Re: Florida Murders More Animals
Quote:
Originally Posted by
YungRasputin
good to post this of course but imo it seems v sus that they’re putting forward a narrative which is directly counter to the press and also, to the video record - it’s like, why would he feel the need to record the officers doing something which they claim he asked them to do and what substantiating evidences exist to back up the claim of an “escaped retic” - just all v sus imo
i mean, in this day and age of influencers and going viral seems hard to believe that local community members would miss the opportunity to take pictures or video of a large retic roaming around
I don't know if the escaped retic story they're telling is truthful or not. Given the proximity to the Everglades and the general public's - never mind FWC's - inability to properly identify snakes, the "loose snake" that was reported could very well have been a wild Burm.
The info below comes from a GoFundMe set up by Coffee's daughter. Given the site rules I won't post it, but it's easy enough to find using Google. It has a lot more info than the bits I've posted here, including quotes from politicians and FWC officials over the past years that would lead exotic pet owners to believe that if they had obtained a permit to keep the prohibited species before the law changed, they would be allowed to keep the animals until they died as long as they were not bred or sold within the state.
Unfortunately and under threat of arrest Coffee did sign a property release transferring ownership of the snakes over to FWC just before they were killed, and the FWC officers told Coffee that the snakes would be humanely euthanized. Coffee took that to mean that a vet would do it by lethal injection, not that FWC would do it using a captive bolt gun.
What isn't clear to me is whether the transfer of ownership occurred last week, or whether it occurred over a year ago when Coffee was first arrested (he was found not guilty back in Feb of this year BTW). If the transfer of ownership was over a year ago then there should have been no need for him to sign a property release last week, Coffee owned these snakes the whole time, and FWC was lying to him about whether he could legally ship them out of the Florida.
The death of the boa is inexcusable. Not only did the FWC agents misidentify and kill it even though the enclosure was labelled, they hid the body until it was too late to even attempt to save the babies.
