Posted by:
tspuckler
at Thu Feb 3 17:59:20 2011 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by tspuckler ]
The problem with that idea would be that a number of corn snakes are "hobby" snakes as they've been crossed with Emory's Rats and Grey Rats - and therefore hybrids. You can bet that the lineage of all these snakes has not been tracked and even if a few are passed off as "pure" they'll (and most likely they already have) infiltrate the hobby.
A number of kingsnake morphs are actually crosses of subspecies -those would be "hobby snakes" too.
Ever try to get a straight answer on the "white sided" gene? There's reason to believe it was created in some types of snakes via hybridization.
No one can verify that anything is "pure." In the late 1980s I'd visit importers and several times snakes were ID'd as "Hondurans" that quite obviously weren't. Tracing lineage to a source out of the country is fraught with errors as many countries have been known to collect reptiles and then ship them to another contry where they are legal to export from.
Even wild-caught snakes aren't necessarily not hybrids. If a yellow ratsnake and corn snake breed in the wild, then all future generations from that pairing would be hybrids. And many of those hybrids down the line could look exactly like a "pure" yellow rat or corn snake.
I'm not a fan of hybrids and I know a lot of hybrid breeders like to cast doubt on the purity of things to feel better about their Frankensteinesque pastime, but the reality is that no one can prove anything - even with one subspecies - like Hondurans.
So in essence every snake is a "hobby snake." And if intergrade or hybrid means "hobby snake" then there's a number of wild snakes that are also "hobby snakes" - even though they aren't involved in the captive reptile breeding hobby.
Tim
Third Eye
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RE: Can't we just say... - tspuckler, Thu Feb 3 17:59:20 2011 