Below Duffy brought up an interesting point, how much to pay for snakes. I personally don’t buy snake (for the most part) most of the animals I have I trade for or kept my own babies. There are very few snakes in my current collection that I ever paid for. My original Striped Corn Snake I paid $15.00 for in 1996 (I think it was) the last year the Expo was held in Orlando and a 1.1 Zigzag snow corns that I paid $35.00 for the pair at the same expo (you can get really good deals the last day of the expo on baby corns snakes, but that was also 8 years ago too)
Two years ago I paid $250.00 for a Salmontine Boa from Basically Boas and it was a bargain and a half, the snake is beautiful and breeds well (thanks Mike and Steph).
Most of my snakes are bartered for, they way the hobby was meant to be. Some of my Boas are very High End snakes costing well over $1,000.00 for. If I ever paid that kinda of money for my snakes I would not have my wife of 15 years, nor would I be able to feed my children and put gas in my car…. So on and so forth. I have a few folks that we trade babies every couple of years, some guys that I have dealt with for years and we like each others babies and bloodlines. Now I know none of us would be raising, breeding, or keeping as many snakes as some of us do if they did not make some kind of money, the cost of new cages, food, electricity for lights and heat and the time and space they take up dictates that we must earn so of the money to maintain our collection. And there are still others who are indeed professional snake breeders and make their living off of breeding snakes. But I prefer the barter method of getting and keeping snakes.
It may not always come out right dollar for dollar, but those are really just made up values any way. If I have a really nice Striped Ghost Corn and I want a really nice Butter corn is the couple of dollars difference in value even worth dealing with if someone wants to make the trade? I don’t think so. I have fun with this hobby because it keeps me at home with my family, it is with animals that I love to work with, it is self supporting and pays for a nice trip here and there.
Putting a price tag on a snake is almost an impossibility. The value of the animal is going to be different to each keeper. There may be lots of cheap guys like me who prefer to trade then buy, but on the other hand there may be another person who does not wish to wait and wants all the possible morphs right now so they can get started breeding them ASAP.
The value is going to be up to the buyer, the breeder just puts the price tag on the snake and hopes that the buyer can see the value of his/hers labor.
Thanks for reading
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Jim Hopkins "Hoppy"
Hopkins Holesale Herps
Hopfam1@aol.com