Billy Gangemi, Russian Tortoises, HELP!

Originally Posted by Chris Kennard

How witty of you. You have exhibited much more anger with your little passive aggressive digs than I have with my observations and opinions here. Your objective here is tiresome and at times seem a bit deceptive. Maybe you should direct your anger toward someone who is wrong. I'm sure there's no shortage of mirrors in your house.

Thanks, buddy. I guess we found out where your motivation for roasting me was coming from.

Originally Posted by lydiacourtney

Thanks, buddy. I guess we found out where your motivation for roasting me was coming from.

This simply proves your ignorance. I was unaware of his message until I viewed your post. I have never had any correspondence with him here or outside of this thread. Nice try though. Your antics here only support the accused reason for not wanting to deal with you. I am pretty sure, given your investigative skills, you will be happy to prove my point by posting the exact time I viewed your thread alerting me of his message to me and when I actually viewed his message. Make sure you post how often I check that section of my profile and post that as well Ms. Columbo. You just proved many people's point here.

Oh, and William, you're welcome.

Originally Posted by Chris Kennard

This simply proves your ignorance. I was unaware of his message until I viewed your post. I have never had any correspondence with him here or outside of this thread. Nice try though. Your antics here only support the accused reason for not wanting to deal with you. I am pretty sure, given your investigative skills, you will be happy to prove my point by posting the exact time I viewed your thread alerting me of his message to me and when I actually viewed his message. Make sure you post how often I check that section of my profile and post that as well Ms. Columbo. You just proved many people's point here.

fair enough.

Lydia, you will have a PM shortly. Refrain from posting until the matter of its topic has been settled.

Originally Posted by lydiacourtney

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Now, about the rest of the batch... and it is really important that you don't lie about this, because it will narrow down causes for me for Taquito, the little lady torty, and could help me help her...did any of the other tortoises from that batch end up sick or dying? Honestly, if I could figure out that I was doing something wrong and not lose the female, you could make fun of me and call me whacko all day long. I don't need more friends, and you don)

If you want to find out exactly what was wrong with your other tortoise and thus what is most probably wrong with the second one, you should have had a necropsy done on the first one. A full necropsy including histopathology is going to tell you far far more than badgering the original seller. The symptoms you related could have been caused from more than one cause and without definitive testing on your animals, you will never know the actual reason, whether it was bacterial, viral, protozoal, fungal or a combination of more than one of the above... badgering the seller isn't going to provide you with any real answers as there isn't a chain to prove that the cause of your tortoises problems originated with the animals before he sold them or after they sold them. One of the things that is continually mentioned to you is that wild caught animals are a risk, one of the real reasons that they are a risk is that the entire chain of custody from collection to the final buyer can result in immunosuppression and pathogens/parasites that were not a problem before this whole process overwhelm the animal often leading to death. This is in no small part why wild caught animals are often considered to be a big risk for people to purchase.

some comments

Ed

Lydia, I really do believe you mean the best for the animals, but you entered into this hobby, had an unfortunate experience and now you've gone on the attack. Yes, the BOI can be adversarial, but there are many good people in this community and almost every single person here cares about reptiles very deeply. They may not express it the same way, or share the same views, but most people care a lot and take good care of their pets and animals. Sure, there are some bad apples, as there are with everything, but most are good people and responsible. So if you come in fighting, you'll probably go out fighting, and in the process you will miss out on the wisdom and experience of a lot of people.

The WC caught issue isn't as black and white as you might think. As someone mentioned, virtually all bearded dragons in the hobby are the offspring of animals who were originally smuggled out of Australia. It's been generations now, but your beardie is descended from an animal that was taken illegally out of the wild and brought to the US. The same situation happened with many dart frog species and a lot of others. At some point, the animal becomes a common and acceptable CB pet. No, I don't support poaching animals, at all! But, the moral high ground may not be as far up as you think. And, let's be realistic, you directly contributed to the import of WC animals - not on purpose, but because of not knowing something that's fairly common knowledge for newbies. Now you know better and you seem to have a strong commitment to sourcing CB, healthy animals going forward. I point this out not to criticize, but just to point out that you are not as 100% in the right, and Billy is not as 100% in the wrong, as you seem to see it.

