Below: Axanthic Zebra Carpet Python.
started to think more and more about the animals I had
held onto over the years of breeding; animals that fed
better, seemed calmer, had brighter colours or different
patterns. The inescapable conclusion was that I was
altering these ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ animals in the same
way that morph breeders might! Sure, I was only
working at a polygenic level, and not with dramatic
mutations with proven modes of inheritance, but none-
theless, animals were being selected and therefore
modified by human intervention. There was nothing
natural or pure about it.
I also started thinking over my many years of selling
snakes; no one had ever contacted me asking for a dull
and boring looking animal. Even if they wanted a wild
type, they would always ask for the one with the best
colours – and it had to be feeding well on an artificial
diet of captive-bred rodents, plus possess a calm
demeanour.
A few months later I decided to compare the hold-backs
from my clutch of Gosford Diamond Pythons to the
original pair that founded this line. One was wild caught
and the other a first generation captive, as pure as you
could get. The offspring I held in my hand were five
generations removed from these animals and looked