Quote:
Originally Posted by dehlol
These hybrids are stupid, irresponsible, and serve zero place in the reptile hobby.
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That is your opinion, and I respect that. However, I would like to hear your reasons why you feel this way.
Stupid:
Are you implying that the hybrids are somehow less intelligent that their pure parents? Cite evidence. Perhaps you simply think they are just stupid-looking. If that is the case, to each his own. Many feel the same way about morphs & mutations. Purely subjective and not fact.
Irresponsible:
It is obvious that you're suggesting that creating a hybrid is irresponsible. If you can provide evidence that the guilty party did so by accident (Ex: a burmese "accidentally" crawled into the tub of a ball python, and a few months later...OOPs!), or if the person clearly has no regard for keeping records of the bloodlines of his animals, is inaccurately representing or labeling them, or the hybrids have been proven to have health defects, then I may be inclined to agree with you. Regrettably, there are a handful of keepers out there that give the rest of us a bad name, but I'm pretty sure most of the people who crossed the hybrids on the list knew what they were doing, had their own reasons for doing so, and clearly have not misrepresented the animals in any way. They certainly are not releasing these monsters back into the wild.
Again, explain why you feel those hybrids (or rather, the people who created them) are irresponsible.
Serve zero place in the reptile hobby:
Again, purely subjective. I can see three main drives for wanting to create a hybrid. The first is simple curiosity, to see if two species are indeed capable of producing viable offspring. To my knowledge, there is no documented health problems or reports of sterility in any reptile hybrids [if I am wrong, someone correct me].
The second one is the need to create something new. Going hand-in-hand with the first, some wish to put certain ingredients together and see if the outcome is grander than the two sums. Some disagree with this, claiming we should not mess with nature, but personally, I think its too little too late for that and there's a bunch of holes in that argument anyway. For one, people do the same thing with creating morphs. Making a hybrid is just taking it a step further. Remember this is captivity, folks, not the wild. Unless you are involved in a restoration project trying to re-establish a species back in its native environment, the whole "natural" argument doesn't fly in my book. True, some hybrids are really beautiful while some are butt-ugly...but we still didn't know until we tried.
The third is pretty obvious: money. Not as noble as the first two, but probably more dominant. It kinda goes hand-in-hand with the second one; everyone wants to create that "new" something, and hybrids are just another product on the shelf. Not everyone is a fan, but many are, and they will pay to get it.
The bottom line is that they do serve a place in the hobby...maybe not a place in every person's collection (some might say the only place worthy is in the belly of a king cobra or a
Drymarchon!), but a place nonetheless.
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