Serpwidgets

For every one of the ads you can find like that, you can also find one for cornsnakes, and one for dogs. The AKC has been around forever and there are plenty of people selling labradoodles, and people selling "purebred rockwilders" (that are not AKC dogs) and all kinds of other stuff. A registry is powerless to affect any of that, and will not stop or even slow down that kind of thing. The people involved in selling and buying those animals don't care about the AKC, the ACR, or the LGR, and I don't believe that any registry will change that.

Also, please note that the AKC does not really set standards. It is my understanding that they do not write them, they get them from others who write them, and the AKC simply publishes them. They are also not really enforced by the AKC. That is, there's nobody sitting in an AKC office looking at a photograph and using that to decide whether an individual dog is or isn't up to a breed standard. The only "enforcement" of any standards is carried out with shows (by peer review) where judges (who are breeders or former breeders) determine which individuals best live up to the standards of the judge, or the judges interpretation at that point in time.

Also it is important to take into account that dog breeds are very much "set to type" so that they breed true. It is unreasonable to compare dog breeds to any selectively bred morphs, unless they are extremely locale-specific from some isolated wild population, which excludes any of the morphs that have been created by breeders.

Anyway, the important difference is this:
· When you breed two collies together, all of the offspring are collies.
· When you breed a collie to another breed, none of the offspring are collies.
The same does not hold true for selectively bred herps at this point:
· You can breed two animals of selectively bred morph A together and get animals that are not morph A.
· You can also breed two animals that are not selectively bred morph A together, and get some offspring that are selectively bred morph A.

Anyway, the practical upshot of all that is that I personally don't believe it is reasonable to think that standards can be set (or at least anything that would be taken seriously) without holding actual competitions where individual specimens are judged, in the flesh, on their own merits. But at this point, the only thing competitions will do is affirm the quality of an individual, which doesn't necessarily hold true for any of its relatives since they haven't been bred for generations upon generations to set type.