In his classic style, Aaron made a great post down thread that rally touched the heart of the Blaze pure stand off. In it he proposed the following deffinition of a generic animals, “a subspecies for which there is not a complete known lineage yet has no specific knowledge of anything being added to it and matches the wild phenotype”. He further added that, “Such animals would be considered pure with the understanding that there may be undetectable impurities in their backround”.
This is basically how I approach selling my animals that have unknown lineages. I sell them as the subspecies they appear to be IF I have no specific knowledge or reason to believe they have been crossed to anything else. This is the way things have gone on for years. Sean may have WC goini but he was also in diapers when I got my first pair. My guess is that 20 years from now nobody will be tracing their goini to his even if it’s the case.
This is why I do not like the use of either “pure” or “generic”. PURE DENOTED SOMETHING WE CAN NOT KNOW and in my estimation its continued use is less than honest. Taxonomically even wild caught locality specimens may not be “pure”. Intergrades are not “pure”. Animals that may look like classic subspeices but live adjecent integration zones may not be “pure” due to gene flow. Also, and some will argue with this, but sometimes wild snakes hybridize and its likely that some of these offspring end up breeding back to one of the parent species.
I can’t produce an equally complete argument against using the word “generic” other than that its use IMHO lends credability to those who make claims that their animals are “pure”. Those who need or desire to label stock as “pure” or “locality” are relative newcomers to the party and it seems to me that they need to make the case of how their stock is different.
