tokay farming not profitable article...

[Riverside Reptiles]

TRAFFIC - Wildlife Trade News - Tokay Gecko captive breeding doesn

 

[Aimless]

this was a bit distressing when I ran across it the other day.

 

[Marauderhex]

While distressing, I feel like it's kind of an obvious conclusion to come to. Animal farming, no pun intended, is very hard to run a business that breaks even, let alone be profitable. Hell, just look at all of the people who want to get into reptiles because they saw a $10K price tag on a ball python once. How many of those quit before even the first year is done because it's a time, energy, and most of all money sink?

 

[Riverside Reptiles]

It's worked well for large scale iguana farming. Most of the igs imported now have been farmed instead of being total wc. The idea is for the natives to farm the animals instead of catching them from the wild. But, I imagine, the amazingly cheap prices that tokay sell for makes it hard to farm them with any profitability.

 

[billewicz]

Yeah but Iggy's drop 20+ eggs at a pop. You know all too well getting more than 8 eggs a year from a Tokay is better than average.

 

[Riverside Reptiles]

Yeah but Iggy's drop 20+ eggs at a pop. You know all too well getting more than 8 eggs a year from a Tokay is better than average.

But on the same hand, you can fit a whole lot more tokays in a contained space than you can iguanas.
These aren't being farmed for morphs, so who breeds with who isn't very important. So you could in theory put a ton of tokays in a large green house type set up and produce quite large numbers I'd imagine. I think the biggest issue though is that the market value of them is so low, that one simply can't make it worthwhile. At least, not in the grand scheme of things considering how many of them are taken from the wild.