Pecto ball pythons and the ethics of keeping reptiles... etc

[elevatethis]

What importer/distributor? I work at a co, and claims go all around that the animals are exclusively captive bred. Plus stores have a few options of where to buy from...

I won't drop any names, but if you've been to any major shows on the east coast, you've seen him.

If any distributor is selling in lots of 50-100 or more, 99 out of 100 times the animals are captive hatched from Africa. A lot of importers and distributors blur the line between captive bred and captive hatched.

You just can't buy captive bred normals like that...yet...as far as ball pythons go, large scale captive breeding is starting to ramp up. It will be a few years before captive bred production even makes a dent in the total demand every year, though, but we'll get there eventually.

 

[Ophiuchus]

Elevate is right. There's "captive born" (also known as captive hatched) and then there's "captive bred", which is often abbreviated as CBB (captive born AND bred) as not to be confused with the acronym CB.

An example of the former is when an adult gravid female is captured and happens to give birth in a warehouse somewhere. To be technical, the offspring is captive-born, but healthwise, the near equivalent to a WC neonate. It probably inherits msot of the parasites its mother had, and the only real difference is that humans actually got to watch.

 

[elevatethis]

An example of the former is when an adult gravid female is captured and happens to give birth in a warehouse somewhere. To be technical, the offspring is captive-born, but healthwise, the near equivalent to a WC neonate. It probably inherits msot of the parasites its mother had, and the only real difference is that humans actually got to watch.

This is actually not true; captive hatched babies are usually just as healthy as captive bred and born babies, but the difference is that the Captive born (aka Captive Hatched and Imported) babies have a whole ocean to cross plus the stress of being handled by the importer who buys 1000, then sells to distributors who buy groups of 100, then sell to the pet stores that only want 10.

The problem is how long it takes for them to get from Africa to the consumer. I have a couple Captive Hatched animals in my collection and have no had any problems with them; HOWEVER, you have to know WHERE and WHEN in the year to buy them. African exporters do not make large shipments year round. They have a distinct collecting and hatching season that takes place from January to May. If you go to a show in April-May and see fresh captive hatched imports, you probably won't have a whole lot of trouble with them.

What I'm saying is that the babies available in the later months in the year at Petco or other places are the leftovers and have probably been sitting in warehouses or distribution facilities for months with minimal care and attention.

And you never really know where they came from unless you buy captive bred and born animals from a breeder. All the hatchlings I produced this year went from my incubator right into my rack, and then direct into their new owner's home.

Which animal would you feel better about owning?

 

[Ophiuchus]

Well, I will still satnd by my previous statement in that "captive-hatched" (or captive born for the livebearers) can be pretty general.

I have read/heard that the people who collect BPs do practice what I mentioned before about capturing gravid females, letting them lay their eggs in captivity, and then advertizing the offspring as "captive-hatched," which is technically true. I don't know about other types of parasites, but I have read in more than a few sources that there is a type of tick that follows the reproductive cycle of BPs. The ticks attach to the adult snakes. When the female snake lays eggs, the ticks also lay their eggs among the python eggs, and when the baby snakes hatch, the "ticklets" attach to them.

I read about this in the old Advanced Vivarium Series by de Voslijli (or whatever it is...lol), as well as few other places. That was 5 yrs ago, so it may be bogus now....but thats where I'm coming from when I said all that.

I do agree with you, elevate, in that CB could just as well mean what you had described, but its still miles away from saying CBB.

So in a nutshell, "captive-born" means nothing to me. In my mind, its a crap shoot; could be from a legit source...or it could be from a scenario as I just described. If its not CBB, I'm not that interested.

 

[elevatethis]

I've never heard of the tick thing...I'll have to ask around about it. I think the better explanation for ticks being around the offspring of WC females is that the person who imports them doesn't bother to erradicate the infestation, and just keeps a generally "dirty" collection.

The other thing is that the vast majority of captive born babies don't come from WC females that are shipped over here gravid...a few make it over here but not much. Often times, eggs from these females go bad during incubation, the hatch rate isn' very high probably due to the stress of shipping.

The snake ranchers over there get ball eggs in two ways. One, they collect wild gravid females from the Bush, wait for them to lay their eggs, then release the female back into the wild. The other way is to simply rob the holes that the females get into where they incubate their eggs, and let the female go again to produce another year.

However, I do believe that ball pythons are being bred in captivity in Africa as well. Trappers have seen the captive breeding going on over here, the price of the morphs, and are certainly aware of what's going on. I've seen those guys walking around with video cameras at the Daytona Show and it's not a bunch of natives over there beating drums and digging snakes out of the ground...its a profitable industry run by intelligent individuals. I believe that every year there are more and more CBB snakes from Africa that are mixed in with the CH stuff.