Into the Future: SnakeBytesTV

Balls aren’t the only game in town

  Over the past decade BHBreptiles has become known more and more for specializing in Ball Pythons and that’s great, but not entirely accurate. Although I have been obsessed with Ball Pythons an continue to pour tons of energy (and money) into them, the truth is that 2/3 of my collection is comprised of colubrids. That’s right, I have way more corns, kings, milks and ratsnakes then anything else I work with. 

  It all started with my very first snake I bred, which was a cornsnake. Sure I had been keeping Boas, Ball Pythons and even Burmese before I ever owned my first Cornsnake, but it’s still a fact that the first baby snake that I ever saw crawling out of the egg was a normal cornsnake. I had been facsinated with snakes for as far as I can remember, but I think that first baby snake head pipping out of that clutch of 23 eggs was what sealed the deal for me. From that moment on there was only one thing that I wanted to do with my life, and that was breed snakes, and become an astronaut, but seeing as I get motion sickness, sticking with snakes was the better option. 

  As the years have went by my colubrid collection has always been the backbone of my business and also the lion share of what we produce each year. To me it’s just about having the variety.. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the incredible paintjobs that Ball Pythons come in and they still probably are my favorite snake to work with, but lets face it they are not exactly setting the world on fire with personality. Now I’m not saying they’re bad animals, but they can be a bit boring. On the other hand each species of colubrid seems to have a completely different behavior. I guess I like the fact that in a 3000 square foot room I can not only keep 5000 snakes, but 140 different species. They don’t get huge, they are easy to keep and breed and they are full of energy. I can walk down one of my colubrid room isles and pick up a snake that is so mellow and enjoys being handled like a cornsnake or a hognose and then walk a few steps further to a spunky Ratsnake that gives me a rush trying to tame it. There’s also the size difference that comes along with the wide variety of colubrids, from the 50 gram 12 inch adult male hognose to the 8 foot long King Rat! And that’s not even taking into account the hundreds and hundreds of different colors that cover the spectrum with this amazing family of snakes. 

 Over the past 24 years of working with snakes as a profession, I have seen the colubrid market cycle in and out of favor, heck I’ve seen a lot of animals gain and loss popularity. Some years they seem to be the most sought after snakes and other they lose favor to animals like Leopard Geckos, Boas, or of course Ball Pythons. With that being said this past four or five years has been the toughest market for colubrids that I have ever seen. Were these animals just going to be on the fringe of the popular snakes being kept in this country? Well last year there seemed to be a little life left in the market for these amazing animals. It started back in August at the Daytona show, we had our best colubrid show that we’d had in almost five years, but it didn’t stop there. Each show we attended we sold more colubrids then we expected and the online sales mimics the show results. 

  Going into this years production I was curious to see if Colubrids would gain popularity like I expected them too. Sure enough we are just starting to get eggs and we have the most pre-orders of Corns, Kings, and Milks then we ever have had. Now I’m not saying that they are on pace to take over the reptile world, lets face it they are still inexpensive and will have a hard time stepping up to the plate with the big projects like Ball Pythons, but I for one am so happy to see Colubrids starting to make a come back. I know that as more and more people start to work with them again they will see the beauty and enjoyment that I have been able to see since I laid eyes on that baby cornsnake hatching when I was just a kid. In the end I just glad to see people expanding their horizons and trying to work with snakes other then the ones that take up most of the forums and blog post. Trust me if you get a cornsnake or a hognose snake you will be as hooked as I am on them.  

