Breeding vs Morals and Ethics

[CDN_Blood]

Oops...poll didn't kick-in...please stay tuned...

Ethics and morals play a role in breeding reptiles, particularly in snakes. While a lot of people will readily create intergrade* or even hybrid** snakes, it's not really done with other herps such as lizards or frogs. This begs the question of why are people so liberal about it.

The boiled down root of that question leads us to a matter of ethics and morals. Make no mistake, these two things are not the same, so let's break it down so we're all reading from the same page...

Morals define personal character, while ethics stress a social system in which those morals are applied. In other words, ethics point to standards or codes of behaviour expected by the group to which the individual belongs. This could be national ethics, social ethics, professional ethics, or even family ethics. So while a person’s moral code is usually unchanging, the ethics they practice can be other-dependent.

Since hybridizing animals is universally considered unethical by the zoological and scientific communities, I cannot present that aspect in a poll. That leaves us with a question of morals, and since I’m a curious kinda guy who enjoys reading statistics, I thought I’d poll those willing to respond to gather some stats on this debate. Oh sure, we’ve debated it endlessly in other threads, but this one will give us some numbers to consider (I hope). So…

My question is this:
Do you consider creating intergrades and/or hybrids a moral or ethical issue?

Give yourself time to consider the factors before you vote, and consider the definitions of intergrade and hybrid outlined below when voting. Remember that you don't have to add any blurb about why you voted as you did if you wish to remain anonymous.

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*intergrade: the process of merging into each other in a series of stages, forms, or types (e.g. Morelia intergrades are different subspecies of Morelia family bred together to create a new form of the original over time, such as Jaguar Pythons)

**hybrid: an animal (in this case) resulting from a cross between genetically unlike individuals (e.g. ‘Bateaters’ are a hybrid resulting from breeding a Burmese Python to a Reticulated Python)