Breeding an animal with an obvious physical deformity sounds like a bad idea to me. Deformities may not show up in the first generation offspring, but if someone were to breed two of those babies together they could end up with problems.

With leopard geckos this ended up happening with patternless morphs and kinked tails. Due to initial high price people were loath to remove animals with kinked tails from breeding colonies resulting in the widespread perpetuation of this trait. It's taken subsequent breeders multiple generations of very careful selection of breeding stock and lots of out crossing to get rid of this trait in their colonies.

I guess I just don't see any benefit to risking the perpetuation of a trait like this in the captive population by breeding this female. At the very least, anyone recieving offspring from this female should be informed about the mother's condition so that they can make informed descision when desciding to purchase and breed those snakes.

-Alice

[ Hide Replies ]

• tri-hog first timer - jimfmcdonald, Fri Mar 2 23:30:19 2007
• RE: tri-hog first timer - Lucien, Sat Mar 3 20:11:47 2007
• RE: Sounds like a bad idea - aliceinwl, Wed Mar 7 21:17:26 2007
• NOOOOOO!!!!!!! - philbradley1, Thu Mar 8 12:28:30 2007
• Clarification - jimfmcdonald, Thu Mar 8 19:35:46 2007
• RE: Clarification - Dillybird, Fri Mar 9 07:30:34 2007
• RE: tri-hog first timer - tom, Thu Mar 8 14:43:27 2007