http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9841 http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9841 It's been reported before and they consciously chose the current behavior.

http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9841 http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9841 It's been reported before and they consciously chose the current behavior. I don't agree with their decision, but it is something they're aware of. EDIT: There is a way to subclass models.Model and not have it be an abstract or real model (I don't remember at the moment) and you could, in that subclass, do a force_insert or force_update based on the PK status so that everything in your project inheriting from that subclass would have that behavior. basically: def save(self, *args, **kwargs): if self.pk: kwargs['force_update'] = True kwargs['force_insert'] = False else: kwargs['force_insert'] = True kwargs['force_update'] = False super(MyModelBase, self).save(*args, **kwargs) So, one can modify that behavior if they want to without having to patch too much - maybe someone can comment on subclassing models.Model while not having Django consider it a model (I think I got it from the Pro Django book if someone has it available). EDIT2: modified the code to make sure that force_insert and force_update couldn't both be True.