Making mars hospitable is a ten million times harder job than saving the planet we already have…
Repopulation would also lead keepers to think “I don’t want my snake anymore, I’ll just set it free for the good of the species”… Look at the Everglades.
Known snake catchers claim that they release 10% back into the wild.
So they catch a pregnant female/recently layed eggs and release 10% of the offspring back where they came from.
Is this enough to keep the species afloat in say 100 years or will we see ball pythons on a wild animal endangered list at some point?.. Genuine question.
This conversation has been derailed significantly.
There is a significant difference between the original topic and drawing a parallel with zoos. With only a couple exceptions I do not disagree that most zoos are not setup to adequately provide for the full range of needs for larger mammals. However, comparing the keeping and breeding of ball pythons to zoos or even keeping lions and tigers is a false equivalency.
As far as wild populations that is a fair point and would be curious to see if anyone has any actual data regarding the population impact on native specimens. As to releasing captive bread ball pythons back into the wild how many do you think would survive predation considering the number of flamboyant color and pattern combinations? There is also no way of knowing what other things we have affected such as natural immune systems. We tend to keep our snakes in “ideal” conditions reducing the exposure to diseases and parasites. What happens when you release a breeding age adult from captivity back to its “native” environment? While I made the argument earlier that this was a bonus, and I maintain that it is for the snakes we care for, it would have an inverse effect releasing them back into the wild. It may seem like a strange dichotomy, but one that needs considering when discussing releasing back into the wild.
Again let’s get back on topic the false equivalency arguments are getting as bad if not worse than the original video.
Releasing phenotypicly altered ball pythons back to their native habitat is in no way the same as Burmese pythons released in Florida. Burmese Pythons in Florida have NO natural predators and as such are apex predators.
I just wanted to point out with the discussion on importation/releasing captive-bred pythons.
Importation serves the purpose of introducing new genes to avoid a lot of genetic drift and bottle-necking in the captive populations. In theory, it will decrease the number of deformities seen in hatchlings. I have read somewhere on this forum that breeding completely unrelated cinnamon ball pythons together seems to greatly reduce the number of kinked spines. Eventually all of the animals of a certain color/morph/line (as that’s the point of line breeding) will have similar genetics and it is beneficial to the population as a whole to have “wild-type” genetics added back in.
Along with that thought, the majority, if not all, of our beloved morphs originated from wild-caught imports. That means that some of these combinations do exist in the wild. Albinos exist in almost every species of animal and enough of them survive to adulthood to reproduce. I’m not saying I would elect my bananas or my leucistics to be released, but as a whole, I think we all produce enough normal or classic ball pythons, that those could be safely released.
I also agree with @shugr231 that the ball python is not truly domesticated. I have little to no doubt that enough of them could survive in their natural habitat. Their baser instincts have not been bred out of them.
Although regarding the video, I wish they’d made more of an effort to take into account that the conditions and time spent at an expo is only a fraction of the animal’s life. Or to examine the conditions of an animal in a pet home. I have seen more and more that people looking into getting a ball python as a pet are wanting to keep them in a bioactive enclosure. While these are typically vivs, inside them is as close to a “natural” environment as anyone can provide for them.
Back to the video. The elephant in the room here is that as keepers of captive bred animals we have had a hand in someway to the capture of wild animals, we also have confirmation biases because of what we hold dear to our hearts in the same way the makers of this video do, the difference is the large majority of the reptile keepers community are constantly learning from science, experience with our animals and the facts of our passion where as the vast majority of PETA members are blinded by beliefs and purposefully create misinformation to perpetuate their cause.
As an environmentalist I share some of peta’s underlying principles but they have such radical beliefs they have become fundamentalists, using any means necessary to fuel their cause, something I cant ever get behind as someone who uses scientific evidence and experience based knowledge which allows my opinion to change based on fact and not belief.
Which leads nicely toward the cutting off of snakes heads for ceremonial medicine… We only need to look at traditional chinese medicine which is a faith based folk medicine to see the horror of allowing people to go unchallenged in their beliefs for the sake of not upsetting the believer. Educational institutions are the only way we can get them to change their beliefs about using rhino horn or python heads.
The poster literally says they “ posted this video because of its controversial and BS content.”
What the what?!
Why throw a match on an incendiary topic just to watch it burn?
Do we really need another issue to argue about right now?
Debate is great; however inciting a discussion based on self-confessed BS is an excercise in time-wasting near trollish behavior.
And come on? Ball pythons?! The cats of the reptile world? that has been bred so successfuly into so many lovely morphs?
And the comments about some people not needing a bp. lots of people are unqualified for any pet — I hardly see that as a reason to condemn the ownership of that animal.
So because it is a emotional topic we should just brush it under the carpet?
A lot of the way the video is displayed is the exact same way certain organisations behave, how are we going to form a organised and clear argument against them if we have never discussed the subject.
