Have a ball (python)!

If I were to have a pet, it would be a dog.

If I were to not have a pet, it would be a snake.

I'm not going to get into any deep examination of why I'm not wild about snakes - paging Dr. Freud - but I'm not wild about snakes. I find them exceedinly creepy. The eyes, the tongues, the no arms, the no legs. Slithering around. Let's just say I'm glad I live in a place where there aren't a lot of dangerous snakes. We do have timber rattlers and copperheads, but they're rare and seldom encountered on the streets of Boston. And if I swim in a local lake, I'm not in any danger of getting attacked by a cottonmouth.  (Could my feelings about snakes be the result of my Irish heritage? After all, St. Patrick did drive all the snakes out of Ireland...Way to go, St. Patrick!)

But plenty of folks do like snakes and keep them as pets. And a lot of the snakes being kept as pets, being collected even, are something called ball pythons. 

They're non-venomous, considered docile, and - unlike, say, a boa constrictor - they're relatively small, just 2-3 feet long (3-5 for females) vs. boa constrictors which range from 6 to 10 feet in length. Of course, they do eat mice and rats, so there's that. But as snakes go, they're fine as pets, if you like that sort of thing. 

And thanks to creative breeding, ball pythons come in all sorts of colors and patterns not found in nature, all part of a pretty big business of "designer" ball pythons. 

When it comes to designing colorful ball pythons, Justin Kobylka is considered the best in breeding. From Kinvoa Reptiles, his Georgia business, he's always trying to selectively breed "one-of-a-kind" ball pythons. These go for a lot of money, and Kinvoa is a multi-milllion dollar a year business. Even the ones that turn out to be not quite as unique as Kobylka hoped, still sell for plenty.

Ball pythons originated in Africa, and in the wild they are typically dark brown with tan patches and a pale underbelly. Those bred for their appearance, as Kobylka’s have been, often have a brighter palette, from soft washes of pastel to candy-colored bursts of near-fluorescence. Their patterns, too, have been transformed: a snake might be tricked out with pointillist dots, or a single dramatic stripe, or colors dissolving into one another, as in tie-dye. One captive-bred ball python’s splotches and squiggles show up only under a black light. 

...Arguably, no other snake, lizard, or turtle has been so sweepingly restyled by human effort. (Source: New Yorker)

The rarer the design - no suprise here - the more expensive. A colorful ball python can cost more than a giraffe, a lion, a tiger. (Note: an individual cannot legally own a giraffe, a lion, or a tiger. But zoos can buy them.) 

“I’ve had offers of over a hundred thousand dollars on a snake,” Kobylka said.

A snake worth that kind of money is not likely to be sold by Kobylka. His preference is to hold on to them in order to breed more and more interesting looking snakes. 

“But the way I operate, it’s important to keep those snakes for my future work. You actually lose money long-term if you sell the most amazing thing at the time.”

I have to admit that, having been intrigued by this article, I googled, looking for pictures. While I found them interesting enough, pretty even, the colors were largely yellows, oranges, brown... I thought I'd be finding designs there were really out there. I was envisioning a snake that looked like a tie-dyed Grateful Dead tee-shirt, a snake that was the same bright blue as my old VW Beetle. Alas...

The coolest ones I found were something called an "emoji python," that have a smiley-face pattern. 

Anyway, if you've decied that a colorful litle snake would make a dandy pet, note that "the standard life spanof a captive ball python is fifteen to thirty years."

In any case, "household reptiles" started to become a thing in the 1990's. 

Children raised on “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Jurassic Park” reimagined scaly pets as characterful and intriguing. Retailers started to see an uptick in iguana sales. New Caledonian crested geckos, believed extinct until 1994 and jeopardized today by wildfires and invasive predators, became well established in captivity. Snakes were pitched to prospective buyers as perfect for cramped urban residences: undemanding, hypoallergenic, and needing to be fed only once a week. 

And ball pythons - small, docile, plentiful, cheap; and, unlike goldfish, you can hold them - really took off as "starter pets." But things didn't get too exciting until breeders like Justin Kobylka figured out that this "ideal" snake pet "need[ed] a totally different paint job."

After all, you sell an interesting smiley-face emoji snake for a lot more than the $30 bucks you'd get for a boring brown-on-brown snake. 

Astonishingly:

An estimated six million households in the U.S. include at least one reptile.

Interestingly: 

Millennials make up the largest group of reptile owners, but snakes, lizards, and turtles have become increasingly popular with Generation Z. “One of our concerns is that technology will take kids away from this world,” a breeder observed. “Why would a kid today want to peer at a snake through glass, when they can put a V.R. headset on and play with dinosaurs?” 

So, just when I learn that designer ball pythons are a thing, it's inevitably threatened by technology. 

Looks like I'm rooting for snakes as pets? Who knew that was ever going to happen?