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Sexing Westerns??

John E Dove

John E Dove

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Anyone ever heard of sexing Western Hogs by counting their saddles?
If so how accurate have you found this method to be?
 
I generally use a probe for older snakes and popping for neonates but I heard about saddle counting and was wondering if anyone else had seen it work out.
As I encounter Westerns in the wild with some frequency saddle counting would be a handy tool for recording gender ratios.
I generally find, with CB snakes, that tail length is rather unreliable.
 
Several years ago that was a fairly often used indicator, but I'm not sure if anyone really relied on it as a sole means of sex determination.
I didn't use it much myself as I was never sure of the exact method. When two saddles join, is it one or two etc. Now I've forgotten what the numbers even were for the sexes so I can't test it on the ones I have.
 
Well I dug up the email that gave me this info and she said "I was told that males have between 35 and 40 saddles and females have more than 40 saddles".

I just used this info for a google search and found the following website that mentions something similar under "Subspecies and Mutations".
http://www.reptileallsorts.com/westhognose-cs.htm
 
I've only really head of it being used to tell the differnce between the subspecies. I'm sure with the tail length it's a good indicator, but i wouldn't make it my only way to sex them. (besides, once you get into the mixed genetic species you'd have a problem {i.e. mexicans with plains hognose} where their patters is dependent on where they're from).
 
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