"AKC" type registry for reptiles?

I have to agree with this not being about making money. I don't like the idea of people charging more for their animals because they are "registered". In other organizations registered animals are worth more because they have been bred for characteristics, like temperment and the ability to do certain kinds of work. Their abilities and characteristics are what makes them so valuable. If people let Average Joe Public at herp shows think that he is getting a specially line bred corn that is superior in these ways to the other corns out there that is just totally dishonest.

Corns aren't like dogs and horses because they *aren't* different breeds. We only distinguish them by their skin color, and the only way we can come up with many of the "Standard" varieties is by mixing up the gene pool. It's not like their morphology and temperment changes if you cross a butter with a lavender. You just get different colors. Breeds of animals are linebred to be a certain way, the only morphs out there I know of that has been linebred like this and could be considered a "breed" maybe is Rich's candycane, since he's spent 25+ years refining it, and it has a distinctive appearance that would be lost if you outcrossed it with something else (much like a purebred dog's distinctive appearance is lost when it is outcrossed) the old bloodreds, and Kathy Love's Okeetee line. I may have missed some, possibly the selectively bred pink and green snows for example, but you get my drift.

Anyway, the more I look at this, the harder and less practical it looks.

I agree that I wouldn't want to see a breed standard for just "amel" or some highly variable recessive mutation. But back in the late '80s we started putting aside extreme examples of amels to breed to each other to increase the extreme look of the snakes. The ones with very little or no white, we named no-white albinos and later changed to sunglow. The ones with big white rings we named reverse okeetees, later changed to albino okeetees. This MAY be the first instance of a named variant of reptiles - let me know if anyone knows of one earlier than around '87, or maybe '88 or so. Anyway, these "looks" have been refined through a lot of generations now and produce the traits pretty reliably, and most customers / breeders pretty much agree on what they are looking for in those types. So for those, and a few other long-term and well accepted variants such as candycane, I don't see why we shouldn't have a breed standard. Of course it doesn't mean that every breeder has to conform to it anymore than Persian cat breeders HAVE to breed the flattest faces. But if a breeder changes the look enough, he will probably want to call it a new name anyway.

I think it is great that Serp will make available his extensive computer abilities to the rest of us with his program that he is already using. He understands corn genetics and is a perfect person to work on this. But he is not interested in shows, and I think MOST of the people on this forum are not interested in them either. I am not sure how interested I am PERSONALLY in them, but I feel that shows could be of great long term benefit in mainstreaming the hobby and getting newbies enthusiastic in learning more about the genetics involved, maybe bringing more serious enthusiasts into our "clan" eventually. Shows may or may not eventually evolve to a point where serious breeders participate as they do in dog and cat shows. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't support the idea of shows for the benefit of the hobby.

I don't know if the Morph Registry that I talked about is the answer or not. And nobody here has to really participate in it if not interested. Serp's registry may be what we need for a "breed (species?) club" to get the ball rolling, and maybe that will be the basis of what we need someday for an "AKC" type organization. Maybe we are not there yet. What I am discussing here is not to take away anything from the idea of Serp's program, but to add to the idea of shows. All she (Terri, from the other registry) is asking for right now is that we write up a couple of breed standards for her to use in the shows. She already has an agreement with Tony Cueto to start the shows at his expos, so this is already in place. The shows will take place, but what has happened in the past is that each judge will know about some particular types of herps that he/she works with, but has no way to judge specimens of other unfamilar species. Standards would give the judge(s) a way to be fair in looking at all species that have standards in place.

I know some of you who have no interest may be tempted to scoff at this effort, but think of it as an easy contribution to something that MAY help our hobby. Maybe it will come to naught and just die, or maybe it will be the start of something big. But writing a couple of standards should not be too diffiicult. I could do it myself based on my book and what my customers have helped me shape my efforts towards on the couple types I mentioned. But it would have a lot more validity if it was a team effort by the serious enthusiasts who frequent this site. So please post if you have any interest in helping to launch this effort, regardless of whether you want to actually participate in anything else to do with this registry.

Thanks!

WOW! My fingers are REALLY sore after that!

