Bad Manners

[David Bloor]

There comes a time to all T. keepers when on of your old favourites molts and you discover it is now a mature male, the dilemma is whether to keep him or to find a mate for him. It’s a difficult choice, with stories of eaten males spiders, egg sacs not developing or people just vanishing with the spider you have loved and cared for.
We decided to try and carefully find a keeper with a mate for our MM. After posting on the BTS site and exchanging private messages a meeting was arranged at the BTS show in May. The person in question seemed of high standing in the society so we hoped for the best and awaited developments.
A while passed and nothing, an email was sent and a reply was duly returned stating these things take time. Months passed and in October we PM’d again. I was astounded to be told that the lady had sold her collection and that our male we LOANED to her had also gone. The only contact details of the new keeper of MY male was a name on the arachnophiles site. I wasn’t a member so I had to join the site before being able to make contact.
My message was responded to with the classic response
“I was just about to mail you this week.”
(One of those responses you always believe, along with; the cheques in the post - No your bum doesn’t look big etc. lol)
The new keeper must have had the MM a while as I was told that her female was looking gravid but unfortunately my male had died. I asked to be kept informed of any updates.
Again I have waited and had no response, so over the Christmas Holidays I have had to chase things up again. I have now been told, “the egg sac was eaten.”
When we started out to find a mate we knew that even if we found one the odds of a success were small. It is the attitude of the people we were involved with that has peed us off not the fact our male died and there are no babies. Since we started this process two more males have matured (a tapinauchenius gigas and a acanthoscurria geniculata) but unfortunately these two guys will be seeing out their days with us, rather than being loaned out.
When people are averaging well over 3 messages a day on sites (here’s a pic of this and that, or my T farted today etc. lol) but they cannot be bothered to post news about a T loaned to them, then I can only presume they are not worth dealing with and are extremely bad mannered.

[Phil Rea]

Sorry to hear you've had problems with your breeding loan David. I've removed the reference to the person you 'named' from your post by the way.

As I've said elsewhere, it strikes me that the fault lies with the person you originally loaned the male too who sold/got rid of their collection including your male. By rights, the male belonged to you, and you should have been given the option at the time either to have the male sent back then or to arrange a loan to someone else.

I would suggest that you reconsider your stance on loaning out males still in your collection, as you'll find that in the vast majority of cases, breeding loans are carried out successfully and to the benefit of both parties. Obviously males are sometimes lost during mating, but that's par for the course.

In my humble opinion, you're missing out if you base your entire approach to breeding loans on one experience that may have gone awry.

[Mark Pennell]

I have to agree with Phil here. Also people must realize that breeding is not 100% guaranteed. Males do get eaten as do egg sacs.

We have all had similar experiences but you should not let it put you off loaning males. Not everyone is so ill mannered.

Regards
Mark