Did you know that Distel is the actual sponsor of the bill, not just backing it? What about lines 89-91 which clearly prohibit most ownership of “dangerous exotic animals”? Why would you sell a bill that prohibits ownership as a bill that only asks for “safety measures”?

Can you find even one case of anyone’s pet “exotic” animal that escaped and seriously injured or killed anyone off the premises? You don’t seem to be “a statistic.” You seem to be THE statistic. Yes, you deserve some sympathy as the victim of one of the most rare types of accidents in the United States, and you deserve the celebrity as does your daughter. What I question is the exploitation of this incident. PETA, IFAW, and the HSUS among others have had both heydays and paydays with the exploitation of your injuries. They make a lot of money from stuff like this and they should mail you a share of it.

You deserve sympathy, but considering the damage that bills like Distel can do, your injuries can be exploited to injure other people who were not involved. This isn’t right. Passing these bills is a for-profit industry for groups like the API. They use you and others and misinform state legislatures, then they introduce model bills that give them the opportunity to take animal owners apart county by county, people who own inoffensive animals and live out in the country. The animal rights groups, all of them, give owners no credit for the strictest possible safety procedures. They treat all owners as equally irresponsible and I’m afraid that this attitude rubs off on the legislatures. You would think that animal rights activists would first defend the right of each animal to live and propagate, but they entirely fail to do that.

Your daughter’s future career is probably secure as she will most likely work for an AZA certified institution. AZA certification is used to lock most institutions out of the business and is a private monopoly that decides who may keep exotics and under what circumstances. What I have to wonder is if you or she have a real sense of fairness about this. Institutions aren’t necessarily good at keeping animals comfortable and happy. The risks are quite low and keeping the animals is worth the risk. Even nonprofessionals manage to have quite a low incidence of injuries for selves and others. You shouldn’t fall into this system and allow yourself to be used against thousands of people who are truly devoted to their animals and who manage to help perpetuate many threatened species. Those people are at a lot more risk than you are, too, and humans do have an obligation to preserve the species that we shove out of their homes.

There are issues that are far more important than the fact that you got hurt. People get hurt and move on. Your daughter is a hero, you’re alive, hopefully you will pick up a good deal of money from your appearance on Oprah and contributions to your fund, and your life will go on. You don’t want innocent animals to die because of this, do you?

Here is an attitude to consider. Humans have wiped out a lot of species, so this attitude is justified: Every human should share the physical risk involved in preserving every species on the planet. Such preservation is that important that every human should share some of the risk and not count the cost or “potential danger.” I am more than happy with the idea that people should take reasonable measures to minimize the risk, but those measures are not as important as the lives of a healthy population of animals that would otherwise be at risk of extinction. The best possible thing that humans can do is preserve life. You really should consider contributing to that.

Also, please come back and tell people the truth about Distel’s bill.