Hello Richard,

I have given some thought (now here's a concept) as to how to reply to your rude comments and personal attacks. Normally I sit by idly and bite my tongue when I'm brought up negatively in the forum however since I don't have much of a tongue left, I felt a response was in order. Here's Richard's post from 1/30/2011 that I'm responding to:

__________________________________________________ __________

But anyway, I wouldn't call amelanistic X melanistic a snow either but that's what they're calling them. Also, Scott isn't exactly the authoritive expert even though people seem to think he is. He often calls snakes something they are not. Time and time again I've been seeing people call melanistic snakes "anery" just because they look like anery radixes do. They seem to think that in order to be melanistic, the snake has to be black and patternless and that's just not true. Melanistic northwesters are often dark charcoal gray and sometimes have a faint dorsal stripe. And quite frankly, I fail to see how an "anery" radix can be anery when it wasn't ever normally red in the first place.

A lot of mislabeling going on and misuse of the terms.

__________________________________________________ ___________

Just curious as to what snakes or morphs you mean by this statement as you provided no examples-"He often calls snakes something they are not"

Richard's next statement is:

Also, Scott isn't exactly the authoritive expert even though people seem to think he is.

I have been in the thamnophis hobby longer than probably most of you. This doesn't mean squat, just is what it is. I have never proclaimed myself an expert to anyone. If people want to consider me an expert or don't want to, that's up to them.

I have made mistakes on genetics and do acknowledge that. Genetics is not an exact science, which in of itself is one of the major reasons that I enjoy breeding garters....not knowing what you may ultimately produce breeding A to Z.

The amelanistic eastern bred to the melanistic eastern created double hets and these double hets (surprisingly) produced the first snow eastern.
This came as a complete surprise as what Richard stated is normally true (anerythristic x albino) but as you can see from the pics Don provided, they sure look to be snows. I think we would all be interested to hear what you would call this morph ??

Lastly on the anerythristic genetics, I personally have bred an anerythristic plains to albino plains, which created double het for snows, bred these double hets back to one another and created SNOWS. These snows have been proven out w/ 2 different snow plains strains (Nebraska & Iowa snows). I also bred anerythristic red sideds to albinos, and the resulting double hets were then bred together and they also produced snows. These crosses prove, without any doubt, that the "anerythristic" trait is truly just that, anerythristic.

On a side note is the cool thing w/ creating new morphs is that this allows the breeder the luxury to name the new snake/morph whatever they want, be it the tooty fruity garter snake or the triple chocolate wonder morph. I'm making this point not to be grandiose, but to point out that this is a byproduct (and necessity) of creating a new bloodlines/morphs. One has to attach a name to something new.

Scott