While I do agree with you 100% Gregg, I think what Joe was referring to was not necessarily his own ideology but the wholesale culture as it stands.

Case in point, early this summer I had a lengthy conversation with a very well known and large breeder who also buys wholesale animals and flips them. He told me that he wanted to create a partnership with me so that I could supply him with hognose snakes and actually told me that he didn't care if they were fresh out of the egg and not even eating, as long as I could ship to him in large numbers, that was all that was wanted/needed. I basically told him that I didn't operate that way and would never willingly sell a non-feeding snake which would reduce the amount of animals being sold. Interestingly enough, he never got back to me, perhaps because I was unwilling to be a "snake mill", or who knows. But what I do know was that he expressed no real concern about establishment of the animals, it was all about numbers.

So with that said, it all comes down to the individual and what this hobby means to them. You and I both know people who are into this hobby solely for the money aspect of it as well as others that are simply into it for the love of the reptiles regardless of whether they make any money or not.

I think the hardest part of this hobby are those people that think they want to get into the breeding game without any idea of the cons that can sometimes outweigh the pros, like breeders that produce a bunch of animals that do not sell right away and end up having to be taken care of over the long haul which the breeder might not be able/willing to do; those are the people that are going to make certain short term decisions like market crashing or wholesaling animals at cheap prices regardless of the overall health of the animal. Unfortunately, I think that once somebody starts down that road, it becomes the "normal" way of doing business that just never goes back to simply being about the animals anymore.
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

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