I don't know about you, but I must admit I don't take my laptop and a broadband dongle
everywhere I go... is this a common thing for newbie potential snake owners to do, so that they can Google up information about the pretty snake morph they're looking at while they're at a shop or a show? Or are they honestly more likely to think "it says it's a corn so it is a corn".
How many "Please identify this corn morph" posts are there on here every week? I know I answer at least three a week on another forum. Obviously they've BOUGHT the pretty corn snake at that point and NOW want to know exactly what it is. Wouldn't it be sad if they asked and found out their corn was a Jungle hybrid - and their very next post is "my jungle not-a-corn ate my caramel corn before I could separate them, gee I wish the shop had told me it was a kingsnake cross when I bought it... gee I wish the shop had KNOWN it was a kingsnake cross too."
And please, it's double-S-this-to. Pronounced "this-TOE" with an inhaled breath at the start.
I guess it depends on what you know. I think mules look more like horses than jungles look like pure corns. But I don't know bleep about equines. Caveat emptor.
But you are more familiar with snakes than you are with horses
Someone who knows every breed of horse and what colours they can come in but doesn't know anything about snakes would say the opposite - that mules and horses are as different as night and day, and that snakes look all the same to them
To someone who doesn't know, say, Blue-tongued skinks, a pure Indonesian is going to look a lot like a pure Irian Jaya is going to look a lot like a Northern Australian. They haven't learned the "keys" to look for. I sure didn't when we bought Bartleby - we bought him as
Tiliqua scincoides (the Australian species). Turns out, on checking out pictures on the web (and seeing "this Aussie photo doesn't look much like Bartleby at all...") he's actually
Tiliqua gigas and almost certainly specifically an Indonesian based on comparisions of dozens of photos to our actual skink. But I did that comparison work because I'm a librarian at heart, anal-retentive about accurate and correct labelling and because I'd rather know NOW that Bartleby may well top out at thirty inches instead of expecting half to two thirds that!
To our favourite local shop's credit, when we went back and said "it's not a
scincoides, it's a
gigas" he said "Sorry about that, it's what was on the wholesaler's sheet, I'll make sure the person who bought the other one knows." He knew full well we didn't want to return Bartleby because we already loved the little bugger to death - but he wanted to make sure the OTHER buyer was happy with that too.