Tinley Summit

  The whole idea behind the late winter NARBC show in Tinley is to have a summit for USARK, PIJAC and our community about the “State of the Union”. After all it was a summit put on by the NARBC that spawned USARK in the first place. Over the last few years the reptile hobby has come under attack on many levels, but the legislation that has been proposed and passed has been the major concern, hence this summit. I think we all had high hopes that something good would come from this meeting. 
  A lot of the major players in the reptile community made the trip to the show in support, even if they were not vending, but what was more impressive to me was the reptile hobbyist that showed up, not only show their support, but hoping for answers. Did they get many answers from the “panel” summit? In short.. no…. The night was filled with information, things like how we dealt with past proposed bills, the NOI for Lacey and so on… but not nearly enough time was spent on where we go from here. I think it’s simple, people are passionate about their reptiles and want to know what they can do to help the cause in protecting our hobby. Unfortunately not much came from the nearly three hour summit. It wasn’t a total lost, Justin Mietz delivered a passionate talk about heading up a National Herp Society and Andrew from USARK explained the path that the organization has taken the past few years along with a great opening by Kenan Harkin from the Burmese Python Initiative. 

  In my opinion, too much time was spent on where we’ve been and not enough on where we were going? By time the “panel” was excepting questions more then half the audience had left. Do I blame them? Not at all, it was far from exciting for the most part and relatively boring to be honest. I’m not saying that there was not great information, but maybe just not the right forum for long winded dissertation about policies and best practices. In the end the people wanted answers, needed direction and leadership. As one of the panel members I will be the first to say that neither was really delivered. 
  When the meeting finally wrapped up I left with a bad feeling in my stomach. We were given a forum to lead and for the most part we failed with arguing about silly things such as “Are you sure we can’t take Burmese Pythons across State lines” and “We can’t get insurance for our Gators”. While both are important topics, we beat them to death spending more then a half hour on each topic. All while avoiding the real issue… What can we all do to help…

   I know I wasn’t the only person that felt the night was a failure and I certainly was not the only person that felt we had to take something positive out of this meeting. We need to unite as a community and this summit was a perfect example of the in fighting and division within the leadership of the hobby. Then Kevin McCurely from NERD came to me with an idea on how we can bring the community together and have a place for everyone to go for answers and resources to help put a positive face on the hobby, just what we need. We will take as many of the industry leaders and unite them on one mission. Listen, we’re all are working hard individually, but together we can be ten times stronger, maybe a thousand times stronger? This sounded very promising.
    The rest of the weekend was spent brainstorming and meeting with as many people as we could. It’s still in the early stages and tons of details need to be worked out, but the unity amongst the leaders of the hobby was inspiring. People that I know have had differences put them aside and sat side by side willing to work together for the better of the hobby. I’m not going to lie, I was starting to losing hope, but after this weekend I see the potential for great things. I don’t want anyone to think for one minute that this “new” project is about industry leaders alone, it will be set up where we will need each and everyone of you. We want to reach the kid that bought his first leopard Gecko from Petco, the biology teacher that wants to introduce reptiles to their classroom, the wildlife educator, the serious hobbyist as well as the law makers and everyone in between. We’ll be in support on USARK and PIJAC and will help them in their fights. We’ll be able to give them guidance along with be the vehicle to reach the masses when they have answers to all of our questions. 

   I can assure you that we’ll be sharing more information as things move along. This will be a monumental task to get rolling, but I can tell you this… I believe that each and every person we spoke to will do whatever it takes to make this happen. Whether we want to except it or not, people expect the leaders of the community to guide the hobby, and it’s about time that we step up and start doing what we can  to keep this hobby alive! While this is only the first step, and on the surface the NARBC summit seemed to be a dud, there was some major successes hatched. Now you guys need to keep our feet to the fire and make sure we follow through. And if you see someone that you respect not doing their part you need to speak up! Most importantly don’t forget… you are the most important part of this whole thing. Get ready for a wild ride people! It’s going to be epic!

SnakeBytesTV

 It’s a hard feeling to describe when you have a vision for something like a TV show or a Web show and you put all your energy into trying to make it a success, not because you are narcissistic or have to pad your ego, but because you want to reach people with your message. What message you might ask? The message that “we” are here and we’re not the underground evil killers you think we are, nor are the animals we love so dearly. I wanted to put a fun face, a human face on my beloved hobby, so that all the people in the World that would stumble upon our show while searching through the YouTube vaults would realize that they have had the wrong opinion about what they thought about reptiles as well as reptile keepers. 

