I hope everyone is having a good new year. I've been lying low on the forums for a while because, to put it simply, it's not much of a fun place anymore.

My wife and I threw a Christmas party this year and for the first time in a while several of my herp friends were all together in the same room. A lot of them have moved onto breeding ball pythons. Personally I don't see the allure but I can tell you that as a community ball python breeders have a single purpose; to create beautiful snakes that they and others can enjoy. That night there was no back biting, no questioning of stocks or worry about purity just an enthusiasm for the hobby. It was, in a word, refreshing.

This got me thinking about the market and how we as colubrid breeders have been complaining that it's depressed. We tend to think of this reality in terms of market saturation and over supply or that "those damn ball pythons are just sucking up all the money" but is that really it, or is there something else at play?

Try this little mental exercise. Imagin for an instant you're newly into snakes and want to start keeping a few. Or you just got your first place and finally can keep some. You go to a show and talk to a colubrid guy who starts off on how pure his stock is and how you have to be really careful because there is so much misrepresentation out there and you might end up with something that isn't what you think. You hear this again and again. You go on the forums and hear the same negativity. Then you go to a ball python breeder's table and see, hear and feel enthusiasm for what they are doing. Jeez even if they aren't selling much they love what they're doing. You go to the BP forums and experience the same generally positive atmosphere.

Now I ask you, which community would YOU be drawn to? Would you really go to the one fraught with negativity? I've kind or riled against the fracturing of the colubrid community for some time so maybe I'm biased but I think the public infighting has damaged the market by scaring people away. Given there is an alternative, I think the damage might be severe and possibly even the root cause of the general collapse. I know that the SOLE reason I've never gotten into grey bands is because I don't want to pay a premium for locality stock only to have to face the prospect that some self appointed expert is going to attack me any breeder associated with my stock has the temerity to produce a phenotypic outlier. If it happened to Ric Blair it can happen to anyone.

Anyway just some food for thought the next time you feel like griping about how bad things are or about how buying colubrids is the wild wild west.

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“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Emmerson

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