Okeetee corns

As I've stated before, I'm not one who is on the cutting edge of cornsnake culture, so I thought I would bring up this topic to some of you who are.

Concerning the use of the Okeetee label, what is acceptable to you? I see, especially lately, literally dozens of ads for "okeetee" corns. In my opinion this term has been bastardized to a most unfortunate degree and to a point where it ceases to hold any value.
I believe the term to designate a locality of corn, not just a look or specific phenotype. I realize one of the points likely to be raised would be what would define the boundary limits of the Okeetee region. The purpose of this thread though would not be to deifne what constitutes the locality itself, but what would be the acceptable use of the label in general.

We can say Okeetee refers to the hunt club, Jasper county, or whatever, but I see lately most every normal cornsnake for sale labeled Okeetee. To me this is just wrong. The vast majority of cornsnakes in collections have no form of reliable collection data whatsoever. When you're working with 20th generation snakes and working to create new morphs, it's just not a priority with cornsnake breeders. Just because a line of corns with exceptional traits has been selectively bred from parents originating from who knows where, I don't think they deserve the label Okeetee. Even if a specimen from the middle of the hunt club was bred to a Florida native, I wouldn't call the offspring Okeetee, because they no longer are.

Even though I have never been strongly into corns, I have always appreciated the true locality okeetees. Perhaps it's just the symbolic value of them, I don't know. But to me they are what is unique among all the many dozens of morphs, and the beauty of a top quality specimen, in my opinion surpasses all of the "man made" mutations by far.
I am fortunate enough to be adding 2 pairs of F2 corns to my collection that are verifiably traceable directly to the hunt club through both sets of parents and grandparents. It is my intention to maintain the purity of the line. Perhaps selectively breeding to accent the traits, but limiting any breeding to only specimens known to originate from the same area. I suppose this has caused this issue to resurface with me lately.
I am of the thinking that the term is used so loosely for no other reason than to increase the potential sales of the offspring.
How many verifiable 100% okeetee lines do you know of in captivity? Lines which have never been bred with any corns not originating from the area of Jasper County. Very few from what I can tell, but yet there are thousands of "okeetee" corns for sale annually.

So among you more serious corn breeders like Rich and Darin etc, what is your opinion of the broad use of the okeetee label?

"Okeetee"

Well, it's just a label, and an unfortunate one, if you ask me. Just as is "Miami Phase". In reality, they have no meanings. For several reasons.

Let's ask this lead in question: Is ANY corn snake that was captured on the Okeetee Hunt Club considered an Okeetee Corn?

So let's continue on with this.

At what arbitrary point in any direction would a corn snake captured there no longer be considered as an "Okeetee Corn"?

At this arbitrary point, if a snake is heading away from the center of the Okeetee Corn range, will it cease to be an Okeetee Corn when it crosses that point? And on the other hand, if a corn snake is reaching that point heading towards the center of the range of the Okeetee Corn, will it be a normal corn until it crosses that point? At which time it then becomes an "Okeetee Corn"?

How about a corn snake from another area that was dropped right into the middle of the range for the "Okeetee Corn". Does it become an "Okeetee Corn" as soon as it touches the ground there? If not, suppose this one snake goes on and breeds with the *true* Okeetee Corns in that area. Are the resulting offspring Okeetee Corns or not?

In another line of thought, suppose two genuine died in the wool Okeetee Corn snakes are captured and you take them home and breed them. You get a clutch of eggs that hatch out and from those babies, you naturally pick out the best ones to keep for yourself. You then grow them up and breed them, again going through this process of keeping the best ones. Once you have removed those animals from their natural environment and impressed YOUR natural selection on the direction of the resulting appearance of subsequent generations, when does the Okeetee label no longer apply to those *natural* *true* Okeetee Corns?

I have seen MANY examples of "Okeetee Corns" recently that I would bet BIG money are nothing at all like those animals that Carl Kauffeld wrote about in 1957.

So what is an Okeetee Corn? Beats me. Unless you collected the animals yourself directly from the Okeetee Hunt Club, there should be some doubt about the accuracy of the claims that some people may make on the animals they are selling to you. Although this is certainly not an attempt to disparage ALL collectors in southern South Carolina, but if anyone believes that at least SOME of them would not lie about the location their animals were actually collected in, in order to gain a premium price for them, then I do believe they are being extremely naive.

