Well Marcia,
I don't know why these guys advertise over and over again. It's really not necessary. If you have great animals and a good reputation, the animals will sell themselves. I know you don't understand this, but a few years down the road, you will. If you have the intestinal fortitude to stick with it like Robert has.
You are in for a big surprise, and some serious disappointment. Texas indigos are just as precarious and expensive to produce and sell as easterns. It's basically the same snake. You are going to have all the same problems and heartbreaks as me. They will eat you out of house and home. They will take up a lot of space. They will require a lot of maintenance, and work EVERY DAY. Females will, after months and months of waiting, either die from egg binding, or give you a bunch of slugs, if they lay anything at all. You will have difficulty finding, unrelated animals to maintain genetic diversity in your collection. You will wait 4 years, at least for them to be big enough to breed. You'll throw away tons of dead pinkies, and fish trying to get the babies to start feeding,...if you get any babies at all,...if you can even get the adults to breed at all. You'll spend an enormous amount of money on your feed bill. You'll pull your hair out trying to diversify their diet. You'll have gobs of people pestering you for babies. Your competitors will be charging more money than you,...and getting it. You won't make a profit, and you'll be lucky to break even. The only real difference that you will experience is the Federal and local permits associated with couperi. You won't have all the problems and expense caused by that. But you will run into idiots who think they know it all, even though they don't. And they will argue, and argue, and argue,....
Yes some of us do occasionally give some away. We may as well, because we don't really make any profit anyway. Personally I have not yet given any away, but I have two zoos, and one private individual waiting for a baby from me this year or next, with more to follow. The Atlanta Zoo, Bush Gardens, in Tampa, and B.W. Smith who will get his female this year. I am also working on an artificial insemination project in order to help diversify the captive gene pool. If we did not give them away, many places would not have them. So when I give away some, I have to charge more for the rest of them so I can recover that loss. And I am donating $200 each from the sale of every baby to Indigos Forever so we can pay for things like the genetic survey currently being done by Matt Rand, and we can build a better website, and we can educate folks, donate more animals to more zoos, and we can go into the field and do wild surveys, studies, and help the Nature Conservancy purchase land for habitat. These are the things that I have been working on, not to mention the trips to local schools this year, and answering countless questions from folks. Oh and the artwork I am creating and donating to make T-shirts for sale, the proceeds for which to put back into the organization Indigos Forever, for all of the above. I also belong to The Gopher Tortoise Council, and I donate to the Nature Conservancy. I am constantly looking for ways to help this species, and to help others working with this species.
Your points are totally invalid. You have no clue what you are doing or what you are talking about. You have absolutely no experience with this species. And yet you come here where you are surrounded by folks who do have that experience and knowledge, make an ass of yourself, and refuse to listen to those who DO know what they are talking about. But I have taken the time to try and educate you, even though it seems to go in one ear, and right out the other side, because you already know it all. That's OK. though, because working with Texans you will learn that everything I have told you is true. Wether or not you ever accept it, or admit it to yourself,...is another story. But the market price for Texans and the associated expenses, are in line with, and heading in the same direction as couperi. The longer I work with this species, the more I'm thinking $2000 for a hatchling would actually be a fair price, and the same for Texans. And I am confident that if we all bumped it up to that, we would still be able to sell our babies. And we still wouldn't be getting rich. Hell,...Robert has had his utilities cut off because he couldn't pay the bill! If you disagree that's fine. With time, you will hopefully learn. If you do learn, you'll be forgiven. If you don't, I won't loose any sleep over it because you'll still be an idiot. My shear amount of time spent on this is not because your points are valid,...it's because they are totally invalid, and I don't want others to be as ignorant as you.
T.