"As a hobbyist that enjoys snakes in their natural form, I spend a lot of time field herping, and have put a lot of effort into collecting my own locality breeding stock. Most of my snakes were either collected by me, or descend from snakes collected by me. I do this to satisfy my own interests, to make myself happy.



At the same time I don't see how my interests in collecting and breeding locality snakes are really any more valid than someone else's interests in engineering his own snakes through crossbreeding, other than the fact that a very vocal portion of this hobby stigmatizes hybridization. With hybrids you can create something that has never before existed. You can take two animals that have qualities you find desirable, and cross them in hopes of creating something that is the best of both worlds. This is similar to what has been done with domesticated plants and animals for centuries. If you crossed an Everglades Rat Snake to a Honduran Milk Snake, you could end up with an attractive tricolor that climbs, and is content to sit out in the open on branches in its enclosure.



Snakes pure and hybrid alike get mislabeled all the time. I purchased a baby gray rat snake when I was 14... it grew up to be a yellow rat snake. I bought a group of Sinaloans when I was 16, but half of them ended up being Pueblans. I constantly see misidentified snakes on the classifieds and at reptile shows: Speckleds labeled as Florida kings, desert kings labeled as eastern kings, albinos labeled as hypo, etc. I have no doubt these are all mislabeled out of ignorance. It seems that to keep ahead as a buyer you have to know more than the sellers. In another post you mentioned that you purchased an anery Honduran that ended up being a different subspecies, and there were the albino eastern kings that were suspected of carrying some nigra influence. Neither of these were man made crosses. We are all responsible for the integrity of our own breeding colonies.




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