Man if we had to go into such detail on every post we would be writing these huge long posts. It is almost imposable to post anything without having to clarify and on and on.
Here’s my take on old school/new school.
Maybe I am wrong, but I consider the Applegate style recipe documented in his milksnake maintenance manual to be the dividing line between “old school” and the new breeders.
The new way is to force what we want, having perfected a recipe for what we would consider success. I would say the new school is less about happy pet snakes and more about production and bang for your buck. Not that it is that cut and dried either.
FR never is shy about jumping in and defending/asserting himself or making his points. I read everything he posts. I know he is an icon in this hobby. He speaks for himself, I don’t mean to do that here, just explaining my perspective as a reader of his stuff.
FR seems to me, maybe I am wrong, to be less about efficient mass production recipe and more about letting the snake/monitor live as close to a natural cycle, observation, and letting that be your set of instructions- let the animal teach you, not the other way around.
FR seems to be always looking at it from the animals perspective. I relate it to “Ditmars style” Observation, observation, observation. Without that, you have nothing- no clue.
That’s the thing that FR seems to be most emphatic about - people who don’t have a clue. They haven’t put in the hours and they don’t know what to do when those things come up that are outside the recipe. Poor husbandry and poor maintenance. The recurring lament of the great FR in his posts.
I bet he is the master behind getting that recipe down pat with his years of observations. It is “new school” to take those discoveries to the max for full production advantage. It is true of both styles that the needs of the snakes are met, I just feel the new style places emphasis on meeting the needs of the breeder.
Old school is not derogatory or antiquated. It is the foundation. That is the basis for all that comes next.
I think a contributing factor to old school vs new school is the fact that when the (example) Pueblan milk was brought into herptoculture it was through the field collecting of nine specimens or whatever, they were the rarest of the rare. You absolutely had to baby each with the highest degree of tried-and-true successful maintenance. Once the recipe was determined and they were as common as chicken eggs, the new style breeders had the luxury of having a lot more room to experiment and margin for error. The experimenting went to high production, pushing the limits, taking more risk, and again tweaking the recipe for the new school style of maintenance for production. Both ways contribute to our knowledge and we can draw upon when establishing new things, hybrids, things that have never even existed before. The new style is like, o.k. lets see what we can do with it- lets try this... I bet FR has had his share of that too. Maybe he started out flipping rocks in Bedrock with Fred Flintstone- whatever.
All this is my perspective on this, nothing more. A detailed response to your feeling that I slighted the great FR in some way. Did I? I don’t think so. Let me say, that I would consider myself to be old-school. I am self taught, or taught by snakes. I aspire to become more the new style. Take all my hours of observation and old-school maintenance and refine my husbandry to the latest and most successful techniques of the cutting-edge hybrid breeders.
I can see the day when we take blood from a cycled female and transfuse it into 12 month old power-fed females, no brumating required, and the use of hormones, phernomes and artificial insemination to be the norm. We won’t order snakes from the classifieds, we will order sperm like prized bull production, or clones of patented creations. Do the “old school” breeders realize their roll in that futuristic vision becoming reality? I tip my hat to them but my vision of the future of herptoculture is decidedly “new school.” As Michael Corleone once said, “We’ll get there, Pop”.
