Quote Originally Posted by j_h_smith View Post
Sorry, but I disagree. ANY law that prohibits the selling OR keeping of pets needs to be fought. Regardless of the location or possibility of it's enforcement.

With this attitude, it will be okay to stop selling anything in the pet trade, unless approved by some over-regulated government agency.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with this passive approach that, "oh well, it won't mean that much because....".

This was the same approach the anti-2nd Amendment folks used for many years until we woke up and some of our firearms were illegal. This, all by our Federal government, not some hippy friendly city. So don't say it can't happen, recent activity in Florida only proves my point.

Jim Smith
How about focusing on reversing 30 year old laws that already restrict - by specific design - ownership of reptiles?

You can start with New York City and San Francisco. You already can't own any pythons, boas or rear-fanged colubrids in both those places.

Problem is people don't look at the big picture. The sale law is small change - the existing law that prohibits ownership is what people should be fighting to reverse. If people had any concept of the big picture, that is.

The recent activity in Florida was targeted specifically at reptiles. This "legislation" in SF started out targeting cats and dogs and has now swelled to cover everything but mexican jumping beans. Sorry, Jim, you can't compare the two laws - one is aimed directly at your throat and the other is a freak accident propagated by a bunch of freak accidents.

That law is a small issue compared to the existing reptile-restrictive municipal code in SF. If people were organized, if people stopped reacting to what they were told instead of doing the thinking and the footwork themselves, the mighty and vaunted reptile nation would be hard at work reversing existing restrictive bills as fast or faster than new ones were being proposed. I just identified three targets - Des Moines, NYC and SF.

That would be a bigger feather in our cap than getting all arm-flappy over a pie-in-the-sky ban on selling all pets in SF.