If you own a pet fish, small mammals, birds or reptiles this bill will effect YOU.
There is a bill ( HR669) that has been proposed and is being sent to a subcommittee of congress on April 23. This bill will ban all non-native species from the United States. Even Hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs and ferrets will be included in this ban. Almost all reptiles and fish species will be banned.
Here are just a few things this bill would accomplish. Are any of these things something you want?

• If you own a bird or reptile, and your specialized veterinarian is located across the state line from your home, you would be prohibited from taking your pet to its veterinarian.
• If you own two fish and they have babies, you would be in violation of this law and your pets could be confiscated and destroyed.
• Don’t plan on moving to another state with your pet. Crossing state lines with your hamster, fish, bird, snake or other nonnative animal will be illegal.

Simply enhancing and improving existing laws and regulations would meet the goal of preventing/minimizing the introduction of potentially invasive species, which is the basic goal of HR669. HR669 has no proof that it will ever have a positive effect with any of its goals. It is a fact however that this bill will have a very great negative effect. Thousands of animals would be destroyed in coalition with this bill; look at your finch, look at your leopard gecko, look at your hamster, your expensive salt water fish tank. This bill creates the potential to have them all taken away. To add to this chaos the pet trade as we know it would be destroyed. The pet trade brings in substantial finances and without these pet species many people would lose their jobs and many businesses would be forced to close. Petco and Petsmart alone have over a thousand stores in each chain, both employ 20,000 employees plus. If these chains were forced to close all these people would lose their jobs. Now on that note, if people cannot own these pets no one will buy supplies for them or need to buy food for them. Then even more businesses will be forced to close. Tens of millions of dollars will be lost in an ultimately useless bill. The US economy cannot take such a hit.

Please help keep our pets and rights safe, let our government know we will not allow such a bill to come to pass, go to one of the following links to learn more.

[link]
[link]
[link]
[link]


Thank you for your time
Sincerely
~ Akayana


(Please feel free to copy paste anything from this journal, the more people become aware of this the better.)