Lydia, I have not had much time for posting in this thread, so I will summarize a few of my thoughts on this situation here.
I understand that you have the best interests of the tortoises in mind. You have also admitted to a certain degree of naivete with respect to purchasing herps. We’ve all been there. However you seem to have turned that naivete into outrage, at the herp community in general, and the seller in particular. I will agree that you and the seller could have communicated better at the time of the transaction; perhaps he could have taken more time advising you, and perhaps you could have asked more questions. You said that you haven’t tried to play the victim, but I do get the subtle impression that you are blaming the herp community as a whole, when it was primarily your own lack of knowledge that led to this situation. Be assured that virtually all of us here have, at one time or another, lost animals due to our own lack of knowledge.
You have indicated that you feel taking herps out of the wild is “stunningly immoral”, and seem surprised that people are ok with it. What you may not realize is that, in the reptile and amphibian hobby, captive breeding is relatively new. When many of us, including myself, were beginners in the hobby, we would not have thought to ask if an animal was captive bred or wild caught either- because captive breeding didn’t really exist. Even the zoos rarely had herps that bred for them. Out of the thousands of species of reptiles and amphibians in the world, only a very small percentage are available as captive bred. That is why, for most of us, wild-caught specimens don’t seem that unusual. However, morals being subjective, there are many different scenarios where I, too, consider collecting from the wild to be immoral, and I’m sure many others feel the same way. We also consider it stunningly immoral when the last tiny bits of habitat for Chinese alligators, axolotls, and other rare species are destroyed. But that is the reality.
It’s a bit offensive when you make a sweeping, negative generalization about “you reptile people”. First, you are having a conflict with only a tiny handful of people here. Second, the majority of us here do not make a living selling reptiles. We, too, are primarily consumers and hobbyists- like you. For better or worse, you yourself are now “reptile people”. Here’s another interesting tidbit- we don’t like it when our animals die, either. We also don’t like bad sellers. That is the entire reason the BOI forum exists.
It is a bit disturbing to me that you now seem to have negative feelings about herp keepers in general, and perhaps fauna users in particular. I guess like anything else, the herp hobby is what you make of it. In this case, you now have an adversarial relationship with some of the users here. However, the name calling and insults did originate with you. Some have been a bit heavy handed with their responses, but for the most part, they were merely responding in kind. If this exchange has been confrontational, it is primarily of your own making.

Ed- I'm very interested to hear more about immunosuppression.

Theresa- I agree that none of this is black and white, and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, outside of the emotional component.

Greg- Well said, and I'm sorry to come off as negative toward herp keepers. I was being personally attacked by members of this list, and my responses were not meant to be as sweeping as they appeared.

Nickolause, et al, my name is Lydia C. Courtney. I am in the process of hyphenating my husband's last name in there, so Lydia C. Courtney-Pope, if you want the full future version, and not the current legal version. His name was on the vet work, so that's why the vet papers said "Pope." Sorry for any confusion.

I propose a new and more positive thread, as the night crew seems somewhat toxic. I would very much like to understand the immuno-suppression of wc animals, and I guess Nickolause is a scientist and probably has a lot of good information and so does Ed.

Those who want to be positive and inform me respectfully can meet me there. Those who want to criticize and blame (and yes, I see the hypocrisy in my own statement) can go their own way or continue to rail on me, here.

Originally Posted by lydiacourtney

I propose a new and more positive thread

A discussion forum thread might be interesting.
As far as responses to this actual situation, one of the reasons that this site works so well is that readers read all of the responses, positive and negative, and judge for themselves the value and credibility of each response.

You cannot really pick and choose responses to try to engineer a perfect-for-you thread, and an effort to do so might be seen as manipulative, since those with valid negative responses bring valued opinion to the table and may actually contain information and thoughts that may be of value to you.