About inbreeding....
I think inbreeding is pretty much the equivalent of burning old ladies in Salem Massachusetts back in the colonial days, blaming their misfortunes on those poor women as being witches and the cause of the problems.
How many of you give you animals vitamin supplements? How many of you blood test your animals for RH factor incompatibilities?
Why are people blood tested prior to getting married?
Certainly no one I know blood tests their animals, so let's take a look at the vitamin supplement issue.
Suppose there is some vital amino acid or mineral that corn snakes may need to have in their diet, or something will not function properly. It may not be immediately detrimental, nor even visible, especially in the first generation. But the animal is growing up without it, regardless. Then they are bred and produce babies, which have already started out life with this deficiency, so perhaps there might be a cumulative effect. Even if you have completely unrelated animals, they ALL are suffering from this deficiency, so it really doesn't matter whether they are related or not. So on to the next generation, although you are outbreeding your animals, you are still compounding the problem with each successive generation.
Eventually, this deficiency may begin to manifest itself. And in 101 times out of 100, people will say it is the results of inbreeding. But in reality it could very well be a husbandry problem.
Many people will tell you that there is no need to use vitamin/mineral/amino acid supplements for snakes because you are feeding them whole rodents, which is what they feed on in the wild. Rubish... Those rodents out in the wild are no where near what we are raising ourselves or buying frozen from suppliers. Rodent chows might be OK, but they certainly cannot be providing everything a wild rodent may be feeding on in it's natural environment. It is THAT food source that snakes have evolved having as their supply of nutrients. And whatever that wild rodent may have in it's gut at the time it becomes a snake's meal, is what also goes into being nutrients for the snake.
We give ALL our animals supplements. As soon as the babies have established a good feed response, they are provided partially dusted pinkies, and from then on this is provided for the rest of their lives.
So I still get some animals with kinks? Heck yeah! But considering the numbers I am dealing with and the percentages, it is way lower than one might expect. But that's just the way it is. Life is not perfect.
As an experiment, go to the maternity ward in your local hospital and ask about deformed human children. Contact some of these poor unfortunate parents and ask them if they are inbred, which may be the cause of their deformed baby. After you are done picking your teeth up off of the floor, let us know the results of your study.