  Now over four years into the show and over 50 million views web wide, I find myself still trying to find that magical combination of entertainment and education. I wonder if the amount of time, effort and money that I have invested in this endeavour has been worth it? Have we made a positive impact?  When it comes to good old fashion fun, there’s no doubt that it’s been a great adventure and more then I could have ever expected it to be, but still, have we made a difference? After all, that’s what my original mission statement was for the show, wasn’t it?

  As I reflect, I think we’ve had our moments of going too far, but we always had the bigger picture in mind, and that was changing peoples minds about what we love, what we are passionate about, reptiles. Unless you’ve ever been in the position where you are trying to entertain people it’s hard to describe the feeling. There’s excitement, dread and pressure all wrapped up into one little package. Then you can add your detractors, the people that can’t wait until you upload your video so they can hit the “dislike” button without even watching the show. Or get on a forum and spew hatred for you and your show, while they sit back and do nothing to help the cause.  Or maybe they ask “Where’s Kel for the 35th week in a row”. Memo, I fired him…. and no I am not going to say anything bad about him, no matter how much you want me to!  

  Maybe I take it too serious, certainly not the on camera part, but the message part. Each week we have to come up with a show idea, a funny part to keep people watching all while keeping in mind that there are as many critics out there as supporters. What’s unique to my situation is, we run a reptile breeding business, I don’t make my living making videos, might be an epiphany to some… To be honest there are times our show helps our business with exposure and at times it hurts our business because of the backlash. In the end I have to keep seeing the bigger picture and not let the pressure steal the fun from what we are trying to accomplish.

  Lets face it, SnakeBytesTV has never been about BHB, you have never heard me tell people to buy from BHB, or flashed our website on the show for prospective clients to buy from us. I have always viewed it as our communities show and never an infomercial for my company. 

  Now what’s facing me is, where to go from here? Do I keep going the way we have for four plus years? Do I try to take it to the next level? Whatever that means.. or do I step back, regroup and decide what we want to do next? When you’re producing a show week in and week out there is little time to change things, you spend all that energy working on the next show, the next idea… 
  Now don’t freak out…I can assure you that my heart is more then 100% dedicated to our show, our supporters and the reptile community. That being said, I sometimes do need a little help from YOU, our viewers. What can we do to make you more proud of us and get you more involved with our movement? What direction do we need to go in to get you, the foot soldiers to help get more and more people interested what we do? Think of it this way, our FaceBook fan page has over 12,000 likes, and the outreach, which means all the friends of the people that “like” our page is over 3,000,000 yes that’s 3 MILLION!! Yet we only get a million views a month. Yet we put out four plus shows each month along with all our back libraries of shows. That’s less then 10% success rate for out outreach. Every time we reach one more person on FaceBook our outreach number goes up by 50, 100, 1000 or even 5000! But we can only reach those people if YOU are proud enough of what we are doing to tell all your friends about it. If they find out about our show from you,  they tell their friends and so on… that’s what going VIRAL is all about.. But it always starts with YOU….

  At some point we all have to make decisions based more on what the value of what we are doing and less on what our heart is telling us to do. In no way am I saying I want to shut the show down, far from it, but I do need to start to figure out how to make it worth the time, energy and money we put into it. I just can’t imagine life without my now “normal” Wednesday morning routine of uploading the show, posting it here and there and then sitting back and interacting with all the incredible people around the globe that support us. My vision is to take the show and our hobbies exposure to the next level. But with that I’ll probably need more help from all of you. What do you say? You ready to take a ride? But this trip requires more then just sitting back and watching, it requires some participation on your part. My ears are open and I’m waiting to hear what you guys want me to  do….. Yours truly… Crazy Snake Dude on YouTube…

Time to wake up

  I posted a video of Roy Garber from the hit series “Shipping Wars” on A&E tv. I was shocked that on the main page of A&E’s website there was a video about this guys love for his pet alligator along with his love for snakes, frogs and turtles. In my eyes this was a huge win for the reptile community. A public figure speaking out about how cool these animals are. Did I think we need to appoint this guy the face of our community, of course not, but I think there might be some people that enjoy his show that might give reptiles a second look after his testimony. 

