Quote Originally Posted by brain View Post

And there is no information on “What pathogens do I expose her and/or the environment to?”
I can kind of see your point... but... do you keep other snakes? if so, you automatically risk spreading anything your current snakes may be carrying and not showing to her just by contacting them, and then her or vice versa. So saying that you are never exposing her to anything bad would be impossible since you would need a 100% sterile environment where you never ever contact her personally to be successful in zero exposure. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasite eggs are all invisible to the naked eye, it's as simple as you mess around with another animal in your house (or out of it, for that matter) that happens to be carrying something and you automatically risk possibly, passing. Whether she would actually catch it, whether she fights it off, whether she carries it without showing it and then when she is released it wipes out a small population, that is all left to chance and unseen circumstances. To wonder about what real harm you are doing is perfectly okay, but to deny that there is a *posibility* of you causing it would be rather silly. Never say never!

The other major point of capturing, keeping, and then releasing a snake that people often miss is the amount of stress and confusion it puts the snak through. Stress lowers her immune system, causing her to be more susceptible to picking up things that she might normall fight off. When you set her free, she is obviously confused and even if you release her exactly where you found her, she is going to spend a good bit of time crawling around aimlessly trying to figure out what the heck is going on and that is the time where she is very likely to be eaten and thus you are in fact, reducing her chance to survive by a great deal by degradation of her immune system and mental health.

I am not saying I am for or against occasional capture and release, I am merely stating facts and offering some speculation and counterpoints to what you have brought up. Whereas Stefan probably meant everything Ihad said, he usually does not go into detail


I believe if it is a morph i.e. albino, then it would not last in the wild.


This is true in many cases but certainly not all. Every color morph animal you see, originated from an animal that 99% of the time, was collected from the wild and was actually showing that trait and not just carrying it. Some color morphs, such as anery, melanistic, hypomelanistic, and even occasionally erythristic are actually beneficial at times and you can even find established populations of these individuals. I personally own an albino animal that was collected in the wild, the albino dekay's of course, and while that was a baby my other two wild caught morph animals were not. Scott felzer owns a BUNCH of astounding morph animals from the wild, many of which were adults at the time found. My hypo eastern, which is close in coloring to a t positive albino, was already an adult and gravid when I caught her. She stuck out SO bad in the grass and yet, she made it. I saw her from almost 40 feet away crawling through tall grass. My wild caught flame has a fluorescent red stripe that is about as inconspicuous as a traffic cone... she was a juvenile and she made it as well. Morphs do make it in the wild, not always, but if they didn't, we would never see them in the hobby!