Local / Pure Bred Boas

Many boa collectors and enthusiasts prefer local boas (also known as pure boas). The debate over this topic and the intensity of the feelings regarding local boas seems to be stronger in Europe than in America. Buddha Boa does not want to enter into the debate and take sides. Rather, since we breed both local specific boas and non-local boas, we want to provide some information about the topic for those who might be confused about it.

First we need to define what we mean by pure or local boas. A local boa is one where the genetics can be traced back to a specific region or country. This means both the parents can also be traced back to the same region and the same goes for all ancestors of this boa. This is much more difficult than it sounds and takes more than just a CITEs to prove. There are two main reasons this is so difficult.

The original boas (the wild caught stock which has been used to breed the captive babies) were most likely traded many times before reaching the final collector or zoo. During the capture and export of local boas, many different parties are involved: the catcher, the middlemen, the dealers, the exporters, the retailers and finally the collector. While the boas are being traded through out the chain, they can be mixed with other similar boas which came from different regions.
As more and more baby snakes are bred and sold from the originally caught wild snakes, it is nearly impossible to guarentee that babies were not bred with boas from other regions. If this occurred, this would have contaminated the bloodlines of the local boas. We are NOT talking about cross genus breeding here (cross genus would be bci bred with bcc). Specifically we are talking about an example like this: nicaraguan boa (bci) could have been breed with a central american boa (bci). Both the nicaraguan and the central america are dwarf boas and similar in looks and breedings between these two local boas is not uncommon. If these "contaminated" bloodlined local boas were sold as pure nicaraguan boas and further breed to others, well you can see the difficulty in knowing that the boa is a true pure or local boa.

So there we are. Local boas can be traced back to a specific region. However, it is difficult to guarentee the genetics are still pure. Local boas are neither better or worse than non-local boas. Simply, they are another category of boas in the market. We breed both local boas as well as non-local boas.

I hope this article provides some information to help illustrate the difficulty in claiming a boa is a local boa.