Overpriced ball pythons!

For us lovers of this small boid it's great news. The prices some individuals are asking for normal looking ball pythons defies all logic. I'm talking people asking $350 and more for a normal looking adult female (maybe CB?). Maybe the time of the normals has come and we will take over the market of the morphs! More power to us! Any thoughts?

Best regards.

I think that the reason that normal female prices are high right now is because of all the morphs out there. Many breeders hold out selling their female morphs but do sell the males. The people that own the males need normal females to breed to them so they can get hets. Normal breeding size females are a hot commodity right now. I have a 4' 2500 gram female, that I have looked at and gone hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. hehehe.

I've got 1.1 02' het pieds coming in (Tomarrow!) and I've been eye balling those larger female adds as well. That male could be ready next season, and it sure would be nice to have a lady big enough to pair him to! Unfortunatly I just can't afford any right now, spent all my money on the 1.1 hets!

Daniel I would love to see it, but I believe Steph is right. The Morphs are making the females more $$. I want equal rights! LOL.
I tried selling '00 2.0 BPs @ a CBCH only show in'00. I was asking $75. Everyone else was asking $35 for males and females. Yeah,CBCH, we all know how that goes. My kids were eating def rats and were really CBCH I have PICS! LAME.
I kept them, there was no way I was letting them go.I produced them. I didn't buy them for $10. That's WRONG!That's just me and they were my first "kids". I care if they thrive.
I still have them. One is line breeding, the other brother will go in 3 yrs.
I saved all the females that I produced and every chance I got I would buy breeder females from a guy I trusted. I bought 2 2600g females, a female he thought was a male and a male for 350. I let him know "Deputy" was a girl. She was 2100g's ? But he let me have her. The two big females were the mothers of a male(bought as a girl) and a female 2yrs B4, I bought as neonates. I have three generations now, it's kind of cool.
I was going to keep all my'02 50% POS HETHiC ALB females but right B4 Christmas Tracy Barker sold me a '01 .1 HetALB who eats like a monster 900g's. So now "The Wife" is going to make me sell my babies.LOL I get attached really quick. I have only sold Boa babies B4, my Pythons are way to cute.
Cheryl, I bet if you wait till summer the prices might drop a little. Just make sure the female that you are buying didn't lay this year.Pieds are awesome. Good Luck, Rob
PS Steph, 2500g's you should have healthy eggs in 2-21/2mos.

Keep in mind that you can get a pastel male for $750-1000 and in a year you could be breeding him to normal females and producing pastels. So if that normal female is laying eggs that will hatch to be half pastel, she is more valuable to you short term. Even if you hatched out 2 pastels and sold them at $500ea, it would be well worth putting a couple hundred into a big girl. If you are working with recessive mutations you are better served buying started juvenile females or yearling females when you get your hatchling males so that they will be ready to go when he is.
Evan Stahl

Daniel I would love to see it, but I believe Steph is right. The Morphs are making the females more $$. I want equal rights! LOL.

Female ball python liberation movement!

Cheryl,

Both my largest females are bred already, if not I could have loan you one. Maybe next year!

Regards,

Daniel

Short and sweet...

Youd be *shocked * to know the number of "Reputable ball python breeders that sell wild caught babies as captive bred and rake in huge profits on it.

Yeah...shake your head, dismiss it as rubbish. It happens, and underneath the guise of respectability.



This business...it brings out the worst kinds of people...or maybe it just brings out the worst IN people,i dunno.


Most sincerely,


Fred Albury
AZTEC REPTILES

Yes Fred, I worry about that very thing. So far I've resisted the urge to "Impluse" purchase on a good price and only have purchased from reputable breeders that I know are selling me CBB~ Captive Bred and Born~ (You knew that, but who knows who could read this thread and not know that!) It's difficult sometimes to pass up a good deal on a CBB, but it gets easier when I think how much I don't want to risk a misrepresented WC (or poorly cared for CBB) introducing parasite's into my collection. My collection may be small time to most "Established" breeders, but it reflects a large investment in time and money for the beginer (me).

Hey Daniel, I don't even have my little het male yet, and when I do get him he will be too small for this season! ~he and his lady were supposed to come Tuesday, but shipping was delayed, should get them tomarrow, but I still don't have a tracking #.....Good thing these are from Kahl who has a great reputation or I would be panicing by now!!!

It is really funny to hear somebody into ball pythons, bad mouth farmed babies and to not understand the difference between farmed and wild caught or wild collected. If not for imports all of the current mutations would be genetic garbage. They would be so inbred that they would be a terrible project, a terrible investment and would not reproduce. Why do you think that the early albinos that came in were such poor producers? They were so inbred the fertility was almost nil. Yet today they are everywhere. Because many more albinos were imported to strengthen out the gene pool. Same with pieds, they were all imports. Same with the origional carmel albinos, pinstripes, clowns, axanthics, ghosts, etc, etc, all imports. Mark Bell is producing some of the hottest ghosts and pastels that anyone has ever seen and they are all from imported lines. NERD, BHB, evryone, started mutations with imported animals.

There is an ENORMOUS difference between farmed baby balls and wild caught balls. For starters, babies are not wild caught. Only juvenile to adult animals are collected in the field. The babies are all hatched in captivity in a facility. The eggs are all from females that were collected in the field earlier in the season, after being bred. Because of this, and I speak from the experience of having looked through and purchased tens of thousands of these babies over the past 13 years, they are excellent quality animals if they are promptly shipped and unpacked. When you see poor quality, badly dehydrated babies it is usually due to poor husbandry and not poor quality to begin with. About 95% of the babies that I have had have eaten live mice right from the go and were 100% healthy and did great. I have many here from two years ago that are now breeding.

The odds are, as was stated above, that any normal balls that most people bought as cb babies are farm bred ones as there are no large scale breeders producing normals (except the cases like pastel siblings). So for all the peopl who rave about the quality of the baby they bought from a breeder, you don't know where that is from. Anyone that has any quantity of normal ball pythons on their table did not produce them. Bill Brandt, Don Hamper, Brian Barcyk, Mark Bell, NERD and just about everybody else in the business buys and resells baby balls from Africa. It is just how it is. As the person above stated, if they were really captive bred here they would be $75+ each and then people would complain about not being able to buy the $10-20 baby balls. Evan Stahl

You can currently buy WC small adult ball pythons for $18 each when you buy six or more. I was amazed at an add by a person asking to buy groups of ball pythons, claiming that he (or she, I can't remember) knew how much they cost right off the plane (so I assume was willing to pay less). One has to wonder how many of those balls might be tossed around as CB balls.