Does giving this any of my time and attention make me a masochist?
I suppose I have a tendency to play devil's advocate or to look at arguments and disagreements as technical debates where all possibilities need to be examined and quantified. It's been pointed out to me that I can be almost obsessive about alternate explainations and possibilities outside of the obvious. This is the disclaimer. I am offering some possibilities- nothing concrete.
Dan had a couple issues with shipping, one where the buyer requested an insulated package and one where the package arrived severely damaged. In both cases the animals were okay, minimal issues, both reasonabally explained.
Dan had an issue where a frog shipment was delayed and did not arrive until the day after it was supposed to. His customer had taken the day off of work on the intended arrival date and was unable to do so on the actual arrival date. There were dead animals in the shipment, likely- although not definitely- as a result of the carrier delay. Dan claimed he owed his customer nothing, since they did not contact him within an hour of delivery, despite the fact that the agent he contracted to undertake that delivery was over twenty four hours late. He eventually refunded the buyer the cost of the deceased frogs, although this came only after a period of more than a week of public arguments and attempts to evade responsibility.
The IBD incident is far less clear. Dan sends boas to his customer, one of which arrives with symptoms that are in line with IBD (although not exclusively IBD). Dan is... apparantly ignorant of what IBD actually is and comes to a conclusion that the affected snake was strangled by another which it had been bagged with. The customer produces a necropsy report that shows inclusion bodies and some bacterial loads that are signifigant enough to note. Dan does post something that he claims is the text of an email from the buyer indicating that the animals he sent were alive for a period of time after arrival- this text does not include any email headers which the computer savvy among us could use to verify the validity. Dan then also claims that unnamed third parties have told him that this buyer has a history of accusing dealers of sending IBD infected animals but refuses to name his source for that statement, leaving it also unverifiable. As a hypothetical, there exists a possibility that the animal necropsied was an animal the buyer had posessed prior to the sale from Dan. All Dan would need to do to evidence that possibility is provide the email headers from the message where his buyer noted the animal went downhill sometime after the date of the necropsy and produce the name of the dealer who informed him of this customer's supposed past. I'm genuinely uncertain about Dan's comprehension of this situation; does he really not know what IBD is or was it a smokescreen? Does he have no clue what an email header is, or is it a smokescreen to cover a falsified message? Does he not understand the rule about anonymous third party quotations or did he fabricate this "other dealer"?
The pink tongue skinks... I am forced to acknowledge that there are aspects of the buyer's initial post which would lead me to believe their husbandry played some part in the animal's eventual demise. That does not excuse Dan's tone when responding to them, his treatment of them on these boards or the constant changes in direction with regards to refunds, replacements, assistance or future deals. Put simply, when a customer is having an issue, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of responding to them that have very little to do with guilt or culpability and when it comes to addressing their concerns, Dan failed.
With regards to the Candoia... They can potentially go downhill quickly if kept improperly. I tried to get some clear cut and extremely specific answers from the buyer about their husbandry but my questions got lost in the back and forth that errupted. I never got the answers I needed to hazzard a guess about how big a part the conditions they were kept in might have played in their demise and probably won't at this point. Of note though, Dan claimed during the IBD debacle that he did not keep Boids and didn't have to worry about asymptomatic carriers being present in his collection. Then during the viper boa thread, he began bragging about the Candoia he keeps and breeds. These statements are mutually exclusive.
In each of the situations, there exists some possibility that Dan was not, at least initially, maliciously at fault. The more issues are brought to light though, the less likely it becomes that each situation was a result of conditions outside of his control or understanding. One or two is a mistake but judging by the ads on KS, he's not doing a sufficient volume of business to really justify the number of problems he has had in the last six months or so. It's still *possible* that each situation went wrong and he's not at fault in any of them, but it becomes far FAR less probable that this is the case.
Regardless of the culpability he has in the individual situations though, his conduct has been a constant and a definite negative. The manner in which he chooses to respond to his own customers when they experience a problem, to posters on these boards who simply follow the evidence that have been provided with and ask questions and to his outright detractors is reprehensible.
I can say that I most definitely am a customer he has lost. I keep Candoia and would have been interested in purchasing that beautiful monster of a viper he posted some photos of if he had managed to provide sufficient evidence that the IBD claim was inaccurate. After all this though... there is not a chance in hell I would enter into a transaction with him simply because I have seen how he responds to complaints and problems. I simply wouldn't take the risk that the package might be delayed or that something would cause the animal to arrive dead, injured or misrepresented- because if it did, however unlikely those situations might be... I know now for a fact that he'd deny any responsibility and behave like an utter jackass in response to any criticisms.
if you paid the man 32 seconds after it arrived, it still had IBD. No one denied that you paid the man his money back. No payment can change that the snake HAD IBD , though I suppose you had hoped it would keep him from telling anyone else about it.
