JasonL: I love your work
It is a fact that hybrids, once bred, are sterile. At least with the ligers, and the donkey zebra crosses etc, perhaps theres a message there from mother nature............. don't mess with stuff concerning her, she don't like it!
I am not fond of heavy hybridising (I don't even personally like interlocality hybrids, let alone intertaxa hybrids), but that argument doesn't stand up. If mother nature's way of letting us know she doesn't like hybrids is to make them sterile, she is giving us the green light to hybridise every species of python with every other species, so according to that, cross your Womas with your Chondros and your Scrubbies with your Olives, as they'll all be fertile.
We all want alterations of what mother nature created, even locality purists like myself. We want better feeders, brighter colours, friendly Jungles, etc. Don't ask me why it matters to me, because I don't have a reason other than "I like locality pure, just because I do".
Since I can't come up with an argument which has any basis other than my own sentimentality and personal preference, I can't find a reason to tell people they "shouldn't" hybridise (where legal), just that I would prefer them not to, and of course, I can't expect people to behave as I would like them to, just because I want it. It's just like someone telling me that I shouldn't want a striped Spotted Python or albino Water Python, because it isn't natural, mother nature doesn't want it. If I was lucky enough to hatch albino Water Pythons, I can tell you I would be producing more of them, and doing it proudly (and for strange reasons even I don't understand, I would want to keep them locality pure, and be a little sad when other people crossed them with another locality, although I wouldn't be able to give them a solid reason not to).
Australians seem to me to be divided similarly to Americans when it comes to hybrids, but with more Americans, there are more of everything, purists and hybrid lovers. That means that there are more hybrids over there than here, so we might have the perception that they're 'worse' than us, but it's simply that there are more of them.
I find it sad that in time it will be very difficult to work out what type of snake you have, not just the locality of your Carpet (let's face it, that boat has already sailed in most cases; heck, it's not even easy to find a locality pure Coastal Carpet Python these days, unless you go for something illegally poached!) but also the exact mix of
species that snake in the pet shop has. Hopefully at least for the rest of my life there will be enough people who are very careful and keen enough to maintain pure lines. Towards the end of my lifetime, maybe sooner, we should have pocket gadgets which will be able to DNA test animals on the spot and tell us exactly what they are (at least at the taxa/species sort of level). Hopefully we'll still have pure lines when DNA testing gadgets are cheap enough for everyone to have one, and from there it will be easy to keep track of everything. Of course, perhaps we'll all starve to death or die in nuclear wars before then anyway.