In such an economically based society, in order to keep laws like this from ever passing it needs to be both established that herpers are not a minority, *and* that such laws effectively prevent a non-minority group from conducting their daily business effectively. Its not just enough to unify an established case and cause need to be present as well or your group assumes the official definition of either a rebel group, or radical group.

I know this may not seem to relate at all, but both politically and legally the banning of smoking in public areas is an almost identical act. It has been successful in California, and the entire province of Ontario. In analysing how this law came to be, it becomes apparent that the business owners in question failed to present a unified front - most of the experts (at least in the criminology sense of how it came to be a crime) agree that the failure to establish this as something causing an economic burden to a large group of people was greatly responsible for the failure of protests. In these cases, even though evidense was collected showing that more public opposition than support was present in this case, the law was still passed.

With reptiles the 'human rights' and 'freedoms' aspects may be a little more obviously in our favour as its hard to make any sort of claim that our keeping of herps endangers the health of our neighbours, however even so these arguments typically are too difficult to prove in a court of law.

In order to quash these sorts of attacks permanently we both need to unify, and to prove the 'economics' of the hobby, business and practice. Not to mention the 'conservation' efforts... Every day more and more of these species' natural habitats are depleted due to lack of adequate environmental restrictions in foreign countries - that is not what's being focussed on at all, in fact this is being ignored completely. So at least one of the arguments is that we're taking them out of their natural habitat and treating them cruelly (at least the current Canadian version of the same attempt to ban-ours actually includes many fish species as well)... Yet at the same time, it's "okay" to commercially farm, forest, and pollute these same habitats to the brink of extinction because it's either cheaper, easier, more profitable, or all of the above.

There are a lot of sides to this argument... But the one definate is that we need to stop appearing in the minority, we need to shed a lot of the 'cliches' that come with the keeping of herps, and we do need to get out the education, as well as start thinking of this in political and legal terms - because those are the terms the attack has been brought to us on.