Kathy-

I've really wanted to bite my tongue in regards to this, but I'll just go ahead and say it.

First off, I'm concerned about the prices. $10 to register any individual snake, and if you're registering a clutch it's $25+$1 per hatchling? So if you have a clutch of 20, it's going to cost you $45 to register that clutch---and then when those 20 babies are sold off and then bought, and then registered (20x10=200) the final profit for Terri is going to be $245 on 20 babies registered and a clutch? Come on, that's ridiculous.

I understand covering costs and time spent doing this, but there is no way in hell anyone can convince me that it costs $245 to send out some paperwork to the breeder, have them fill that out and then have it sent back, and then have the person who bought a baby register their ONE snake online, which is all automatic.

It's coming across that Terri is doing this to make money, and then increase the amount at which all "papered" snakes are going to sell for. I personally dispise this idea and think that to start out with, this should for all intents be a mainly voluntary process with prices just covering all costs. I would be MORe than willing to help Serp, or whomever, with data input for clutches, individual registration, etc.

My other concern, and perhaps it doesn't belong here but I'm going to say it anyway. I've had it ever since the name was brought up.

I read the BOI quite frequently and things stick in my mind when I see something that I dont agree with. I happen to recall a thread about Terri that's stuck in my mind ever since I read it. I'm not going to go into all sorts of details since anyone can go over there and read the thread if they do a search, but it bothered me.

I know when you're in this business people are going to get pissed off for no reason and make frivilous claims, but my huge problem with the thread was that Terri was notified numerous times and never once came to give her side of the story. To me, knowing there's a thread on there about you and not responding is an admittance of guilt.

Since I think that's an admittance of guilt and the whole issue was about her guarantee and it not being upheld---that really scares me when it comes to this Morph and Color Registry thing.

Sorry that I brought this up but I just needed to get my feelings on the matter out in the open. Hope I didnt offend anyone, but this infomation is already public and out there, I'm just giving my opinion on the matter.

And again, if anyone wants to do this without the intent of making money off people, I'd be more than happy to help out as much as I can.

I think you all need to be realistic about this before you even get started on it. I ran into the same dilemma when I created the BOI along with FaunaClassifieds. Yeah, it was fun at first, challenging technically, and it was apparently helping the community at large by what it was accomplishing (in some peoples' opinion, anyway), so I didn't mind at all doing it for free.

But it apparently WAS successful and got larger by leaps and bounds. I have had to progressively get more bandwidth, larger and faster servers, and had my time eaten up with the management and details that this all entails. It finally reached the point to where it was getting in the way of my REAL business. When that happens, what do you do?

This project has the potential to go the same route and it appears that two likely roads are in the future for it:

(1) It will really go nowhere, or just be a novelty for a small group of people, because participation will be too light for it to become truly effective or influential. Some people will participate, but it will be of no real influence or interest to most people at all because of the limited subset of animals covered by it. Which does, of course, limit it's usefullness. It may putter along for years, but gradually fade into disuse as most people will find that the effort involved to take part in it does not pay for itself in returned benefits.

or

(2) It will become wildly successful, with nearly everyone eventually jumping on the bandwagon. When hatching season rolls around, the managers of this program will get inundated with thousands, if not 10s of thousands of new records for the database. Bandwidth for their domain will skyrocket, requiring bigger and more expensive servers to be able to handle the load. The inevitable errors and problems as well as custom requests, will begin to wear heavily on the available time of the people doing this project, until they too begin to become weary of the demands made on their time for free. At which time a decision will need to be reached to either drop it to save their sanity and regain their lives, or start charging for the service so it can start paying for the time and efforts they are now putting into it. However, the bleak prospect will arise that possibly the necessity of charging for the services will also be the death of it, which will delay this decision being made until the managers have nearly reached the breaking point.

As can be seen from this thread, a lot of people would resent someone trying to make money off of doing this sort of thing, regardless of the personal costs and time involved, and the necessity of it when labor is a factor. Yeah, this is irrelevant to some people now, but it might not be in the future.

Anyway, that's my view of it, and my opinion. I don't have a crystal ball, but I do think I have a pretty good perspective of the probabilities.

