Mike Waters wrote:Legal issues of board lines has been weighing on my curiosity for some time...
Seriously, Mike? I'm a rather evidence-based person, but simply from having been born and raised and having spent most of my adult life in the U.S., it has always been so self-evident to me that I've never wondered about it nor sought proof of it in law books. (Not since I was about six years old and plucked flowers from a neighbor's garden to give to my mother for Mother's Day, and instead of thanking me for my present she severely scolded me for damaging and stealing from our neighbor's property, and then marched me back over there to apologize.
) Property ownership and land owner's rights matter tremendously in this country. The rule of thumb (and the laws that stem from it) is that you can do what you want on your own property, with relatively few restrictions, but not on the property of others; on the latter property you have to abide by the land owner or other authority there. Public land isn't simply unclaimed and therefore somehow outside of the system, but rather it is publicly held (not for you or me as individuals, but for us combined) and managed by the relevant government (it would be impossible to get all of us individuals to agree on what can and can't be done on the land, so they represent us). You must know that you can't just go out to a state forest or other piece of public land and do whatever you want there, right? Why would you ever think that hauling a truckload of boards or whatever (AC to you but trash to the authorities and others) out there and dispersing (again, others' view is littering/dumping) it without persmission would be some kind of amazing exception to this hugely important rule in American life?
Mike Waters wrote:... not that it has prevented me from laying boards...
I understand (but still can't condone) this attitude if one views it merely as akin to something like speeding in one's car, and being willing to take whatever speeding tickets one gets as a result. But anyone who's been herping a while, not to mention participating in a herping internet forum such as this one, must surely come to realize that all too often problems occur for the entire herping community because many authorities have a dim view of us in general - thinking us all poachers and other kinds of scofflaws - and use whatever individual herper wrongdoing they're aware of as justification for their view. So in effect you might well be earning all of us that speeding ticket, not just yourself. (And of course the probability of that goes way up when one not only privately disregards the law, but also gets on a message board such as this one and publicly proclaims that s/he does it/that it's just fine for everyone to do it/that s/he doesn't care if it's not fine to do it/etc.) It's incredibly unfair, of course, but it's the reality we live with nonetheless.
And for any herper who understands this unfortunate dynamic but still doesn't care or let it affect what s/he does in the field - and I'm not saying that's the case with you or anyone else here specifically, though I suspect it is for a number of the herpers engaging in this practice - well, "slob hunter" seems to me like a pretty mild term to describe such, and I could think of a lot worse that would also be accurate. Such selfish disregard for others is frankly disgusting.
As Chris and Fundad (with ICH) have pointed out, too, it's not like there isn't a legal way to go about placing one's own AC on land that belongs to someone else. All that's required is to be willing to make the effort to get the proper permission, and in those cases where that's simply not possible (and despite the protests of some, we really don't know how common this is because virtually no one has really tried to date), to be mature enough to accept that one can't have everything s/he might want.
Mike Waters wrote:Gerry don't be too offended...
Don't worry, Mike, it's pretty hard even for people who actually know me to offend me, let alone folks who are essentially strangers to me except through their posts to an internet message board.
I am often perplexed, though, by how ready some people here are to abandon open, honest discourse for more underhanded means of persuasion when they realize that they're on the losing side of a debate. I sometimes wonder, do these same people attempt to cheat in sporting events, in board games with children, in their school or workplace, on their spouses, etc. as well? Or do they somehow absurdly think that bad behavior here doesn't count as it would in the "real world"? Like I said, it perplexes me...
Gerry
)
