Question Regarding Number of Snakes
 

How many snakes should be owned by one person without being considered as hoarding?

Having more than can be properly housed and cared for.

Brad, you are somewhat unusual in that every one of your posts on Fauna has been a broad, open ended question. Absolutely there is nothing wrong with curiosity, and I hope you get all the answers you seek. I think you have found the perfect answer to this one in Ed's reply, above. Some people have large collections that are well maintained, that is not hoarding.

Hoarding can not be quantified by numbers, it is an act. I own probably 300 ish snakes but I sell a good majority of my babies, I don't consider myself to be a hoarder. However if I had only 5 snakes and continually refused to sell any of the babies they had, I'd say that was hoarding.

It also depends on the snake species. I could manage several racks of ball pythons or stacks of boas by myself. Long-term I could not care for one adult retic by myself because for safety sake my husband and I feed them together.

Heck, I hatched out around 8,000 baby corn snakes on year. I wasn't hoarding, I was just insane. :rofl:

It also is highly dependent on who is doing the asking. Most experienced herp keepers would look at my collection, for example, and call it "modest".
A member of the general public, with no previous exposure to the hobby, would most likely call it "hoarding".

Who gets to define the term "hoarding" anyway? What exactly does the term mean to most people? I guess the amount of ammunition for all kinds of calibers I have accumulated over the decades could be construed as "hoarding" by some people, but so what? I'll buy what I want with my money, and who cares what someone else thinks about it.

I believe the less concerned you are about what other people think about you, the more stress free your life will be. IMHO.

I think hoarding gets to be a problem when it concerns critters and the hoarder cannot care for them, to the critter's detriment. Every once in a while you see stories of people hoarding cats or dogs, and then people of various authorities go in the house after neighbors complain and there are inches of feces on the floor and the freezer is full of dead cats or dogs and the still living ones do not have enough food.