Inbreeding snakes

[Gary D.]

With the hobby now being a business to many the desire to produce morphs as quickly as possible, it seems inbreeding is more the norm than ever. What are the breeders and the hobbiest's on parent/offspring and sibling/sibling breeding. Short term, long term? What are your thoughts?

[Linds]

IMHO it all depends. Inbreeding is natural, and simply intensifies things. Many locality-specific animals have evolved in to the individual animals they are as a result. Problems arise when it becomes careless and completely uncontrolled. Often people will inbreed just because, not choosing the correct offspring in the first place and/or failing to cull animals that aren't 100% sound in every way. It works perfectly in nature because survival of the fittest comes in to play. That aspect has been taken away and as a result, we have to be extremely cautious if we choose to practice that.

With many morphs (such as albinos for example), the animal in question is already defective and would be killed off quickly in the wild. By continuing to intensify weak animals, we are now seeing many other accompanying defects down the road (such as one-eyed boa constrictors).

Either way I didn't vote because I go both ways on the subject. There's the right way and the wrong way imho :cool:

[Ptindy]

Like Linds said there is a right way and a wrong way. Inbreeding two normal ball pythons is just wrong because of the number available. But inbreeding say the rare satanic leaf tailed geckos which are hard to come by and to get to breed to begin with inbreeding willl have to take place. Adding WC's to a breeding colony of satanics is beneficial but soon this species will be rarely if not ever imported so you can only do so much to preserve the species in captive collections and inbreeding will have to take place. Morphs is a whole different thing because like Gary said, everyone wants them o nthe market ASAP to make some bucks and effects of inbreeding I think are long term and you wont see any for a while. I personally would rather get a pair of GTP's and breed those then a pair of pastels. You don't buy your hatchlings from GTP's you earn them, ball pythons you buy. Just my two cents.

Mike