From the nohr669 blog

[FloridaHogs]

This blog has lots of good info on how to fight HR669.


"Top Ten things you can do to help stop H.R. 669 from becoming a law, thereby protecting your right to own, breed, sell, trade and transport reptiles and other exotic animals:

1. Log in to http://www.nohr669.com and watch the short video on the home page. Take the actions outlined in the video. It will take less than 15 minutes of your time.

2. Contact all of the local pet stores in your area and make sure they are aware of H.R. 669. Be prepared to provide a brief overview of how it will impact their business. You can find pet stores you don’t even know about by going to www.switchboard.com, selecting the “Find a Business” tab, enter “pet stores” in the Business Name field and enter your city in the city field. Repeat this for surrounding cities to make sure you find all the pet stores.

3. Contact local high schools and ask for the phone numbers and/or email addresses of the biology teachers (or the head of the sciences department). Contact him/her and explain H.R. 669 and ask him to consider what the passage of H.R. 669 will mean to the school’s ability to use live animals for learning purposes. It is quite common for schools to keep pet reptiles and other exotics in the classroom. It is also not unusual for them to actively try to breed them to learn about mechanisms of reproduction. Losing this learning tool is something many teachers are willing to participate in fighting against. They will also enlist the help of their students and the students may enlist the help of their parents. In other words, the propagation of awareness can be viral. One simple phone call to a biology teacher could set off a massive chain of events that gets an enormous number of people to join the fight against H.R. 669.

4. Contact your local television station(s) and make them aware of H.R. 669 and explain how it may cause many local pet stores to close down. Frame the conversation from the perspective of job loss in the community; decreased revenues, fewer taxes; unemployment. Television stations love stories about terrible things that happen to people. H.R. 669 is a perfect candidate for making bad stuff happen. Provide them with the web site and phone numbers of www.nohr669.com and www.pijac.org.

5. Log in to craigslist for your community. Go to the pets section and post a notice about H.R. 669. A sample post can be found here: http://norfolk.craigslist.org/pet/1118326905.html. I was contacted by several people in my community after making this post because none of them knew about H.R. 669. They were very thankful and were eager to take action and spread the word. Craigslist is another mechanism of mass communication for people with common interests. Let’s leverage it.
6. Email every single person you know with a brief explanation of H.R. 669 and ask them to go to www.nohr669.com and follow the two simple steps on the site. Ask them to do this even if they don’t have pets. Explain that it will be a personal favor to your or suggest to them that they may one day want to own one of these animals or that their son, daughter, cousin, or whoever may want to. If H.R. 669 passes, nobody will have the ability to choose. Ask them. No, beg them to forward your plea to everyone they know. Yes, I know this sounds a lot like a chain letter but we need a voice like never before. Email and the Internet are the two most powerful communication mechanisms ever conceived and we have less than two weeks to make a LOT of noise. Let’s use the tools that are available to us.

7. Locate and contact any exotic animal clubs or associations in your area (birds, fish, reptiles, etc.). Contact their leaders and educate them about H.R. 669. Ask them to rally their members for a weekend trip to the shopping malls to place a flyer on the window of every car. Consider walking from door-to-door and putting flyers on people’s doorsteps. Don’t put them in mailboxes, though. That’s technically not legal.
8. Spend between now and the 23rd being a weirdo. Take every opportunity you have to tell people about H.R. 669. I printed up several hundred flyers that I keep in my car. When I get out of the car and go to the grocery store I give them to people. I gave one to the lady at the gas station. By profession I’m a computer guy. Amongst other things I teach network security. Today during class I stopped talking about networking and asked how many people in the class owned a pet. I then asked how many owned a fish, a reptile, a hamster, etc. I asked if their children did or if they had any neighbors who did. I then told them about H.R. 669. It took about 5 minutes and I think it got a few more people to log in to nohr669.com as a result. I don’t care if I look stupid or people think I’m out of line or the context of my presentation is wrong. We have less than 10 days to destroy this bill and I’m going to do whatever I need to do in order to protect my right to be a reptile breeder.

9. Join and support PIJAC. Advocates who fight for your rights are not and should not be free. Pay the few dollars they ask for as an annual due to have a team of people always at your back, protecting you from stupidity like H.R. 669.

10. Create a Twitter account. Follow anybody and everybody who is a reptile lover. Take a quick peek at my post on the bp.net forum to get yourself started. You will find it here:
http://www.ball-pythons.net/forums/s...ad.php?t=89195. The only mechanism of communication faster than email is Twitter. Get on board with it. It will change your life and it will help you participate in the up-to-the-minute fight against H.R. 669

Thanks.

Colin Weaver
colin@ballpythonbreeder.com"