  Surprisingly a lot of repsonses were extremely negative about Roy’s husbandry of his alligator. Don’t get me wrong, I was not impressed either, but it wasn’t like they were being neglected. The gator certainly should have been bigger and a larger environment was a must, but again… this guy was pouring out his love for reptiles and our communities repsonse was to attack him. I tagged him in video and if for some reason he decided to pop in and see what “we” the reptile community were saying he would have seen the attacks and probably never wanted to have anything to do with our fight. 

Some responses said that we needed to be careful who we want to respresent our hobby. Are you kidding me… This guy is not a rapist…. He’s a guy that has a successful TV show that for no personal gain decided to tell everyone how much he loves reptiles. Do we need to get in touch with him and tell him to never talk about reptiles again publically? Come on people, we need all the help we can get. We can’t sit back and tell someone that has a much bigger voice then all of us combined that he is terrible for our hobby and a reason that HSUS has ammo for more laws to be passed. 

We can sit back in our small community on FaceBook and bitch to one another how we are getting our rights taken away from us, while we push people away because we don’t agree with the size cage they have or the amount they feed their animals. In the meanwhile the special interest groups are paying Michael Vic to do commercials on the importance of dog care.. Funny how our standards are higher then theirs. 

Again, I’m not asking for this guy to be the “face” or “voice” of our hobby, but we need to embrace anyone that loves reptiles and if we don’t agree with their husbandry then we need to reach out them and try to educate them rather then shun them as terrible people for our cause and attack them on public forums. 

I’m fighting so hard for ALL  causes in the hobby.. my question to those that don’t want this “type” of exposure is… What are you doing to change anything??? Go ahead bash me for the way I keep my animals, bash me for Chewy getting bit, bash me for calling you out… In the end I’m fighting for your rights to keep reptiles and my love of my hobby and I’m not just sitting back bitching…. As always sorry for the rant….

mites

  Are mites the kiss of death? Seems that a lot of people in the reptile hobby equate mites with being the plague… As if mites are as bad as IBD, respiratory infections or Herpes for that matter. Of course nobody wants to deal with mites, they are a pain in the butt and are something that everyone that keeps reptiles hopes to avoid.

  It’s not secret that we have had issues with mites popping up in our baby Ball Pythons. There’s been plenty of conversation on the forums about it along with colorful threads on the BOI. First off let me say that as a reptile business it is inexcusable that I ship a snake out with mites.. This should NEVER happen, but it has and at some point in the future probably will again.. Uh.. Oh.. did I just admit that I will send out a snake in the future with mites??? Would you guys feel better if I lied and said “BHB will never send a snake out with mites in the future.. .ever!” As a matter of a fact I am willing to guarantee that every major and most minor snake collections in the country, at some point, has dealt with a mite problem. There was an old saying that says “If you haven’t had snake mites, you haven’t kept snakes long enough”. They come in on bedding, they come in on live rodents, they some in on “new snakes and they hop a ride on snakes that have been to reptiles shows. With a small collection they are very easy to treat and get rid of, normally gone within one treatment of Prevent A Mite.

