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To: Public Comment
for the Study Committee for Senate Bill 1032. As the director of North Carolina’s largest reptile park, and the manager of the State’s only snakebite antivenom bank, I have grave concerns over Senate Bill 1032. I deeply oppose this Bill and for the following reasons: (1) The Study Committee has failed to prove the urgency of a statewide ban on ownership of the listed animals. They have provided no facts or statistics of any kind. They do not show how, or when, or if accidents involving these types of animals stand out above more common accidents involving other kinds of animals, including dogs, horses, cows, insects, etc. They do not show any relationships with other forms of external injury. As such, the reader is left unable to make a reasoning verdict or decision in their favor. Assertions have been formed anecdotally without the support of scientific fact or real statistics. 2) Statistics provided by the National Safety Council directly refute the assertions in Bill 1032. For example: Of approximately 4,423 deaths from external injury in NC in year 2006, none involved captive Big Cat species or captive reptiles. Of 70,790 deaths from all external injury in NC over the past 16 years, only one could be traced to large felines and none at all to snakes in captivity. No escaped big cat or reptile has ever killed a single person in NC. The single feline-related human death in recorded N.C. history (in Miller’s Creek, N.C.) involved a caged animal. From 1990 to the present, a total of 16 years, there have been only 2 serious injuries (Surry county, and Apex, NC), but these did not end in death. Of the 2 separate incidents of “escape” of Big Cat species in NC during the past 16 years (one incident in Cleveland County, and one in Rowan County) these did not involve “big” (adult) cats at all, rather were only the small cubs of Big Cat species. No person was injured in these incidents (which were rather more “cute” than from horrifying) and local animal control handled the situations competently. By contrast, dog attacks killed 300 Americans during the years 1979 – 1998, while 800,000 Americans sought medical care for dog bites (source, Center for Disease Control factbook: Dog Bites). There have been 14 deaths from dog attack in North Carolina since 1990. Auto-collisions with white-tailed deer killed more than 2400 Americans during the last 16 years, with the deaths of at least 70 North Carolinians. There were a total of over 8000 driving accidents with white-tailed deer in N.C. last year alone! One can’t help noting that these facts have not prompted the committee to ban driving or eradicate white-tailed deer (see www.unc.edu/news/archives/mar00/reinfu2033000.htm). Another animal curiously absent from the “inherently dangerous” list is the horse. Horses have killed 45 people in NC since 1990, while the score for all captive apes, monkeys, crocodilians, and snakes hovers at Zero. In summation, the Bill seizes on freak incidents among a population of more than 8,600,000 North Carolinians, ignores all the other different ways they can hurt themselves, and then exaggerates the importance of one or two incidents without supplying any other statistical comparisons. The bill is irrationally selective. (3) Bill 1032 would negatively impact the economic lives of several thousand North Carolinians directly – those who work with these animals. On the larger scale, hundreds of thousands of people would be economically impacted through the negative effects on tourism to our state. There are dozens of zoological attractions, wildlife conservation and education centers that attract visitors to North Carolina. They also directly serve the educational needs of local communities. These would all be shut down. Even if these businesses were “grandfathered” and allowed to remain in operation, they would be so hampered that future growth of these enterprises would be impossible; nor could any new such enterprises open in the future. The precise total dollar figure that would be lost to North Carolina is not known but is suspected to run into hundreds of millions of dollars. (4) The Bill is only a platform for the Animal Rights activists who originated both the Bill and the study committee. The study committee is therefore not an independent research group without bias. This can be directly traced to the authors of the Bill, the Animal Protection Institute (API) of Sacramento, California. Indeed, the very name of this group is a deception, for Animal Protection Institute is not an “institute” in any real sense, rather it is a promotional organization that recruits monetary proceeds by pushing nationwide animal-related panics in order to extort money from gullible contributors. (5) The Bill masquerades as a “public health” issue when it is really an “animal rights” issue fomented as a personal crusade by certain members of the committee. There is no present or urgent public health issue involving these animals in North Carolina and this can be factually proven. (6) The Bill hampers if it does not actually violate (and this deserves further legal study) the free-trade laws of North Carolina. It forces private concerns to join a monopoly and monopolies are illegal. It is equivalent to saying, “you must work at Wal-mart, trade with Wal-mart, use the Wal-mart trademark, and pay dues to Wal-mart, or not exist at all.” This is wrong and is treading on questionable legal ground. (7) The Bill ignores other legislation already in existence. Federal and local laws were long ago put in place to control and prevent such dangerous incidents occurring. The authors of the Bill have deliberately ignored and obfuscated these. For example, caging requirements for Big Cats are already enforced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is also against the law to chain animals to trees in most counties in NC. Animal cruelty laws are in place and public endangerment laws exist in abundance. For example, people are legally responsible by law for the damage their animals do. These laws have existed for many decades. In conclusion I can find no evidence to support Senate Bill 1032 and believe it is the wrong move for North Carolina. A larger package containing a factual study of animal injury in the United States will be forthcoming. Sincerely, |
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