Ryan,



By your line of reasoning, every LE person in the country must be reformed into an expert in herpetology, all wildlife laws must be enforced 100% with no mistakes and the court system must be absolutely perfect before you advocate people taking any responsibility for their own actions. Further, you suggest that people should never be involved with enforcing the law in any way because that would just encourage people to turn on their friends and neighbors.



Can you see how unrealistic your expectations are? If your line of reasoning were applied to child abduction cases, for example, there would be a whole lot more missing children. Pick any other LE example you like and apply your logic to it, and the only result will be chaos. If you see your neighbors kid breaking into a car at the mall do you do nothing? If you see your neighbor dumping oil down the storm drain, do you pretend that it does not affect the stream or the ground water your family drinks? If your neighbor likes to drive 40 mph through the neighborhood, is there no chance his actions might result in your child being hit by his car? Our actions affect other people, and pretending that the actions of other will not affect us does not mean that they won’t.



No one is perfect and nothing is absolute, and change occurs at a very slow pace especially when you are dealing with government bureaucracy! Change, by its very nature, is a stepwise process, and any real lasting change needs to be entered into from both sides. Expecting someone else to do all the work for your benefit is simply not a realistic position, so you can either refuse to take action to save the hobby you profess to love, or you can continue on the path of allowing others to determine the fate of your hobby with out your input, the choice is yours.



All I am really advocating here is for people to look at the issue from a different perspective and stop blasting LE personnel as being the only problem when it comes to herp LE matters and recognize that our community has some problems with it that we need to address. I freely acknowledge that there is a lot of work that must be done on both sides of the fence, but if you want your side of the fence to look as good as your neighbors side, don’t expect him to pay for the fence and build it too, because if you do, you will almost certainly be looking at the posts and rails. Why should your neighbor make your side of the fence look good if you refuse to help build the fence and then criticize the way he builds it? It doesn’t matter if you have 20 years experience building fences, if you don’t help build the fence in a positive way, you will still loose!



As to the rest of your post… I had nothing to do with Operation Slither in any way. In fact, you seem to know a whole lot more about the details of Operation Slither than I do. So you can make up whatever story you like about my motives, and me, but that does not make them true. Let’s stick to discussing the issues and problems facing the herp community and stop trying to tear each other apart personally, shall we?



Big Brother

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