childrens reptile parties hold animals is back!

Hands-on childrens reptile parties are back in Melbourne!
For those who haven’t been following Snakebusters, Australia’s best reptiles, you may not know that for the last two years we have been fighting criminal charges brought on us by our main commercial competitors via the regulator, who happen to be the same entity. Yes, those who compete against us, also regulate us!Our main business competitor is the government owned zoo in Melbourne, known as “Zoos Victoria” that in fact comprises three facilities, namely Melbourne Zoo at Parkville, the Healesville Sanctuary and the Werribee Open Range Zoo. They in turn are controlled by the bureaucratic monster known as the Department of Sustainability and Environment (or DSE), who are the government regulator of reptile and wildlife licences, which we operate under.
Because we are regarded as the best in the business and are simply too successful for the liking of our main rivals, the DSE has decided to regulate us out of existence.
However as fast as they arbitrarily put more and more useless rules and demands on us, and us alone, we complied with them all to the letter.
After several years of getting nowhere and my publication of the the expose of the Koala Scam following the Black Saturday Bushfires (see Australasian Journal of Herpetology, Issue 8), published in february 2010, the DSE decided to hastily charge me with two offences, (13 counts).
The offences were failure to have a DSE regulation “pit” to do venomous snake shows.
That charge more-or-less came unstuck in the end, because in order to entrap me, the DSE had chosen NOT to define what is or is not a pit, and we had in fact complied with their demands and bought to the exact specifications they’d dictated.
It was also exactly what all our competitors, including the Melbourne Zoo themselves, used!
The other charge was an allegation that we had somehow recklessly put our reptiles at risk of being stolen. However as Snakebusters have the best anti-theft protocols in the business, it was a mystery as to how this would be argued, especially as it related to four events that were covertly filmed by the DSE officers and yet they had themselves been unable to steal any reptiles (yes they tried) and none had been stolen or ever at serious risk of theft.
At the end of the series of trials through both magistrates and county courts, it emerged that the DSE had re-defined the wildlife act to mean that it was illegal to let anyone hold any animal in any wildlife show. That meant for example that the moment I let a child hold a Green Tree Frog at a kids party, I was in breach of the law.
Yes, the sole element of the charge was that myself or my staff had illegally let people hold the animals.
Now this is something we’d been doing for years and we even had e-mails from DSE staff supporting our educational shows in all ways including the hands-on with wildlife.
You see I’d asked the DSE in 2006 and again in 2007 if there was anything they wanted changed and back then the officer involved Tom Thyuss had said “no” and that “your shows are perfect”.
So in the wake of a $12,000 fine (reduced from $33,000) for the heinous crime of doing hands-on reptile shows, I wrote to the head of DSE, Greg Wilson asking for permission to be allowed to let people hold reptiles in our shows.
Now just to be clear here, we are at all times talking the safe and non-venomous kinds. We are not talking venomous or even venomoid, which have at all materially relevant times, been excluded from the story. We were never charged for handing out venomoids to kids, as we agreed to stop this way back in 2007 and the charges related to non-venomous reptiles in the 2009 period.
Anyway, after the conviction and $12,000 fine, the DSE wrote back to me stating that they didn’t need to give me permission to hand out the non-venomous reptiles, as I was always allowed this under their rules!
Now that’s strange indeed as the DSE had just wasted over $100,000 mounting a court case successfully prosecuting me for just that!
The judges had said we couldn’t argue against the DSE as they were the ones who made the rules, no matter how stupid they were!
However this later letter from the DSE means two things. Firstly we shall be seeking to overturn the improperly obtained conviction. After all, the DSE have now effectively said we never broke the law! This change of the “criminal record” may take time.
More importantly however it means that we can continue to do hands-on childrens reptile parties in Melbourne Victoria where the kids get to hold the animals.
The same applies for kids school incursions, public wildlife displays and exhibitions and more.
And that’s what kids, mums and dads and teachers at the best schools have always wanted.