 Now let me take a minute before your guys head explode and tell you that we have had mites, and we are doing our best to rid of them 100%. But they’ll be back at some point and we have do to do better job of not only irradiating them from our collection, but certainly NEVER sending them out to your collection. But when someone tells me they will never do business with us because we sent someone a snake with a couple of mites by accident, then I lose my mind. When someone contacts me that has had an issue with a snake we sent them with mites, I offer to take the snake back with a complete refund, I offer to pay for the treatment and I offer them a discount on future business for their hassle with the problem that I created. Of course this is bad business for us and something we “will” get ahead of, but lets take a look at things with a level head. Mites are terrible, but as long as you take care of them they are harmless and nothing more then a inconvenience. Yes they “can” transport disease when not eradicated, but lets hope your “other” snakes are not disease ridden. Other then being a pain in the ass, are they the plague? Are they so vile that a snake business with mites should be ostracized and black listed? Come on people, if you get a great snake at a good price that is followed by good service, but unfortunately the animal has a mite on it, does that mean you should never do business with that person again? Especially when that company is willing to bend over backwards to help you get past it.  
  Listen, I hope I never have another snakes leave my place with a mite, but if I stopped dealing with people because I got an animal with a mite on it, I would have to throw my address book out and scratch off 90% of the biggest breeders in the countries names from the list of doing future business. We ship out tens of thousands of snakes each year and have had a very “few” leave this place with mites. When I say a few I mean less then 5-10 animals out of the 20,000 plus animals we have shipped. Of course one is still too many…

Certainly mites, suck… but if I was sending out a “sick” snake, then I think I would deserve the bad wrap that seems to be following us around because of a few animals that slipped out of our place with those pesky mites. I’ll do my best to stop it from happening again, but I think people need to be educated on what some “real” health issues are when it comes to their reptiles.. Until then I guess I’ll just keep working on better procedures to stop this problem while my competitors talk people out of buying snakes from us because of the dreaded mite problem.. I wonder if those people will be willing to do all the things we do to help promote and protect our hobby? Lets hope we never have to find out!

Idea for educating/ promoting the hobby

I had this idea a couple of years ago and never followed up with it, after all I have a few irons in the fire you know. Here goes… We pick a date in the spring, best around the end of the school year, where as many people from all over the country contact their local schools and libraries, asking if you can bring animals and do an educational show for the kids. We call it “Snake Appreciation Day”. If we get thousands of people to all schedule an educational “programs” on that day we can not only change a lot of peoples minds about reptiles with the “hands on” approach, but this would certainly be news worthy for the major network news and major print papers. 

We can start a website, have people register where and when they are doing their “talk” for Snake Awareness Day, so people can see how this movement is growing. Once we start to get impressive numbers we can reach out to the News agencies around the country and bombard them with request for stories. When the day comes we can have local news out at events across the nation. We can have every local news agency doing “local” stories about this event and blow up the national News at the same time. 

We can use the momentum to not only show people that our community wants to educate the masses and get away from the satanic death metal stereotyping, but also use the opportunity to fund raise for organizations like USARK and PIJAC…

What do you say…. You want to join me on this ride???

Champagne corks

  You can almost hear the champagne corks popping at HSUS with this latest victory, and trust me it was a victory for them. They put together a masterful job of selling the public, the media and the law makers that there was a threat to humanity with “killer” pythons. Let’s take a step back and look at this from a “non” snake keepers stand point. You turn on the news and you see pythons invading Florida, they say they can eventually  take over 2/3 of the country… You have no information saying this is not true, it’s the news, it’s in the USA today paper, of course it must be true. Then you hear claims from a Senator in Florida that there are up to 200,000 killer Pythons taking over Florida..and moving north! The USGS put out a paper with all kinds of unfounded scientific evidence that supports all these claims.. Of course the only action is to put a nation wide ban on these snakes before they are knocking on my door in south east Michigan, right….

Now let me ask you… Was the truth ever reported? Did we take this to the public and make the USGS report and the claims from “said” Senator look foolish? Did we contact the major newspapers and get them to print the other side. Sure, they probably wanted to run with the more sensational story, but did we press them to show the other side, the truth? Isn’t it just as big of a story to show the corruption of the system as it is to report false claims? It’s not hard to see that the initial claims from Senator Nelson where he said there could be a few thousand Burmese in the Everglades and within one year it went up to as many as 200,000!   Now I’m not a genius, but I have stayed in a Holiday inn select once or twice. I don’t think the reproductive habits of the Burmese Pythons are that intense. Mind you that in the years that permits have been issued to find and kill these “killer” snakes, very small numbers of Burmese have been found,  so where did they come up with these infalted numbers? Why did the estimated numbers of Burmese in the Evergaldes grow from a few thousand to up to 200,000? What about this “Super Snake”? The African rock Python x Burmese Python… the one that has no growth inhibitor and can grow to 30 feet and kill everything in it’s site? Is it just me or did this come out of a science fiction movie and have absolutely no scientific proof behind it. As a matter a fact, there have been plenty of African Rock x Burmese that don’t even resemble the “monster” that these “experts” described, and the media ran with. Heck there was a show on History channel about it and there is a show being developed for Discovery channel right now about it… Opps, was I supposed to know that? In the meanwhile did anyone do anything to show the truth?

