I have been given an opportunity to purchase 15 Ball Pythons at $100 a piece plus shipping. The worse snake in the group is a normal het pied female and tops out with a og/ghi/leopard/clown het pied adult female. The guy selling is getting out of BP and concentrating on Retics. I’ve seen pics and they look very nice. Does this sound to good to be true. This would double my inventory to 30 different morphs to work with. I’m so close to pulling the trigger and expand. This is how Chris Hardwick got started, he’s a good person to emulate imho.
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This is good only if you are picking up animals and morphs that you are passionate about. I wouldn’t buy a bunch of animals just to boost my numbers if I didn’t feel like they were ALL nice and something I really want to work with.
I would also be 
sure I was ready to DOUBLE my number of captives. That’s a huge jump that you could quickly find yourself overwhelmed with.
And before you start working with a larger number of animals I recommend having a rock solid affordable rodent supply.
One other thing to keep in mind is if you haven’t done so already you may want to actually produce a few clutches before getting a large number of animals if breeding is your intentions. Just to see how it goes for you and if you really like breeding animals. And to see if you have problems selling your stock.
I would also be very careful about who I buy hets from. I personally prefer to make my own hets but if I buying them I want to get them from a honest respected known breeder. I want to be for sure getting what they say.
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I agree and am growing up my own rats. I’m working on a few Grant’s to open up a Ball Python shop so I am definitely ready to grow. I’m already set up for racks and supplies. I didn’t mention it’s 3males and 12females. 2/3 juvenile 1/3 adult over 1200 gram’s. Wouldn’t be breeding any of these this year. But definitely ready to grow and these morphs are very good. Have been looking at all of them except for the pinstripe, but doesn’t mean it’s a bad one to have to work with. Thanks
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Good advice, I have 5 female’s breeding this year and 3 are definitely showing good signs, they are going to be ultrasound this week. I appreciate your help and advice. You always respond with respect. Thanks again.
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No problem I’m always happy to help whenever I can.
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Yes, personally if somone offered me this deal it would be a polite “no thank you”. Why would someone let OG GHI leopard clown het pied go for a $100?? Have you met this person before or have experience deaing with them before? There have been a lot of scammers on both facebook and reddit who have very convincing pictures, have a very beliavable story of why they need to rehome multiple high end breeder females and play the game well. Ultimately someone will send them money, and then they vanish into the blue. When something seems to good to be true, it usually is.
Add that to the fact that buying 15 breeders when you haven’t sucessfully produced a clutch seems like a bad idea. So many people try to get too big too fast and sacrifice quality for quantity. The best advice I have ever been given about breeding and raising animals was from a consistant dairy goat show champion veteran who told me that “an expensive animal costs the same to feed as a cheap animal. So you’re better off keeping a small herd of as expensive animals as you can afford to start out with instead of a huge herd of cheaper animals” and I think it’s consistantly turned out to be solid advice reguardless of species.
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I’ll throw another monkey wrench in here. Just because they’re adult breeders, doesn’t mean you will get them breed the first season with you. Or the second. Or sometimes even the 3rd. I have a friend who’s also a collector and as he gets older and wants to work with less BPs I get his females. We both have excellent husbandry, just do things a bit differently. Out of the last large group of females I got from him in 2018, 3 have not settled in to breed for me yet and one slugged out it’s first clutch with me this year. I spent $2600 ok those 3 females. One of them just began eating consistently for me, last month lol. Adult females don’t like to move and they don’t like husbandry changes. Some will do it no problem and not skip a beat, but you can’t know which ones that will be.
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This is spot on and why I always prefer to raise my own breeders. I will buy adult males because you rarely run into a problem where they won’t breed for you immediately.
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I personally think there’s a lot of concern with him selling them all for $100 each, especially since it’s a shipped deal, and not an in person pick up. The combo you mentioned og/ghi/leopard/clown het pied adult female would not be let go for such a low price. That’s a double recessive with an additional het to it.
It screams scam/problem in my eyes.
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Assuming you’re looking at this as a business opportunity, I have to ask why? At the moment there are over 32,000 listings for BPs on MorphMarket alone. I just don’t believe morph breeding is as lucrative as people make it out to be. It’s almost a pyramid scheme at this point with breeders hyping the market and just pumping more future breeding stock into the pipeline for the next new breeder to buy so they too can make “big bucks”. The market is flooded.
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I will clarify one thing here that I forgot in my original post, only one of the 15 is of breeding size. Andk it’s a male GHI at 800grams only 4 male’s in total. The other 11 are all female. I’m not sure if this is a scam, or not. I had a neighbor who used to raise high end Palm’y puppies and got wore out with it. He end up selling 3000k show qaulity dogs for $200 just to get out of it quickly for example. No matter that I believe y’all have raised some good points and believe that I won’t be purchasing the collection. I’m going to focus on my current collection since I have at least 3 female’s that are showing good signs. Thanks again👍
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I will add this one piece of “from the farm” wisdom as my $0.02
First rule of animals on the farm: infrastructure first!
It’s freaking hard to put up a fence around the pasture to keep the goats in, when the goats are already there.
Make sure you can handle what you have and what you are getting with some room to spare, in your space and in your budget.
Make sure you have the rack space, therms, substrate etc. Before you get the snakes.
Can you handle old Murphy dropping it on you? Cause sure as anything all your breeders will pop at the same time with extra large clutches if you don’t have enough incubator/hatchling rack space. 
And if you desperately need the clutches because you are over extended, they will all take the year off.
Love the ambition though!
Good luck!
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I love this!!
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It was a special circumstance…
I was subdividing a pasture. Thank goodness, the perimeter fence was already there, but the curious little buggers were seriously under foot the whole time, and of course, some wound up on the wrong side when I was done…
Years ago helped a friend of mine try to pen up a herd of young goats. A bunch of them. Found out really fast I was waaaay too out of shape for that!
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Yep, they can be quick. Surprisingly strong too.