Unless your beautiful snake descended from lineages from the actual Okeetee locality, as Okeetee IS a locality, he would be a classic corn. IMO, your corn is the superior looking phase of corns. I absolutely love normals!!!!
The original locality Okeetees that were the founding stock at times very much didn't even look like what is commonly referred to as Okeetee " phase " corn these days, which are not locality corns if the lineage is not as such. A lot of them didn't have thick, black borders, or colors as screaming red/orange as they are now. Somewhere along the way, thru selective breeding, people started using the locality term for animals that were not even from that area or had a small percentage of founding stock from that area, but had since been diluted with non-locality animals.
Your buddy Stanley could very well be a locality Okeetee or may not be, the only way to truly know would be to have info regarding his lineage. The term these days is used by many breeders so flippantly, and can cause confusion as to what the terms really mean.
Stanley ROCKS! Gorgeous snake, and please, keep us posted with pics of the little guy.
I 100% fully agree!. The term is tossed around today for almost any type of normal corn. As you said, cornsnakes directly FROM the Okeetee Gun Club's 50,000 acre estate do not necessarily represent what most Okeetee's in todays hobby display, although many certainly can.
The term "Okeetee" corn is commonly used to describe richly colored captive-bred corns that display vivid orange/red ground color and deep red saddle blotching that can many times involve thick black borders, but this was basically through Lee abbott's and the Love's old selectively-bred lines.
To me it is quite simple, if captive-bred snakes have this phenotype(outward apperance) but did not SPECIFICALLY originate from locality Okeetee Gun Club lineages, they are best coined "Okeetee
phase" corns referring ONLY to the Okeetee "look". And if they descend from actual locality-specific lineages that have absolutely ZERO out-crossing into other bloodlines, then of course they are true "Okeetee locality" animals.
Heck, there are also some true locality-specific Okeetees that are actually selectively-bred for their THIN BORDERS as well.
In short, unless you actually KNOW the lineage, you simply don't know. I would also refer to that posted snake as a beautiful, nicely colored "classic" corn as well without knowing any of it's parental history. And if it did ALSO display the typical thick borders similar to the Abbott and Love, but cannot be traced to them, then it would be quite acceptable to simply go with "Okeetee
PHASE" simply as a descriptive term of it's phenotype.
Problem being, there are too many people that drop or add the
pertinent portion of the name or term, this is what can be extremely confusing to most folks...LOL!
Anyway, "classic" it is!....
~Doug