I’m not sitting here on my high horse, I didn’t do a good enough job of trying to get the word out either. I tried on a number of occasions to get on Late night shows, Fox TV and in the New Times, but again, I’m just a guy with snakes and a YouTube show. I think our biggest problem is our efferts are spent on trying to convince people that already know the truth. We post on snake forums, facebook our reptile friends, do email and letter campaigns within our community, never trying to reach beyond the boundries of the people that already are on our side. At the same time HSUS and the other special interest groups are winning over the people that “don’t” have a clue. They are believing because they have never been showed the other side, the truth.

I’m not 100% sure who we look at to get this message out, but we had better figure that out pretty quick. If it’s USARK, then we better find them funding to bring on a PR manager, if it’s someone else, then we need to address them and get started right away. The one thing I know is, right now as we speak there’s a victory party going on at the HSUS and other special interest groups headquarters. They will be smelling blood in the water and you better not be fooled into thinking this is over.. Now that they won, and handed the reptile community the hugest defeat in it’s history, they will be back for more… I promise you that.

My question to you is, what are we going to do about it?

R.I.P. big snakes

In reality I probably thought I’d see this day come, yet I was still in denial. Maybe it was the promise of “fight” that we were putting up, maybe it was me just being naive. Yet, when the announcement came and four species of the “big” snakes that I have kept and bred for most of my life are now on the Lacey act and will be banned from crossing state lines, I was till shocked. How did we come to this? Last I checked our country was in pretty bad shape financially. Unemployment at high rates, housing market in a mess, yet our government feels that one of the most pressing things to worry about are “big” snakes. Mind you the only problem with big snakes are in South Florida, not “all” of Florida, but south Florida. Their brilliant solution for this so called problem that takes up less then 1% of our country…. is to punish everyone and stop the interstate traffic of these four species.

Sure you can still keep your pet Burmese Python, but pray you never want to move out of state or get a job transfer to another state. Because that long term “pet” snake will not be making the trip with you… What about our military? People that are willing to risk their lives for our freedom, yet will not have the freedom to take their pet snake when they get transferred to another base. Have the politicians really thought this out? Do they have a clue what they are doing? The short answer is… NO. What they have are special interest groups like HSUS that have done an incredible job of “selling” their snake oil to the law makers. Of course if you read or listen to their argument, it’s ridiculous, but the law makers are eating  it up like it’s written in the bible. Do they really believe what they are being sold,  or do they just follow those special interest groups because of huge donations? I would think the latter. Should be we mad at HSUS? Not really, in a way I respect them. They are better then we are at selling their agenda. Of course they have deeper pockets, but I think it’s as much about “selling” what they think. Let me ask you… When was the last time “our” message was on a late night show? How about a national radio show? Have we tried to reach out to these news organizations to “sell” our message? Not that I’m aware of. Truth be told, I have tried personally, but I’m just a guy that breeds snakes. We need our organizations to do a better job of “selling” the public on what we believe and know to be the truth.. There is no victory here…. We lost four species of snakes from our hobby. We should not be chest pumping that we saved anything… I’m a supporter of USARK and PIJAC and I can not imagine how hard their job is, but we can not try to spin this as a victory. This is so far from a victory it’s not even funny.

