Re: Breeding vs Morals and Ethics
crossing a milk snake and a rat snake or something in the same family in my opinion is not a immoral or unethical thing to do. I consider myself a member of the scientific community and I have never heard amongst my peers or superiors that hybrids are wrong. In fact a few doctors in the field of zoology are fascinated by hybrids and have tried to create a few to see where things genetically match up. Speciation means that the crosses may or may not occur in nature due to size, location, breeding habits, and mating times. Animals are not harmed and the offspring are viable and fertile with this type of cross. Seeing as no harm is done the only people to really get upset are people in the pet trade. They get upset because blood line might become muddied up. Something might be passed off as a corn snake when it is actually a rat/corn hybrid. So that deals with ethics and what is socially acceptable. To this day I still don’t understand why the snake community has such an issue with these types of crosses. Almost every other animal hobby out there contains crosses. Dog breeding, cat breeding, horse breeding, fish breeding, goats, cows, ducks, chickens… Not to mention some of these crosses happen naturally or are for the greater good of the animal. For example a dog that has a great dane sire and a collie mother is less likely to have the heath problems that a pure great dane would have. Hence lengthening the animals life and providing a better quality of life since there is no way the animal is inbred and the gene pool stays fresh.
Lets start with 100 unrelated corn snakes 50 male 50 female
If we take 1 male or female from each litter than after generation 2 we have 50 clean unrelated corns
Next generation 25
Next 12
6
3
Now we have a problem. Everything although distantly is related. We could inbreed which could cause health problems since genes work in pairs and the animal is more likely to inherit the defected gene. There are no more corn snakes. You had the last 100. Should you inbreed and risk passing on sickness and deformity or should you bring in some fresh genes from a closely related species? Personally I am strongly against inbreeding and would rather see the hybrid. Just my thoughts, sorry to offend.
Also as a side note hybrids are sterile crosses are not.
Horse x Donkey = not the same thing so steril
Wolf x Labradore = same thing and fertile (as a cladist i feel dometicus and lupus are incorrect but...)
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2.0 Black Rat Snake 0.1.1 Corn Snake 1.0 Pueblan Milk Snake 1.1 Cali King 1.0 Pastel BP 0.1 BCI 1.0 Anery Boa 1.1 horses
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