Fit for a King or Just Milking it?

Not just a vanilla milksnake

There seems to be an accessible route into the morph market for milk snakes, facilitated by their low costs and bright patterns. Being prolific breeders with a high demand for animals anyway, morphs can give breeders new goals and ambitions. Matthew Pearman has recently embarked on a new morph breeding project called Milksnake Mutations, he said: “I’ve kept milksnakes for 10 years now, in fact they were my second ever species that I had when I was a teenager. Milksnake mutations came about because I’ve finally found myself in a stable job, with an equally enthusiastic partner and we said screw it, let’s do it!”

“Compared to corn snakes, I do think they’re hugely underappreciated in the morph market. The truth is, there is not many base genes which puts people off. The base genes are hypomelanistic, amelanistic and anerythristic but then responsible line breeding creates different scales within these genes. I think milksnakes are great because every budget is different and top whack for a Honduran is around £1,000 which really isn’t that much in comparison to other species.”

With such a wide range of species and subspecies, the Lampropeltis genus gives new breeders the opportunity to build a collection of snakes that remains rooted in their childhood passions. Young breeders have a lot of scope to develop on their existing expertise, whilst remaining confident in their experienced approach.

Sting of the King

The hardy nature and adaptability of the Lampropeltis genus has allowed one species to cause ecological damage to the Canary Islands. With few predators on the island, the common king snake (L. getula) has established four well rooted populations on the island of Gran Canaria. Being cosmopolitan feeders, the snakes are feeding on island’s endemic lizard species. Since 2009 over 7,000 snakes have been caught in multiple attempts to quell the population growth and protect the indigenous wildlife.

The snakes on Gran Canaria are almost certainly the descendants of escaped pets or released animals from the 80s when king snakes had their initial spike in popularity. As such, Spanish authorities have pushed to list Lampropeltis getula under the European Union Invasive Alien Species (IAS) legislation. This listing would effectively ban the trade, breeding and movement of the species and all subspecies in the EU. Although this has not come to fruition in the four years that the debate has been ongoing, it is possible that despite leaving the EU at the beginning of the year and there being little risk of any damage from the species here, this may still affect the UK.

Both the Reptile and Exotic Pet Trade Association (REPTA) and the Federation of British Herpetologists (FBH) submitted responses to the IAS scientific forum challenging the validity of the proposal on an EU wide basis. REPTA told Exotics Keeper Magazine: “Whilst there can be no doubt of their impact on Gran Canaria this cannot be translated onto mainland Europe, and definitely not into the northern areas of the EU, such as the UK. For this reason, among others, we objected to the proposal on both occasions it was presented.”

“Since leaving the EU, the UK has adopted all of the current species listed under IAS, however we are not clear about how they would view future listings. It is our hope that the UK Government will adopt a scientific, evidence-based approach to any new listings and adopt them or not on the basis of the risk in the UK. Currently it looks like the Kingsnake proposal may be presented a third time for assessment. However, as we are no longer part of the EU, the UK will not form part of the assessment. If the proposal is adopted then ALL L. gentula subspecies will be banned in the EU, meaning you can’t sell, breed or transport them. The impact on the UK therefore hinges on our Governments approach to proposals.”

“Northern Ireland however is bound by the Northern Ireland Protocol and so an EU ban would be enforced in Northern Ireland regardless of if it were adopted by the UK”