Donna,
....I think this is an excellent topic for discussion. I do not sell Boa Constrictors but I do sell Rainbow Boas. I sell many of them one or two at a time to people who seem to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable and I wholesale a bunch of them. What I have noticed is that people who seem to be knowledgeable and enthusiastic here on the forums often are not posting and in many cases not even keeping snakes as soon as a year after they have had a big presence here on the forums. Selling wholesale and having some of your snakes go to petstores is perhaps not any worse for them in the long run. BTW, many of the snakes sold at wholesale do go to excellent brick and mortar and internet reptile stores.
....Snakes are prolific animals. They reproduce at a fairly young age and have relatively large litters. In the wild this is necessary because so few of them do make it to an age and size where they can reproduce. I am sure that some of the snakes I sell go to people who see them and just have to have the pretty snake but never learn enough to properly care for them and do kill them. I try to look on the bright side and consider the fact that my captive born baby snakes have an enormously better chance of living a long productive life than if they had been born in the wild.
....When I first started keeping Rainbow Boas there were many more of them available as wild caught animals than were available as captive born animals. Over the years that difference has completely reversed. Today the majority of Rainbow Boas sold in the USA were born here. The CITES import export data also indicates that the number of baby Rainbow Boas produced here in the USA and then exported to other countries is growing. We may soon reach the point where the US exports more Rainbow Boas than it imports. We breeders are taking some pressure off the demand to take them from the wild and we should be proud of that. Of course if we could be sure that all of our baby snakes went to the right people we could be even more proud of our accomplishments.
....There is another aspect to consider. When we bought or captured our first wild snake we each personally added to the pressure to collect them from the wild. We have a responsibilty to try to produce enough captive born snakes to offset that continuing economic pressure to collect them from the wild.
Jeff


>>I'm new to the business... so asking this about wholesale buyers. Sometimes I see their ads in the classified, stating that they will buy your lots of baby boas. Has anyone sold to these wholesalers? Do you think it's a good thing to do? (I'm wondering do the boas just go to the pet stores as fodder for amateur snake killers?) Is this a good way to sell off your normals or neonates you can't sell otherwise? would you do it? Why or why not.
>>
>>Donna
>>1.0 Chihuahua mix
>>2.0 Cockatiels
>>1.1 Boa constrictors
>>0.4 Andalusian horses
>>0.1 Clydesdale/paint horse

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