I have received a number of personal emails from people about some comments I made further down in this forum. These came from people I know and respect and from strangers. I appreciate the feedback.
The gist of the emails was “be careful what you say on the alterna forum, LE peruses these forums.” I am fully aware of that fact and in fact I wish they had the willingness and ability to participate rather than just lurk.
The message we appear to be sending to each other, subliminally, verbally, and on private forums is to try to maintain this ruse of thinly veiled secrecy. This all stems from a fundamental misconception that we promulgate – that the law enforcement community is not to be trusted because they are trying to take away our rights. Conversely, we think that LE sees us as a bunch of scofflaws who want to poach snakes out of the wild to sell. As usual when there are such diametrically opposed opinions, both points of view are probably oversimplifications, at best.
We as alternaphiles have a history of going underground. When alterna were protected from 1977 until 1987 (IIRC), some people kept hunting for them and kept them, just very quietly. The “secret society” evolved. In 1987 we all rejoiced as alterna (and several other popular species) were delisted. Of course, we all still knew that roadhunting was technically illegal, but we did it anyway. I’ll bet I put in thousands of hours of illegal roadhunting in TX before the law was reinterpreted. Some mostly restricted themselves to walking cuts since that was legal, but I’ll bet not many of those legal purists drove by an alterna on the road and said “Darn, I wish that snake wasn’t on the road so I could catch it.”
Then came the interpretation a few years back from TPWD that road hunting for snakes was legal. We had everything we asked for, but the mistrust never waned on either side. For the first time in almost 30 years, we could go out and hunt these animals the way we wanted without fear of reprisal. That was a great feeling. Now we are outlaws again.
My point is that alterna lovers have decades of experience going “around” the law and a reputation for doing so. We also have a “hush-hush” policy about it as evidenced by the emails I received. This is silly, since it wouldn't take a veteran FBI criminologist to figure out what this "observation" talk was code for.
Why didn’t we agree as a community to uphold the principles of the law and only herp on private land until we could fix it? Some few did, but most of us have taken the don't ask/don't tell approach. We’ve gone back to the early 80s mentality. The problem is that this is just what people in LE expected us to do and we’ve met the low standards they seem to expect of us.
I actually don’t like the idea of adapting to the new regs because I think if we do that, we lose the impetus to have them changed. The LE folks can just say “see, you can still do your hunting, just on private land. There is no need to change the law”.
The best case scenario would be if we could go to LE and say “look, in 2007 X number of alterna were found on roads and cuts and in 2009 we found X (probably none) hunting on private lands. We have been negatively impacted by this law." But we will never be able to do that, because we lie to each other as well. We can’t ever get a hold on how many alterna are collected each year because a plague of mistrust runs throughout us.
Unfortunately, laws are made and changed based on data and when we hide ours, we don’t get a meaningful seat at the table.
This is why I find this “observation” talk and our hush-hush approach to the truth so bitter tasting. It is reflective of the pathology of our hobby. Is their hypocrisy in my opinion? Maybe just a slightly different hypocrisy.
I had a taste of freedom for the last two years, I don't want to go back underground or see this hobby go back underground. I would rather see us refuse to do so, but that’s all we know how to do it appears.
Chris
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Chris Harrison
San Antonio, Texas
Just because the legislative season is over for now doesn't mean we can't continue the dialogue with our representatives until the next session.