For people that have been in this hobby for as long as I have, you might remember that this hobby was born from the explosion if the Burmese Python market. That’s right, if it wasn’t for the “investment” boom of albino, green, labrynth, and other Burmese Pythons in the 90’s this hobby would look completely different, yet we can sit here and say that it’s okay that we just “lost” them for the rest of eternity? Well, I’m not calling this anything but what it is. We got our asses kicked by the other side…. Now the question is, are we going to do something about it or are we going to continue business as usual? Because if the best we can do is send emails off to the president then we might as well give up now. Do you think our president cares one bit about your “big” snakes? Come on people…. wake up. We have to change peoples perspectives on snakes and what they mean to all of us. We have to educate the public on the income they bring into this country, the jobs they create. I’m not bashing the organizations for dropping the ball, they did the best with the hand they were dealt. I’m just saying if we as a community don’t start joining together and stop the bullshit that we have been doing for the past several years, then we are all doomed and we might as well give up now. If people in this hobby spent 10% of the time they spend posting bullshit on the BOI about stupid shit and spent 10% of the time that people use lying about competitors just to make themselves look better and instead used that time on helping save our hobby, then USARK and PIJAC could actually have the resources they need to “win” these battles.

I’m so frustrated with so many things that have happened in the hobby in the past several years. The way it’s turned into a grade school mentality. This is not what it once was, when we respected others, we appreciated the success of our rivals. If we don’t get our shit together people there will be no hobby to protect ten years from now. I’m willing to do way more then my share…. But we have to all be in this together. I pray that this is the turning point where we can look back and say we started to take our hobby back. But that means we all have to change, we all have to do more. We have to be on the same team. You can’t tell me we can’t fund raise more? We can recruit people in the limelight better. I know for a fact that tons of celebrities keep reptiles, yet I have yet to see a commercial with them saying they like or respect reptiles… If we do not change public perception we are doomed. 

I’ll apologize for my rant, but today feels like a look into the dismantling of our hobby. Is this the first domino to fall or are we going to stop this shit now…….

2012 high hopes and challenges.

I’m really not one to think of the New Year as a new start, after all it’s just one day after the last day in December and what really changes? With that said, I can see it as a way to put things in perspective, to kind of look back and inventory what the last twelve months have meant and what you hope the nest twelve will have in store. 

There is no doubt that 2011 was the year of plenty of “highs” and “lows” for me and my business. I hate to admit it but there were probably more “lows” then “highs” in all honesty. Our production was not what we normally count on and I was not happy with the direction our company had been taking so we moved on from some of our crew that had been with us for a long time, which was personally hard to do, but the right decision to get things back on track. Bringing new crew on is always tough because I look at BHB as a family. We have been fortunate to find some key people that have really helped change the way we do things. Our production for 2012 looks more promising then ever. Of course there will be disappointments, but I think this will be our biggest year ever. We also have been trying to improve all other aspects of our business from a  brand new website to bettering our quality of animals and service. It’s hard when things start to slip and you have to figure out how to get back to where you were before things started to go in that direction. When things start going bad it doesn’t happen overnight and the “fixes” don’t happen overnight either. We ended the last few months of the year working harder then I can ever remember. The turn around is slow but is obvious in the animals health and certainly worth the effort. To say I’m not excited to see how things turn out and looking forward to being 100% proud of my business like I had in the past would be an under statement. Again, it’s a process and we’re working our way through it as quick as we can, but I know that soon we’ll look back and be so happy with all the work that we have put into getting back on top of the way things run around here.

It’s not all about “my business, our hobby has been under major attack this past few years, but 2011 might have been the most pressure our hobby has seen to date. I don’t just breed and sell snakes, but I work hard for the community, if that means promoting the hobby or being involved with “behind the scenes” work to protect the hobby, I am all over it. I put a lot of pressure on myself because I love what I do and I love this hobby and I am willing to do whatever it takes to keep this hobby alive. I’m not going to lie and say there aren’t times when I think that going back to just worrying about “my” business and not having to have all the pressure of trying to be one of the “front men” for the hobby. It was a lot easier life, but I can’t imagine not being as involved if not more involved then I have been. The love of the reptile hobby drives me, even  when the weight seems too much. Sure it sucks when you work so hard and you hear people bashing you for one reason or another, saying the our “show” is hurting the hobby when you see the people flooding into the hobby because of your efforts. But then I get all the positive feedback, the tons of emails, messages, comments and it makes it more then worth it. I just have to not let the negative drag me down, because I know that my heart is in the right direction and that’s all I can do.