When would be a preferred time to discuss this? A global pandemic has no effect on this subject.
If you find it time wasting, you are free to ignore this thread and have a look around others, but I’m sure as you do you will find I am far from a troll.
A little interruption as some will notice a few posts were removed by the staff and others were edited, our mission here is to elevate the discussion and this is definitely not accomplished by name calling, criticizing, making fun of and/or picking on someone’s attributes.
So if this is how one thinks he/she must preface their side of the argument I will encourage them to take a good look in the mirror first.
Debate intelligently and respectfully whether or not the other side you are debating is present.
Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.
Additionally
When you see bad behavior or a possible TOS violation, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it . If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.
I have no argument. I saw absolutely nothing wrong with this video. Ball Pythons deserve to live short lives in the wild and die a natural death, like being chopped in half for voodoo or eaten by a small cat or a monkey alive, slowly. Keeping snakes in clean comfy cages and feeding them sufficiently so they live long lives is abuse, full stop.
I’m obviously kidding. This was a complete waste of 24 minutes. Took real patience to get through.
I made sure to contact the musician who’s music was used to let them know their creative content was being repurposed for bullshit propaganda. Not sure how the comments became an argument when we can all agree.
With the exception of a new morph popping up, I do not really see the need for WC ball pythons.
But tell me, how may captive bred mainland phase Oligodon purpurescens have you seen available in the industry? I will save you the effort of looking, the answer is: ZERO. So, if I would like to work with this species and establish it in the hobby, how would you suggest I go about that?
There are two sides to the coin and you cannot paint with a broad brush that what applies to one species must apply to all.
For species already established in captivity, absolutely not. However, for some species, taking a reasonable number to establish a safe and legal pet trade would reduce the demand for WC specimens of that species. Hopefully then, future specimens would be CB and there would be no need to take animals from the wild any more.
(Example: Crested gecko, which were thought to be extinct until they were re-discovered in 1994 and introduced to the pet trade, where they thrived).
Obviously we should always be very careful capturing animals from the wild for the pet trade. Must be done responsibly with regards to wild population etc… etc…
And just to add to your point, how are we to go about establishing a breeding group of a endangered species? Getting some from the wild that’s how. To save a species you will need to take some from the wild and establish a captive breeding group, and just like what @t_h_wyman said, you cannot paint with a broad brush to meet both sides of the debate. Great discussion all around though.
I am going to go against the grain a bit here and say yes, to some degree, we still need to pull specimens from the wild. We need, to some degree, a periodic injection of fresh genetics to maintain as much genetic diversity amongst our captive bred populations as possible.
The caveat to that is I am making an assumption that we are creating bottlenecks at various points in order to isolate genes for specific phenotypic expression. What impact is that having on the overall genetic diversity of captive bred ball pythons? I have no way of knowing for sure, and is something for our Dr. Moraeu crowd over in another thread who are actually geneticists and seem to have the access and ability to test such things.
We could be several decades away from any real issues here if we cut off all wild caught ball pythons. We know virtually nothing about the genetic diversity of our domestic bred ball pythons let alone natural population genetic diversity or sizes.
The fact is we are artificially determining fitness based on a very limited number of traits, we have no idea what other traits are being perpetuated or lost entirely in the captive bred populations.
When people ask about releasing back into the wild or bringing in new imports the honest answer is we really don’t have the data to support either side.
Because we’re still constantly outcrossing with normals and not just breeding within morphs, I actually don’t worry too much about creating bottlenecks. While it seems there is some inbreeding in the initial identification and expansion when a new morph is discovered, it’s a relatively sort amount of time before it starts getting crossed out with literally ever other morph we have, including normals. There’s enough outcrossing that I don’t worry about consanguinity the way I would if it were dog breeds or any other type of selective breeding.
Personally I don’t really think we need to be importing wild caught ball pythons anymore, we have plenty of genetic diversity within the captive ball python population that is enough to sustain the species just fine without worries of shrinking the gene pool too much.
This was my only point @t_h_wyman . We did our job, why shoud we do more?
I think saving species from Extinction with this method, is another discussion.
And now we just have a little bit language barrier, cause I don’t get this maybe right…
Do you mean to take animal from wild and make it as a pet for hobby, or in bigger scale industry (breed it to a pet markets…)?
Ah, but your statement was worded “broad brush” style: do we really need snakes, lizards, birds, from nature anymore? No clarification that you were speaking only for those that are well established versus those that are not
Either/or. Frankly, I do not see kukri becoming the next ball pythons, but it is possible a small sub-set of the hobby would like to get in to them. As such, I would prefer to be able to offer a stable CBB population. But I had to get WC imports to be able to do that. I could say the same for my Rhamphiophis.
But maybe there is another species out there that could become super popular and grow to be as large balls/corns/leopard geckos/crested geckos… You still need to bring in some base-level of animals from the wild to establish a stable CBB collection.