From my own personal standpoint, I draw the line at being anal about locality. I have tried to be reasonably certain that the original stock I got was at least told to me to be from the Okeetee area by people I would have reason to believe for no other reason than lack of disputing evidence.

And yes, I have outcrossed these "Okeetees" into other genetic lines for one reason or another. And I still call the animals that result from those matings that have a reasonable resemblance to what a textbook example of a commonly accepted "Okeetee Corn" should look like, as "Okeetee Corns".

So my requirements for an animal I sell to be called an "Okeetee Corn" is that it must have some direct lineage to the original animals that were sold to me as "Okeetee Corns", and in appearance must be reasonably a cut above what I would just consider as a run of the mill normal looking corn snake. Both conditions must exist before I would put that label on their deli cups.

I realize that there will always be debate as to exactly what defines the area that could be considered okeetee. With the exception of insular localities, the same can be said of most locality designations. That issue will most likely never be agreed upon by everyone.
I perhaps take the name too seriously for the times we have come to. To me it is the bloodline, and the purity of it. Any selective breeding done within a group of actual locality animals cannot negate the locality. It's a poor comparison, but I look at it as the corns you have bred for several generations are still corns, but should you cross one of those with a cal king, no amount of back breeding to corns can make them a genuine cornsnake again.
Any snakes bred in captivity are seperated from nature, so it is impossible to breed what is "natural". The bloodline however can be maintained regardless of selective breeding.

The same situation exists with chondros for example. Serious chondro keepers know that 99% of all locality labels for those snakes are basically BS. There are chondros in collections with true verifiable locality data, but they are exceedingly rare. There still exists many who are completely trusting in those labels and will adamantly insist that their sorong chondros are absolutely pure locality animals.
Anyone with ethics selling chondros at least do the courtesy of adding "type" to the locality label. With okeetees though, there are those who label any "normal" corn okeetee.

The corns I plan to acquire are definate okeetees, descended on both sides only from stock collected on the roads bordering the hunt club. It seems to me though that few people value that anymore. Perhaps it's the common usage of the term that has caused blanket skepticism, or maybe people just don't care about locality corns anymore like they do with some other species.
Maybe it's pointless to put the effort into preserving such a bloodline. I kind of like the idea that they'll be around though, perhaps not as Kauffeld saw them, but of the same pure bloodline regardless. After all one can selectively breed for the nicest traits while still remaining within the known locality gene pool.

In my opinion, a snake has to have that okeetee "look" AND be able to trace its lineage back to the hunt club for it to be a true okeetee. Corns with the look but lacing the heritage are what Kathy Love designates her "classic corns." I like a distinction being made, but it's purely a matter of personal preference. The true locality purist says my definition is not good enough, and I understand that.

However, neither opinion will ever amount to much in the industry, because people call their animals whatever in the world they want to, and, unlike other species, almost anyone can breed their animals and advertize their normals as okeetees. Further, Rich is right that there are those who will lie about where they got their breeding stock, so even trying to get pure locality stock is harder to do.

As to you analysis about introducing outside strains and then never being able to remove the influence, it is a point well taken. However, there have been a LOT of multi-het cornsnakes and mutation corns dumped on the hunt club grounds itself in years past. So, I suspect that the pure locality okeetee with no mutant genes cultivated by man is quickly becoming an idea to be chased with no fruition.

As Darin has pointed out, there probably is no such thing as a truly pure Okeetee corn snake any longer, anywhere. Actually not even from just about any locality at all.

Back in the early 80s I was an idealistic fool that felt that selling my corns was "dirty". But since I was producing far more of them than I could ever hope to keep (HAH! I wish I had been able to see the future back then!), I had limited options as to what I could do with those babies. So what seemed the "right" thing to do was to release these into the wild as kind of a headstart program. So that's what I did, for several years.

I released corns anywhere from New Jersey on down to South Florida. And yes, I have released corns into the Okeetee area as well. And I know for a certainty that I am not the only one whom has done that in the past. And who knows how long before that time someone else might have been doing the same thing.

So unless someone has their original stock from as far back as the early 70s or even before, and has not outbred them even once, I seriously doubt anyone can truly claim to have a *pure* Okeetee corn snake.

