Anybody awake?

[Skiploder]

They could have saved everyone a lot of economic hardship and heartbreak if they had done this several decades ago.

I honestly have mixed feelings about this. I think it's closing the barn door after the horse is already out, but the truth is that Florida should never have been an importation hub for tropical species in the first place, and it still shouldn't be--whether they're snakes and nile monitors, or tropical fish, or plants, or whatever.

I suppose existing breeders and importers there will have to either move, or stop dealing with those species. That isn't going to be kind to their local economy, or to those businesses. But with this in place, there is really no more need for the proposal to ban these animals Federally, so we may have an easier time stopping this for the rest of the country.

It's a case of enough is enough.

I know this is an unpopular perspective on a reptile forum, but I'll come out and say it:

As a whole, this community does very little to educate prospective buyers. Breeders will sell a venomous snake, a giant constrictor or a large, potentially dangerous monitor to any idiot with the money to buy it.

So while some of you are scratching your heads as to why both the Feds and the States are lining up bills to place limits on reptile ownership, this isn't a case of big government out of control or animal rights organizations running us up.

No, it's a classic case of greed and overindulgence and people in this hobby - not in the media and not in the government - have made us easy pickings for a firestorm of bad publicity.

I see where these bills are coming from and although I don't agree with over-legislation and the loss of personal liberty, I am sick and tired of people running out an buying giant constrictors, giant varanids and hots who cannot provide them long term care and who house them irresponsibly.

I'm amazed that the breeders and importers didn't have the foresight to figure out that selling potentially dangerous animals indiscriminately to the public wouldn't eventually come back to haunt them.

USARK has a partial answer - look to last year's legislation they backed in North Carolina. The problem was that many of you blabbermouths had issues with it because it infringed on your ability to irresponsibly keep dangerous reptiles.

It was rather hilarious watching a bunch of you morons run around blasting the North Carolina legislation while running your USARK sigs - oblivious to the fact that it was a USARK-sponsored bill.

Here's an alternate point of view - make every hot, every large varanid and every giant constrictor available by permit only and contingent upon standardized caging and husbandry requirements (just like USARK advocated in N.C.).

Do everything you can as a group of responsible owners before you start getting all huffy and pissy at the general public and the politicians reacting to decades of excess with mounting environmental and tabloid backlash.