As some are quick to say "If you don't test, it will come back and haunt you and show up in your sunkissed project," the reverse can be said, "If you test for a year...or even 4 years, it can still come back and haunt you and show up in your sunkissed project." All you are doing is playing with the probability of it showing up later down the road. The fact of the matter is, the chance of it being there will ALWAYS be there.
And they are very studiously ignoring the FACT that the SG gene is NOT limited to only Sunkisseds. To claim that by ONLY testing Sunkisseds with even 100 percent compliant testing of
all Sunkisseds and Sunkissed carriers, and culling out ALL such Sunkissed stock carrying the SG gene will completely eliminate it from the gene pool of corn snakes is incredibly foolish and myopic. Listen up: That regimen will make absolutely NO difference whatsoever. The barn door has been open for years. The horses have fled, been running full tilt to the four corners of the earth, and been gone long enough that you might as well just burn down the barn. They are NEVER coming back now. Not unless you are perfectly willing to completely kill off a substantial portion of the population of corn snakes (meaning currently existing animals and a BOATLOAD of future born babies) in the process.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is just sticking their head in the sand.
So, get REAL, please. Use REAL facts along with some logical extrapolation of what those facts are showing you to come to a sound well reasoned TRUTHFUL and ACCURATE image of the situation. The INSTANT the first animal in Kathy's collection became a heterozygous carrier of this mutated gene, and that animal was bred to others and those animals sold (some of which were carrying the gene heterozygously, and therefore hidden, since certainly Kathy would never have sold any animals visibly exhibiting the symptoms of SG), it was very quickly spread around enough that there is NO chance now of eliminating it completely. The population carrying SG increased EXPONENTIALLY from that moment on.
I have sold MANY, MANY animals that were carriers of Caramel, Lavender, Ashy/Cinder, etc., as the original source of those genes, into the market before I ever even realized I had such genes in my stock. Unless you get an animal that spontaneously mutates to be homozygous for a new genetic trait, that gene will be hidden and quite likely spread around YEARS before you ever even realize that you have a new gene that cropped up. So Kathy was very likely unknowingly selling SG carriers long before she ever saw it exhibit itself in any of her own animals.
So you CAN'T get rid of SG now, nor EVER. Not without taking extremely drastic measures that most people will not have the stomach for. The solution would HAVE to be: KILL THEM ALL. And unless you have absolutely 100 percent compliance with this draconian testing methodology, the testing net will NEVER catch them all, and all of those dead corn snakes will be absolutely for nothing. All it would take is one carrier surviving and producing offspring that get sold into the marketplace, and you are right back to where this all started. So DILUTE it by strict outcrossing to where it becomes rare and irrelevant. Don't breed siblings together. Try to get stock from several different sources. Create parallel lines for any project you work with. Make a sensible plan to deal with this problem and then stick to it.
Seriously, there really is NO other rational way to deal with this.
