I'm going to assume it's my website you are referring to, considering I haven't personally seen any other online articles which discuss this subject. If that is the case, it'd be nice if you included a link to the article in question so others could read it first hand as opposed to only offering your rather lacking interpretation of what I said.
If I am incorrect and it was another article you read, then my mistake.
http://www.arbreptiles.com/culling.html
I did not suggest that all normal type offspring should be culled, nor did I suggest that we should focus on morph breeding.
Refining a species is eliminating an undesirable trait. That undesirable trait may be poor feeding response, a genetic defect, or just an imperfect pattern. It depends on the goals of the breeder.
The latter is the extreme case, some will do it most will not. If a breeder is aiming towards producing a line of perfectly striped cal kings, then yes, any specimen with a broken stripe is subject to culling if the breeder so desires.
The species is perfectly refined when we take it out of nature.
A species is perfectly refined to survive in the wild. However, this most certainly doesn't always align with what is desirable in captivity. Take for instance the preferance of many kingsnakes to feed initially on lizard prey. In the wild this is a benefit. They are more likely to locate a small lizard than they are pink mice.
In captivity however requiring lizards or lizard scented prey is undesirable, so selecting specimens for breeding that begin feeding readily on mice and culling specimens that are the most difficult to convert from scented prey is advancing in that direction, and in doing so it is strengthing the captive lineages.
Captivity and the wild are two completely different things, and what is desirable in one is often not desirable in the other.
I say if you're going to breed, be prepared to find homes for all your healthy offspring, normal or not.
The reality is this just isn't always the best thing for the hobby. Many are of the opinion that if you are responsible for bringing a snake or what have you into the world you are somehow obligated to ensure is survives and lives a long happy life.
This is shortsighted, and in some cases a detriment to the hobby.
The first thing a breeder must assume is that every snake he or she sells will be bred. This isn't always the case, but with captive breeding being such a routine occurance it's a safe bet that someone sometime will attepmt to reproduce any animal you sell.
Let's take again the example of a poor feeding kingsnake. Say I hatch a nice little Arizona mountain king that refuses to feed. No tricks work to get it going, so I resort to force feeding mouse tails for a few months and finally brumate it. After warming it up I finally get it to take a scented pink after much effort. Three or four months later it finally starts to take live pinks semi regularly. It's perfectly healthy, but was exceedingly difficult to get feeding. This particular animal should be removed from the gene pool. There is no reason to promote this tendancy in the next generation, and to do so only perpetuates the feeding problems with this species.
On the other side of the coin, any hatchlings that take an unscented pink on their first or second meal should definately be held back for breeding. It's practices such as this that refines a species to captivity, and makes it more desirable to keep and breed.
If this type of culling doesn't sit well with you, you'd definately hate the methods serious dog breeders use when they are working toward the perfection of the breed standard.
The main point in the article is that so many hobbyists are breeding whatever they have that happens to be the opposite sex, just so they can make some more babies to sell for $20 each. They sell everything that hatches, including non feeders and specimens with minor kinking. You see it in the classifieds all the time. One eyed albino boas are commonplace for no reason whatsoever other thar greed, plain and simple. Many of these people are merely soft hearted and try to find homes for deformed offspring without understanding what they are doing. Others just want to make another buck, so they discount undesirable specimens and sell them regardless.
The fact is, just because you have a pair of leopard geckos doesn't mean you simply have to breed them, although many seem to believe this apparently. Think of the advances we would see if only a portion of the hobbyists putting all that energy into producing a few dozen more leos would instead devote it toward a species which is still uncommon in captivity, or not as commonly bred. There are many species which people do not work with because they are not the latest fad, or they are waiting on someone else to figure them out and publish a set of step by step instructions on how to breed them.
A huge percentage of reptile "breeders" follow only the easy route of working with the common species, replicating the work done by the people who put into establishing the breeding protocols to begin with.
Keep in mind that I am an American, and that being the case, the entire article was written from that perspective and is concerned only with that part of the hobby. In Ireland, where you're from, species availability is likely much different, and there is probably a large place for additional breeders of all species including the common ones. In this country however there are many professional breeders that supply all the leopard geckos and such that we need, and that should serve to free up the experienced hobbyist to pursue work with species more in need of reproduction, or at least allow him to devote a portion of his energy to that area. Unfortunately though, many are quite content to churn out more of the same things while rarely bred species continue to be so.
