Clarkesville, GA, attempt to ban reptile business within city limits

So unnecessary and so wrong.

I live in a small neighborhood where several of us own reptiles. I have never seen an escaped reptile, only the resident black rat snakes and garters. The few rodents I've encountered running around here are wildlife--mice, groundhogs, and squirrels. I can just about guarantee that in any neighborhood there are far more native rodents already living there than any guy can breed in his house or garage.

I have, however, encountered many feral and "free range" cats. These have done substantial mischief, from leaving tracks on cars to clawing outdoor furniture, to spraying in bushes right under my bedroom windows, to digging in flower and vegetable beds. Oh, and I cannot fail to mention how they have entertained the neighborhood, darting in front of cars and making the summer nights hideous with the sounds of their "luv." This is most neighborhoods, and probably the same in the neighborhood where this scene is being played out. Yet the lady focuses on a man's contained reptile and rodent colony.

What I see here is not so much ignorance as prejudice. Someone "thinks" reptiles and their food are a certain way and so she has responded accordingly--not by what she has experienced but by what she already holds to be true.

I kinda remember something like this from way back when. I was a military brat, raised on base housing. In the mid-sixties, my family moved to Georgia, and my father found a house off-base he liked and rented it for us. Once we started mingling with our neighbors, we found out that they were proud of their neighborhood because there were no blacks living there. We heard from them about all of the horrible things that happen when blacks move into a neighborhood--the way they act, the way their kids act, how they let their lawns go to hell, how they have huge horrible loud parties and on the way home all of their guests steal from all of their neighbors.

This was quite a revelation to us. We had lived in military housing alongside black families and none of this had happened. I guess the neighbors must have thought we were quite ignorant.

I'm not going to say this woman's blanket hatred of reptiles is the same as a blanket hatred of blacks--I'm saying that it is born of the same thing. Ignornace is straight up not knowing and ignorance is not bad. Ignorance can be corrected; ignornace can be shown truth. What is going on here is prejudice--knowing from the get go and unencumbered by any facts that might be encountered along the way.

This particular Clarksville case involves an educated woman and illustrates that prejudice is not bound by either ignorance or education. I'm pretty confident in my guess that the Clarksville woman has never encountered a problem from pet trade reptiles or feeder rodent colonies before. She has no prior bad experiences upon which to base her opinion. Yet she is willing to move to deny a man of his livelyhood because she knows that he is going to cause her problems.

This is prejudice against the way a man makes his living even though it is not harming her. She would deny another his means of making a living even though it does not harm her or anyone else because she does not like it. Stupidity is the inability to comprehend. Ignorance is innocence. What I'm seeing here is an uglier animal of a far different stripe.

My 0.02 cents worth