Beware of the snake man

[Lizardlicks]

Are you kidding me? An entire community on Tumblr sat back and just complained about this? Why didn't anybody actually get up from their keyboard and do something about this? Why didn't YOU do something? Simply sitting there and talking about it, and getting their youtube channel taken down does nothing. HSUS and PETA DEFINITELY needed to be contacted about that, not to mention police.

My point is, as a reptile community we need to identify and condemn these psychos who feed cats and dogs to snakes. If people are going to see us as respectable and responsible exotic pet owners, WE OURSELVES need to do more to prevent this from happening. Not just sit back and hope that the general public doesn't find out.

It was not "just complained about." A private pet owner started posting about trapping to feed their snake on their personal blog. Other snake keepers sent them communications that this is a terrible idea and explained why. The person became belligerent, and the more people got involved and tried to reason with them, the more hostile they became while trying to justify their methods. The youtube account we got taken down because we were able to report in to youtube under animal cruelty, but the posts the person made didn't violate tumblr's TOS, so they wouldn't do anything about it. They eventually nuked their own blog because too many people got mad at them for what they were doing, citing the oft cry of "tumblr is too sensitive! Everyone is offended by everything!"

Unfortunately, they didn't provide anything that would have identified the area they lived in, or you bet your butt we would have been mass calling the authorities in the area (did it the other day when some girl in kentucky posted about how she was (illegally) taking box turtles out of the wild and giving them new, pretty paint jobs on their shells. Ketucky Fish and Wildlife still said they couldn't do anything unless they had a specific location). Problem with the internet is that it's world wide. I live in Washington, and that person lived... idk I could maybe guess "south-ish". Doesn't really do a whole lot of good to call the police and tell them about how "someone on the internet is being bad, no sorry officer I don't actually know where."

What we did accomplish was stopping them spreading terrible advice, especially on tumblr which has a great deal of younger community members just starting out. Maybe some reason got through to them as well, but maybe not. The best we could do was tell them "stop that, you're wrong."