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Yep, the economics are definately the problem with isolating a bad gene. (Of course, you don't have to hold back all of a litter to do the experiment, since you're only backbreeding to the first sire or dam in the line. Even if you hold back a single animal, if you keep backbreeding, after 11 generations -- less, really, b/c we're talking thousandths of a percent difference at a certain point -- the offspring will practically be genetic clones of dad. It'd be expensive, but not a million dollars' worth of expensive.)
Then again, if you know that you have a snake throwing babies with defects, why sell them? All of these ads with people selling albinos for a high price that have defects are a problem. The prices aren't generally low enough for people to buy the animal as a pet, but they're low enough for a person to buy as a cheap breeder. If you suspect a genetic flaw, you shouldn't be selling the animal. You also shouldn't breed the parents that produced the flaw to each other again. (If it's genetic. Nobody's done any real work to prove that one way or the other, though the odds seem very, very much in favor.)
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