I agree with what I am interpreting what he was saying in that article as we have a similar problem here in fl. I do not disagree with the venomous permit system here in Fl. I think it is a somewhat good idea. If you ever go to any of the hot shows you always manage to see some idiot who has no business owning any snake at all running around wit a cobra or gaboon viper they just bought. But my problem with the permit system is that there are way too many hours involved in getting the permit and then once you do get it it's carte blanc on whatever kind of hots you want. So basically some one who works reptiles professionally such as myself and does it as a full time job has a difficult time obtaining a permit because they do not have the time to go volunteer at someone else's facility for the required 1000 hrs. This ends up not taking into account years of experience with other non-venomous herps. Those of us who have been around the block a few times are most likely not going to go out and buy a bunch of mambas right away because we have a new hot permit. Under the system here I could not legaly go out and collect pygmy rattlers or water mocassins and keep them (snakes like these eyelash vipers and helodermids would be my theoretical choice if I wanted to go through the hassle of getting a permit...which I don't) yet I have been keeping reptiles formany years and could easily qualify for a Komodo dragon permit (as a business not as an individual) which is a class1 permit. And yet I have seen it personally where some guy who volunteers at some nature center somewhere and feeds their rattlesnakes and water mocassins for a few years and then gets a hot permit and can keep whatever they want. I shouldn't have to tell you that there is a huge difference between maintaining local crotalids and some of the elapids out there. What this does in effect is tempts people to go underground and get there snakes from a source out of state and keep their mouth shut. You can see the potential danger here should such an animal get loose as there is going to be a tendency to not want to alert authorities and risk incriminating one's self. Such a situation happened in Melbourne fl. when I first moved here and the snakes involved were cobras. Like I said I agree with the permitting system (at least for hots and crocodillians) but if they are too difficult to obtain they are essentially useless.

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