Why you should purchase ex-breeders

This question has been asked a couple of times. Should you or shouldn't you purchase ex-breeders? Why would you purchase them anyway?

Our society has been accustomed to purchasing items new. Lots of people don't like used items. In betta breeding, there are reasons to go for one over the other.

Purchasing new bettas

• they're still "virgin", you felt happy when you see them
• they're not exposed to breeding experience yet, hence your "experience" can guide them in the best outcome that you wish them to have
• their cost varies, but usually more expensive depending on the type and features that your bettas have
• combination of their lack of breeding experience + your lack of breeding experience = greater chance of breeding failures
• your choice of bettas limited to whatever available on the market (usually people sell show fish on the market and they're not necessarily breeding-quality)
• their breeding-quality depends on how good your eyes identified their features - inexperience betta keepers will need to learn a lot to properly identify good bettas
  

Purchasing ex-breeders

• they're no longer virgin, they are used items, they are torn. you need to be able to ignore these torns and realize that these ex-breeders are going to be used for breeding again at your place, hence will be torn eventually!
  
• they have been exposed to breeding (presumably successfully), hence your experience in breeding contributes little to the success of their future spawns (presuming you provide them with acceptable breeding environment)
• their cost varies, but usually much cheaper than what they would otherwise cost.
• minimal experience on your side + the bettas' breeding experience usually leads to successful spawn fairly easily
• they are proven to be breeding-quality, at least on the eyes of their previous owner - hence it is important to know where you buy your bettas from and whether you can trust their judgement.
  
• their availability in the market is usually close to nil, you get them direct from their respective owners. many bettas breeders are not willing to release their breeders for a simple reason: you will be able to produce the same quality of fish that they're currently working on, hence introducing competition on their side when they try to sell their fish later. if the ex-breeders are used to produce the next new line, then their owners usually don't really want to release them
  
• due to the above competition reason, sometimes you need to twist bettas owners to release their ex-breeders, and the economy dictates that everything is up for sale "for the right price", hence you may find their prices are easily double if not triple your standard bettas.

Some types of bettas will make the option of purchasing ex-breeders becoming more appealing. For instance, if you're breeding giants (like what we're doing), you may have heard numerous times that "giant is super difficult to breed". Well, that saying is true. It is easier to breed giant bettas when they're small and young, but the result usually is very disappointing since your chosen young giants could have been non-ideal (e.g. they may be not 100% giants since it's hard to identify their quality when they're too young, see more discussion on giant gene distribution). It is probably safe to say that in 100 pairs of true giant bettas spawn attempts, there would be only a very small fraction of them to be successful spawning. We dare to say that the proportion to be about 20%. That certainly has been true proportion in our experiments. Note however that when we refer to true giant bettas, we refer to 3+ inches for your male HMPK and 2.7+ inches for your female HMPK. The size of the female dictates your success!

We had been asked whether we've purchased ex-breeders before. Yes, we had and we continue to do so. In fact, given a chance between purchasing ex-breeders and virgin bettas, we prefer to purchase ex-breeders from trusted betta keepers.

A lot of typical (HM, HMPK, CT) breeder-quality bettas are sold in auction sites, or purchasable direct from their breeders these days. So, this may not necessitate you to purchase ex-breeders. However, if you are presented to purchase ex-breeders from rare lines (such as giant, etc), then we suggest you to snap the chance! These rare lines are very difficult to get and usually the owners will put extended measures to protect their rare lines.