I assume your session has just begun but it is important to get these bills voted down quickly before the make it out of the house or senate(of you respective state). I'm pretty sure bills must be voted on 3 times in each legislative(house/senate) and between each vote they are sent back to committe to tweak them.

It was most effective for us to talk to the committe, our Exotics bill was snuck through so quickly that we only got in on one of them. It was written to ban all transfers of exotics into the state. We brought thousands of signatures against the bill. We were able to get some things added to the bill to protect exotic owners rights, ie private citizen oversite.

There are some portions of the IL bill that I'm sure all of us can agree on but Jason is probably right, they could take this a lot further. Its a smoke screen. Even though you may see some things in the bill as "right", do not let that confuse you. These bills are only used as launching pads to ban ownership of ALL animals. Sounds nutty, I'm sure, but have you ever listened to "the other side". They are truely insane and bent on eliminating private ownership of animals.

A good example would be the bill written for exotics in my state. They have already wrote an addition to this bill for this session which absolves the "grand father clause" and allows the FWP to write the rules pertaining to the exotic commision(this would mean that they won't require citizen oversite to ban animal ownership).

What caught me funny about the IL bill is that they are writing additions to the Animal Welfare Act, that is a federal mandate controlled by the USDA, this could become a real cluster(bleep).

Later-
Matt Schubarth
Pet Nebula

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