding project, and one of the females I bought turned out to be gravid, laid an egg, and 3 weeks ago it hatched. I'm hoping this baby will turn out to be a female just so I can avoid inbreeding (and so that I will have a 1.3 breeding colony/not have to house two males in seperate enclosures). If it turns out to be a male, I won't house him with the females, but when they are outside in their outdoor pen, there isn't much I can do to stop them (besides building a seperate pen for him).



I prefer to try to use unrelated animals simply because you get more genetic diversity, but it depends on what your goals are. I'm probably going to start breeding normal BP's (just for fun), and I want to try my hardest to only use unrelated breeders.



It depends on how you feel about it, but i think anyone here will agree that if your inbreeding produces undesirable traits (unhealthy babies, etc.) you should do some outbreeding instead.

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