The easiest way to get a pied is to buy a pied! That way you can admire it and enjoy it yourself. Hets don't look any cooler than normals (not that normals are boring, I think they're great).

The previous post suggested buying het pairs and perhaps a slew of % possible hets. If you like keeping well up to 10 animals or so just because you want to produce one morph animal, be my guest. If you are willing to buy, house, feed, and care for that many animals, just because the initial sticker shock of buying the morph seems daunting, you will probably burn up a lot more money and effort in the process than you would have in just buying the morph.

From the marketing standpoint, if you were to breed a het male to a het female, then you would produce some Pieds and more 66% possible hets - which are not the greatest buy out there. Since everybody pretty well butchered this explanation on their first few attempts (no offense guys), here is the URL to my response in a thread where I explained a lot of this in detail:

http://forums.kingsnake.com/view.php?id=1256091,1256735

The thread was about axanthics, which are a different morph than piebalds of course, but both are recessive, and so the inheritance is the same for both morphs.

Now, from the standpoint of "how do I go about producing a piebald?" Yes, a het X het breeding could get you there, but the offspring from a pied X het pied breeding will be much more valuable when you in turn want to sell the babies you worked so hard to produce. Shop around and find a deal you are comfortable with to get an unrelated male & female pair that consists of one piebald animal and one het piebald animal. Prices vary a lot, so shop around to find out which route you want to go. Females should be at least 3 years old, and weigh over 1500 grams before you should attempt to breed them. Males can be bred quite a bit younger, and I won't attempt to define how much younger, as there is a lot of debate on this.

Good luck to you! This is an addictive hobby (as if you couldn't already tell). Educate yourself as best as you can on genetics before you invest in morphs, and it will save you a lot of headaches and lost money.

~Rebecca



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0.1 Dumeril's Boa '04 (Courtney)
1.2 Ball Pythons



0.2 American Pit Bull Terriers (40lb darling lap dogs:Brandy&Mara)

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