TripleMoonsExotic said:
Some people think that bad feeders will produce bad feeders and would rather not take the risk.
Behavior definitely has it's roots in the genetic makeup of an animal.
Stimulus -> Response and the specifics of the response are a result of evolutionary pressures that left a particular behavior as a successful one.
So the idea that the feeding trigger for an individual animal has a genetic basis is a valid one but should not be mistaken for more than it is. The health of the animal, the type and presentation of the prey item, the environmental conditions, any seasonal predispositions and countless other difficult to measure factors all end up impacting the resulting yes/no breakdown of if an animal eats what we want to feed it when and how we want it to eat it.
In nature, environmental pressures end up making gradual changes to the instinctive responses of a species as "failure to thrive" animals never make it into the breeding pool to pass along whatever factor it was about them which was unsuccessful.
In captivity, our control and influence produces a strange and seemingly contradictory set of intensified genetic pressures- people constantly try to breed with a goal of producing a specific trait that they find desireable, while simultaneously expending a remarkable amount of effort to keep animals alive even when they exhibit a trait which would certainly be described as negative. Captive cinditions are obviously very different than wild conditions, so the quality of a given trait (physical, behavioral, physiological, whatever) needs to be judged using a different and seperate set of merits but... Well, to use ball pythons as an easy example; if an animal is predisposed towards feeding triggers that make it difficult or expensive to maintain in captivity, the logical conclusion is that it should not be encouraged or propogated. If the only way to get calories inside an animal is force/assist feeding and all reasonable avenues of behavioral manipulation have been exhausted, then it's not an animal which should be added to the captive gene pool. Though behavioral tendencies are far less easily defined and identified than simple recessives controling color or pattern and it's difficult to be certain of the exact cause of an
unsolved feeding issue, it should be treated as potentially genetic. Culling is my solution, since it removes the questions and possibilities raised by selling an animal strictly as a pet or keeping it alive in your personal posession, but opinions will vary about that.
All that said, I'm not entirely clear on why anyone would bump this thread. I still believe that the actions which were shown in the video never should have happened and am still disinclined to be real forgiving of anything similar, no matter how much or little a person may know or how well intentioned or innocent of maliciousness they might be... I also really doubt that Deborah has made a habit of those mistakes. Being criticized in detail tends to result in a pretty sharp learning curve.
