I just read the thread from 12/27 about the old days before the internet, and it got my gums working, so here's how it REALLY was.
Why, when I was your age, I remember sitting in my back yard on a summer day reading a price list from a Florida herp dealer that my friend had gotten in the mail (the mail in those days was folded paper and came with a stamp on it, and it didn't beep). We salivated (we could still salivate then....sigh) over the cool stuff, but the prices! Way out of the league of a couple of pre-teens in the '60s (that's the NineTEEN sixties). Emerald Tree Boas (Amazon Basins) topped the charts at--now, brace yourself--$30 each.
I remember visiting the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange and seeing some of the first Burmese Pythons offered. Back then, the typical Indian python was the Indian Python, P. molurus. The Exchange had some knockout Eastern Indigos that day, 3 feet long, $5 per foot, and something called a Children's Python, but nobody knew any more about it than the name.
My favorite local pet shop had a good herp selection. Baby BCI for $8 each, and occasionally an Eastern Indigo for $18. In those days, the animals were shipped in heaps piled into crates, and stuffed into display cages in pet stores, and not fed. The ones that died ended up on the bottom of the pile and turned to soup. The herp trade then was just a mass grave. The specimens were cheap, but their lives were, too.
Now, baby boas come in their own little deli cups, with food in their stomachs, and they've never seen a parasite (did you know that Emerald Tree Boas get little ticks in their labial pits, or that wild pythons have ticks that are colored and shaped to resemble the snakes' scales? Nice.). Back in my day, there was no such thing as a herp vet, and no one would have used one anyway, because who takes a $2 lizard to the vet?
So, now Amazon Basin Emerald Tree Boas are $2,000 and baby BCI are $100. Collector-grade Suris are offered for $600 and up, and most vet offices in my neck of the wasteland keep a herp doc on staff. The friendly competition between collectors has become as much about the quality of life they can provide for their animals as about the look of the animals themselves. Oh, and the pressure on wild populations has changed, which was the golden promise of captive breeding in the first place, plus anyone, with patience and a bit of money, can have access to an array of species far greater and more reliable than the iffy, ever-changing, politically volatile international wildlife trade ever offered.
I think I like your days better.