I myself have debated this subject with myself and with friends. I have been wanting to add a pure as possible pair of Okeetee's to my collection for the last year or two, however, for reasons mentioned above, I have not pursued it. Darin did have some decent Okeetee's listed for sale about a week ago that i was looking at.

I believe that a lot of people are simply labeling what they have for sale as an Okeetee. With every ad I see, I will look to see if there is a picture. The pictures that I have seen hardly look like the Okeetee's that I would be interested in. The value of these animals has dropped considerably as well. I'm not necessarily referring to the dollar amount, but the value or attraction that these animals once held in people's collections. If I were to aquire a very nice pair of Okeetee's that physically displayed what an Okeetee should look like and then selectively bred them. How would I be able to market my off spring? As Clay mentioned every Joe Blow has his high orange normals listed as Okeetee's. The market has been so watered down that it might be hard to convice some novices that this is what an Okeetee should look like.

Don't just "look" at them, Dennis!

Where to start?

I breed only a handfull of snakes, my favorite being Okeetees (I hope that word turns red when I post this. ) I have hunted the club. So has forum member John Albrecht (who, incidentally called me last night to let me know (and rub it in) he was road-cruising it! He isn't who I got my initial stock from, but he keeps better locality data than anyone I know on the collection spots. I'm not naive enough to assume that because the sellers live in Ridgeland, that I got locality animals. I've gotten to know the men themselves.

Secondly, as far as people turning snakes loose there and that diluting the blood, hogwash! First, how many people would really turn tons of morphs and hets loose? I believe you, Rich; just how many could grow to adults and pass on their genes? Snakes lay all those eggs just to have two hatchlings survive to breeding age to maintain population. And the animals there are evolved to that climate, food, etc.

Then there is the matter of what amount of diluting could really be done? There are an awful lot of cornsnakes down there.

Even if I completely lose that arguement, bottom line is this:
I have turned down some beautiful snakes from Rich and Kathy's stock that would really improve my lines. I didn't buy them because I'd no longer be offering the product that most folks that I sell to want. Snakes with verifiable lineage to the Okeetee Club. You can suggest that only the one I caught myself is pure, or that I was suckered and misled, or even that the snakes living there are no longer valid because so many people have dumped thousands of hatchlings there (which I doubt), but the bottom line is that I am doing the best I can to maintain what I feel should have the name Okeetee.
I'd be happy to include photos or a link to my animals.

I just recently bought two lots of corns. 21 Okeetee corns from one breeder. 11 Normal corns from another breeder. Now, to my untrained eye, the Okeetees, as a group, have a brighter color. Although, individuals from both lots look VERY similar. The breeder of the Okeetees told me that they get brighter with every shed and that when they reach adulthood they should be a very nice orange and red.

I want to be sure that when I sell these corns that I label them correctly. After just being around here for a few weeks I KNOW that I don't want anyone thinking I'm trying to scam.

I also have an adult corn snake that has a high degree of orange color. Can someone post a pic of an Okeetee and a "Normal" corn for comparison?

Thanks,
Dennis

SnakeMover,
I believe it was Darin in a past thread that said if you ask three people that question you'll likely get three different answers. The reason is people have different beliefs as to what constitutes an Okeetee.
My position is if the breeder you got the okeetees from cannot genuinely trace his stock back to the area of the hunt club in Jasper County, then you just have 21 more normal corns because they are not deserving of the okeetee label.
As far as posting pics for comparison to tell whether yours is an Okeetee, that makes little difference in my eyes. I don't care what the snake looks like, it's either descended from the Okeetee reigon or it isn't. If you don't know with certainty that it is, then it isn't an Okeetee. Some disagree with the strictness of my useage, but Okeetee is a locality, not a look. An ugly corn picked up on the hunt club is an okeetee regardless, that just can't be argued, the label refers to a place.
Just as every gray band you find on Juno road doesn't look the same, neither does every corn in Okeetee look magnificent.

As far as being labeled a scammer if you sell those snakes as Okeetees, that's unlikely to happen. It's so common to throw that name around today, people automatically assume they're not locality and those who do produce the real okeetees are forced to prove it all the time.
People like me will consider it ethically wrong if you sell corns of unknown descent as Okeetees, because you really have no idea what they are and it's highly unlikely that they really are from that stock. But as far as considering you a scammer, I would not, just one who doesn't respect the value of the term, and I definately wouldn't be buying any of them.