Your view of the reptile hobby

[poison123]

Thought jags were a morph?

[Mikoh4792]

Thought jags were a morph?

coastal morph

[AussieSnake]

I believe the original jags in Australia were illegally imported, therefore they were sold under the radar as Reduced Pattern Morphs for a long while. They are now out and proud sold as Jags. This is the inconsistency in Australia, some states allow breeding of sub species of Morelia as they are seen as Morelia, whereas some states see them as clearly defined sub species. This certainly doesn't stop any of it from happening, as the hobby is not policed all that closely. (f there is no money in it for the government, why try hey). There is always a lot of contention over here around the natural intergrade areas, and always posts on forums and facebook with the what is my carpet tagline. But luckily over here we still have a lot of breeders who only breed locality animals, so we still have good bloodlines.

[AussieSnake]

Aren't jags one subspecies?(from a coastal).

Those laws are pretty interesting. Is there a defined reason for why you can not produce intergrades in some states? Would it be illegal to cross naturally occurring intergrades such as coastal/jungles, coastal/diamonds...etc?

Jags are not even classed as a species by the relevant departments over here. And is there any such thing as a pure coastal jag? I thought the originals were a mix of coastal/jungle, not sure on that one.

There is no defined reason as to why you can cannot breed sub species, just archaic laws essentially. Technically, in Queensland where I live it would be "illegal" for me to breed say a coastal to a bredli, but as I said it doesn't stop it,i think even the authorities realise its silly. There is fairly well defined intergrade areas in the coastal/diamond geographic and even the coastal/jungle areas, but at the end of the day there is so much variation occurring naturally that its always going to be hard to define sub species except through quality locality breeding. Take this coastal pic for example that I removed from my local street.

But also in Queensland any outlet operating as a reptile shop/pet shop is only allowed to sell antaresia species of snake, but you can breed Morelia, aspidites etc and sell them from your home tax free. Kind of absurd.

[Roman]

I'm pretty sure in europe they have laws with regards to keeping reptiles, I.e. things like minimum cage sizes and what not. Thats what I read on facebook so it must be true.

Here in Germany we don’t have an actual law about enclosure size, but we have an official guide line. So normally there is no examination of your cage sizes, especially as you don’t have to report your animals (with the exception of protected animals like CITES etc.), but if you get in a dispute with the (local) administration about your animals and they inspect your housing conditions the vet who will do this will use these guide lines. Most staff of the nature conservation authority or veterinary office don’t know much about reptiles, so they will use these guide lines to evaluate your housing conditions.

If the size of your enclosure is approximately the same size as in the guide lines you might not have any issues, but if your enclosure is way to small you need some good and convincing arguments why this setup is still OK. This might proof difficult to say the least. So most keepers I know of use enclosures of an appropriate size. Of course there are also keepers who keep their snakes in racks and I haven’t heard of any problems they might have had so far.

I posted the following text some time ago in another context, it is a description of these official guide lines here in Germany…

You might take a look at the following document. It is an official guide line for keeping reptiles. It was published by our ministry for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection in 1997. This publication was a cooperation of ministerial staff, animal right groups and some representatives from the DGHT (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Herpetologie und Terrarienkunde - the German Herpetological society). It represents the minimum requirements for keeping each species. Obviously it is written in German, but after some pages with some preliminary text are tables which are easy to read and cover a lot of commonly kept reptiles

The tables are separated by group

Echsen = Lizards
Schlangen = Snakes
Krokodile = crocodiles
Schildkröten = turtels and tortoises

The columns are

- Name (scientific name)
- short description of the habitat and the geographical origin of the species (e.g. tropical, high humidity, arboricol, )
- Enclosure size (L x W x H, in reference to the length of the animal. E.g. if a snake is 4 ft long and the size should be 1,0 x 0,5 x 0,5 the enclosure should be 4 x 2 x 2 ft). For Lizards it is the enclosure size for 1,1, the length is head and body without tail, for the snakes it is the total length nose to tail end
- Basic temperature (in Centigrade) Tag/Nacht = day/night
- Max temperature basking place (in Centigrade)
for Lizards
- possible group mix 1,x = 1 male, several females plus possible life span e.g. (15-20) years
- remarks (sometimes there is a recommendation for the humidity = "Luftfeuchtigkeit")

http://www.bmelv.de/SharedDocs/Downl...ublicationFile (http://www.bmelv.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/Landwirtschaft/Tier/Tierschutz/GutachtenLeitlinien/HaltungReptilien.pdf;jsessionid=237C1F1AE9C2071DF4 B537C36A5669EE.2_cid296?__blob=publicationFile)


Switzerland has an actual law about proper cage sizes. I don’t know about other European countrys.

Roman