I may have come off wrong in my last post. I don't like the idea of paying $500 for a new morph, but I don't have a problem paying a fee to register it. Something more reasonable (like maybe $100-$150) would be accepted better initially. I know that I would feel a lot better about paying $100 or $150 instead of $500. I am a poor college student, and the $100 would be hard for me to do, but it is a lot more reasonable for me, and I am actually able to see myself saving up $100 in the time that it would take me to finally produce some of the snow-type kisathies that I am going to start on. Myabe in 4 years, when I have a steady job, and I make a real paycheck, the $500 won't seem totally unreasonable, but as of right now, it is a mahor turn-off.

Now for the success of this program, while it's still in its infancy and everyone is trying to get something that works, I can see this taking off. I think there are more people interested in what kind of background their snakes have then we really think there are. I really didn't expect that my 11 year old brother would be interested in his corn's backround, but he kept bothering me until I finally e-mailed Don and got a reply. Like I've said, I think this is a great idea, but I don't like the idea of using this as an excuse to charge more for corns. A lot of people will still buy from the cheeper breeders because they either can't afford the higher prices, or aren't willing to pay for them, but I do think that there will be enough people willing to pay for their corns to have papers, simply because they can find out the heritage of the snake. I don't know, I want to register my snakes on a community file, but I don't plan on charging more for them. I know that realistically, most of my clutches will be sold wholesale, because I can't ship snakes, unless of course when I finally make those snow-type kisatchies, people want to come visit me for their snake .

A couple of bucks to register a snake I want registered? Sure. Big picture, not a big deal. And if volume is so great that they have to quit their "real job" and live off the profits, more power to them!
If we are willing to pay someone to perform a service, they aren't stabbing us in the back by making a profit off it!

I have to admit that I skim-read through that lot this evening because I'm short on time but my personal opinion that, the cost aspect aside, this is the best way forward if we truly wish to bring our hobby forward for the betterment of the breeders, buyers and corn snakes themselves.

As you all know, the Corn snake fan club in the UK are putting on a show this year for corn snake judging and we are close to completing the show standards for each morph (28 for this year). A breeders registry is another project that has been discussed for a while although no formal work has been done on this as, to be honest, I only have 24 hours in a day and that's not enough as it is. However, I'd be more than happy if a few of us want to get together (virtually across the pond) to sort out something that's universal. I'm more than happy to sort out the UK branch of this but combining efforts may very well make this a reality. Rome wasn't built in a day but the future starts now

Rome wasn't built in a day but the future starts now.

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How do we know the future didn't atsrt a week ago? lol, Anyways.
I think that registration is a great idea. Let's just start small and not get ahead of ourselves. Making more money on registered corns may be possible, but we should at least allow a few generations of a line to go through before charging more. Bad things will happen if we push ahead too hard, too far, too soon. I really don't want bad things to happen, I want this to take off and be highly successful. charging nothing or next to nothing now and slowly increasing the price when neccessary and logically the best, then this will all be for the better. Like I said, four years down the line when I have a real job, $500 probably won't be nearly as awful as it seems now, but that's still in the future. If the future truly does start now and we haven't missed the train already, then don't push it too hard. Give it some water, sunlight and time to grow.

You might want to consider creating a 'breed club' instead of a reptile registry. The breed club could also be responsible for maintaining pedigree information. Each Corn Snake should have a unique name, and the breeder's name should be part of the name. The date of birth should also be listed next to each name, and pedigrees should go back at least 4 or 5 generations. For example, Lazik's Lucy (6-1-97). That is how it is done with dogs. Without accurate pedigrees for several generations, I don't see the point of having registration numbers, etc. Accurate pedigrees are what is important. As far as an analogy, you might look to the Doberman Pinscher Club of America instead of the AKC. The Doberman Pinscher Club is responsible for educating the public about the breed, many competitions, etc. Now that I think about it, you'd also want to list the variety of Corn, along with any known hets, for each entry in the pedigree, along with name, breeder, and DOB.

There already is a Corn Snake Club

Cornfan said:

There already is a Corn Snake Club

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I think he's talking about one here in North America.