About Us

So let me tell you about Shinja, LLC and how it got started.  Shinja is owned and operated by myself, Mark Haas.  I graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in Computer Engineering and currently work as a software engineer.  So needless to say I am die-hard Va Tech football fan.  Shinja is Japanese and the logo is a mixture of those Japanese characters.  My mother being Japanese inspired me to choose the name.

When I was a kid I always loved animals.  I used to breed Siberian dwarf hamsters when I was in elementary school.  Needless to say I drove my mother crazy asking her to buy me animals.  During high school one of my best friends Sean Travis bought a couple of snakes and I thought they were pretty cool.  He had a brazilian rainbow boa and a Surinam redtail boa. He used to take me to all kinds of strange exotic animal pet stores. We used to go to the Aquarium Center in MD to check out the dart frogs.

One place I remember was named Steve’s Exotics in Alexandria. It was such a disgusting place and of course that is where I bought my first snake. It was a Colombian redtail boa. That snake subsequently became sick and that’s when I met my veterinarian Scott Stahl. He is one of the best veterinarians in the country for exotic animals. He was just a young guy starting out back then. This was when he was still at Pender Veterinary Clinic. We treated him with antibiotics and he subsequently got better. Scott has since been my veterinarian for over 15 years now

So off to college I went. Sean and I lived next door to each other. The collection of rare reptiles had to be put on hold because needless to say college students aren't wealthy. My boa proceeded to get very large and scare many people at parties. Eventually I graduated and moved to Chicago. That’s when I decided to go ahead and start breeding ball pythons. I decided my first investment to be a Pastel ball python. I paid $8500 for him. Isn’t that crazy? Now they sell for $50 but that’s a different topic. I really had no idea what I was doing in regards to snake breeding. It took several years to get a hang of it. Some of the breeders that had been around for a long time really helped me out.

Unfortunately in 2004 Sean was killed in a car accident. We always talked about getting into breeding snakes and how well I thought he could do. So in part I am doing this business for myself but in part I am doing it for him as well. He was a great friend that lived life to it’s fullest.

Over the years I have expanded the collection to a larger degree than I have ever expected. Now I have some employees that definitely help out. It seems the more employees I have the less time I have. I’ll have to work on that one. One day I was like it would be cool to have some poison arrow dart frogs in a terrarium in my office. Then all of a sudden they started to breed and I was like maybe I should breed these too. So now I breed ball pythons and poison arrow dart frogs and that’s it……for now.