I don't mean to sound like I'm squashing anyone's enthusiasm, but in the past attempts to create a reptile registry have all been failures.
The first I remember was actually free, but even with no cost to the breeder, it wound up lasting 3 or 4 years before it finally went defunct for lack of interest.
The main problem was twofold. First you have to gain the interest of people in registering animals in the first place, and not just 2% of breeders. Secondly the registry has to achieve some form of credibility to where there is some reason to prefer registered animals. These two problems work against each other, if there's no reason to prefer registered animals, then breeders have little incentive to bother with it, and even less if it costs something, while at the same time if only 2% of all breeders are involved in the registry, then there's no real reason to prefer registered animals.
The biggest roadblock to solving either of the problems was always finding a starting point and setting down the criteria. The problem with the starting point it you will have to take the word of a breeder in most all instances.
Take me for example, say I wanted to register my jungle carpets when you first started accepting registration requests. You would either have to take my word that they were pure jungles and had no diamond python blood in their history or decline my request. Considering that very few if any jungle carpets in captivity in this country can be traced back to the wild, since exportation from Australia has been banned fo rover 30 years, then you would either have to take everyone's word or refuse to register that species.
If you have to take the original registrants word that the bloodline is pure then what's the difference than taking a specific breeders word that it is. At least with the latter you are dealing directly with the person making the claim, where with the registered animals, you may be 3 generations away from the person who initially registered the bloodline.
The same scenario plays out again and again, so no one can ever be sure if the registry even started out on the right foot or had hybrids registered as pure from the very beginning. This is what results in the lack of confidence and resulting lack of preference toward registered animals.
Specialized registries such as the cornsnake registry would have a greater chance of success, and perhaps in 15 or 20 years it will actually mean something in the hobby. That sounds like I'm putting it down, I'm not, I just mean it might actually be an AKC of cornsnakes one day. For the time being though it is little more than a novelty that some hobbyists enjoy playing with but it's still not something that the vast majority of cornsnake buyers really care anything about. If I were looking to buy a cornsnake, whether it was or wasn't in the registry database would have absolutely no bearing on my purchase decision. By the admission of the registry site itself, all the information included in the registry is only as good as the individuals who supplied it, which in most cases that I have seen are actually the buyers of a certain snake, not the people who produced it.
General, all inclusive reptile registries however are almost always doomed to failure due to the logistics of the undertaking.
I think such a thing would be nice, once it was fully in place. Figuring out how to actually build it to the point it becomes valuable though is far more difficult than it initially appears.
