The reptile keeping hobby has changed dramatically over the last 20 years in Australia, when you do a comparison analysis of the last two decades. More people from a diversity of backgrounds are actively involved in the keeping, breeding, buying and selling of a wider variety of now affordable herps. Throw in the internet as a communication medium and tool for marketing and the hobbies dynamics are forever changed. Nowdays selling reptiles as a small time hobbiest can be daunting with buyers spoilt for choice at competitive prices. This can be frustrating when wishing to offload excess progeny that eat up time, effort, space and money, especially when buyers are few and far between. Worse still when they window shop online, asking endless questions from a seller with the click of an email, demand multiple photographs of an advertised specimen, generally being tyre kickers or worse from what I've read and heard about. Its enough to make the most passionate breeders keep breeding pairs separate for years at a time, or just sell up. There are more cases of keepers now owning the very few reptiles they just love and have one or two special projects in mind and being at peace with that. If breeding they plan to make room for the little ones to have a long stay and stagger out the selling process for however long it takes to sell them to the right keepers over time.
I dabble in field work every summer and find great reward in reptiles as wild animals. If it paid I'd do it as a full time job. Reality is field research is a luxury to find financed and runs at a cost rather than a profit. Again Herpetologists as research scientists are a world of difference from reptile hobbiests, from which they often distance themselves. The hobbiests are often unaware of this, assuming herpetoculture lends itself to herpetology in the scientific sense. This is nothing new, there is a history of it.
My advise to the seasoned and weary breeders trying to negotiate their way through the hobby as it evolves and are willing to walk away, don't in haste. Take a well deserved break if need be, downsize and let yourself breathe for a while and take stock. Come back to keeping and breeding if and when you are ready. Do whatever you have to, but remind yourself of where your passion for reptiles began, the journey it has taken you on, and where there is next to go with it.
