Kingsnake.com - Herpforum - This is just a hobby to most.....

Posted by: Kevin_Arbogast at Thu Nov 6 08:31:57 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Kevin_Arbogast ]

.....and most hobbiest don't care about business models or marketing stratagies. I am a hobbiest breeder and I breed the animals I love so I can produce some really nice examples to keep myself and sell the surplus. That is essentially the heart of the reptile hobby, and it is the right of any keeper to breed how ever many of what ever they want and to sell their surplus offspring at what ever price. Anything less and this will not be the hobby I have loved for over twenty years.

I actually laugh at the "wannabe" mini business mogels that spend so much time at shows visibly networking and acting like their on the floor of the NYSE. Although that is not my idea of the hobby, more power to them, but I also have the right to be amused by it and choose a different path.

To play devils advocate for a minute, I have seen many under fed yearlings for sale at shows this year. The high dollar morphs or keepers are 2 to 3 times the size of the less "valuable" inventoried yearlings. How is that about the love for the animals? And it is some well know breeders tables that I have noticed this. I get not wanting to feed a bunch of surplus offspring, so drop the price to a level that you are not stuck with stuff that you don't want.

There is a lot of resentment towards ball pythons in the general herp hobby and it has less to do with people being turned off by BPs and a lot more to do with the greed that is associated with BP keepers. I feel this is unfair because most of us, like myself, keep them because we really like them regardless of the "market" conditions for a decent return on investment. Unfortunately, the minority of BP breeders obsessed with ROI have given this part of the hobby a very negative image.

There is nothing wrong with trying to make money off of a hobby that you love as long as you are willing and understand the risks involved. The thing with herps is that they are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. You can hold onto your spiders all you want and try to get price A, but if the herp buying public only wants to pay price Z, then you will just end up keeping a lot of extra spiders that will end up turning into underfed yearlings that will end up selling at or close to price Z in the end. Yeah, that makes sense!

The "business" people will probabley get ticked off by my post, and that is cool with me, but I think most hobbiest get where I am coming from. Bottom line in my opinion the market crasher is a myth, and that people who drop prices are simply doing so to move their animals at a pace that is best for them. This is also a way of brining "back door" pricing to the public and allows everyone to see the real selling price.