We’ve been working towards a TV deal for more then four years, with our “web show” growing in popularity it seemed like it would be easy, but trust me it’s not. Finally a few months back a network “green lit” a project that we would be involved with. We hoped to be in production by fall of last year and as with the whole process we have yet to film one scene. Once again, I realize how tough this TV industry is… Our producer promises that we’ll be filming the very first part of this year and with any luck we’ll make it to the TV screen sometime in mid 2012. The biggest reason why I even care to do TV is to expose people to our “world” of reptiles. To open the doors for us to get our word out. Who’s out there representing our hobby to the masses? Sure there are some that are trying and even making some progress, but I want to be even louder then that. I want people to see our passion for what we do, so they can understand that these animals are not dangerous monsters. Sure, there will be people within our hobby that will “hate” our show, they will continue to say that when we get on TV that we are hurting the hobby because we will be doing some extreme things. I can bet you that chewy WILL be getting bit from time to time, we will be showing the “ugly” side of running a family business, but we’ll also be showing how much we love the animals and how passionate we are about working with then. You have to remember it’s a fine line between entertaining people enough for them to watch so you can get your message out and boring people to death and nobody watching and your show getting canceled. If we go down that path then what did we do to help our hobby? You “have” to stay on air in order to get your message out. I always say you can have the best message in the world and if nobody is listening or watching what difference does that message make? We’ll do our best to represent our hobby in the best light we can. Trust me, I do not take that lightly and will not do anything that I feel will hurt us in anyway. And with the exposure that hopefully comes with it, I will use it to really change the peoples minds that don’t understand what we , the reptile community, are all about.

As you can see, this next chapter in my life is full of change, full of possibilities,  from getting our business back to the standard that I will be proud of to trying to lead the reptile revolution to the masses… I have my work cut out for me and there will be many many sleepless nights to go with my always long days. In the end it’s all of you guys and all your support that empowers me to live my dreams and fulfill all my desires. If there is such a thing as a “New Years resolution” then mine will be to try to make all of you proud of what we are trying to do. I thank you for being part of this and I hope to make you all proud in this new year!

Ball Bids

I hate to bring attention to this, but I felt a need to share my opinion. There’s a “new” website called BallBids, where you bid a penny on a morph Ball Python. How it works is you pay for your bids, average of .60 or so. Each bid the animal goes up a penny. The auction goes for a few days, so in the end a $350 snake sells for $4. Keeping in mind that every bidder has lost money except for the winner, who has gotten a great deal on a snake. Now there have been “penny” bidding sites for a long time, with lots of them being shut down as scams. To me buying a laptop for $3 is a different story then buying an Albino Ball Python for $5. These are living animals and the care of the animal and the after the sale support will be non-existent. 

For now all the animals being auctioned off are from Mike Willbanks from Constrictors Unlimited. Mike is a good friend of mine and has great animals and a good reputation. I have not spoken to him about this, but I hope he does not realize what part he has to do with “cheapening” our hobby as well as having no concern for the animals only money. Knowing Mike like I do, I have to imagine that he will “run” away from this as quick as he can. He is a good guy and cares for his animals and our hobby. 

I am curious about your opinions. First, what do you think about this “penny” business model selling animals and second, do you think that you will still support the breeders that supply animals to this “make a buck quick” website.

I am hoping and praying that this site closes soon, not because I am concerned about the prices of animals, but the way the rest of the world sees how we treat our animals. These are incredible creatures that are alive! Not object that are valued at pennies to make “one” person a lot of money!