at best here all we could hope for is the ability to guarantee live arrivals shipping venomous may be a ways down the road
I doubt we'd even get a live arrival guarantee. That's no problem with me though, a properly packed animal will survive shipping with little more than a few days stress to deal with, barring carrier mishaps like misrouting it to Alaska.
We do pay to do everything in life, anything that could possibly add another dollar to the government coffers just to have the "privledge" of doing anything enjoyable, and I resent every dime of it.
If you offer to pay a $100 fee to ship reptiles they will take it, I'm just saying there's on reason at all for it. If they refuse to guarantee live arrival, which I bet would be the case, and the animal is properly packaged, then they are taking no extra risk, burden, or liability in accepting reptiles for shipment and in my opinion deserve no extra funds for doing so.
The majority of people are not shipping 100 packages per year, and many would only ship 10. These people are going to attempt to ship under the radar anyway because such a fee would be cost prohibitave.
Overcoming this "paranoia" about liability will probably need financial incentive.
I don't know what degree of liability they might expect, but a signed waiver absolving them of any and all liability and placing responsibility on the shoulders of the shipper would seem to me to accomplish the same thing.
The only fly in the ointment is carrier delays. Regardless of the contents, packages are occasionally misrouted, overlooked, or otherwise arrive late.
Unless you feel you can push a class action lawsuit to require carriers to ship snakes it's going to be an uphill battle to provide an incentive for the carriers.
I actually believe this is a possibility except for the cost of it. Take Airborne for instance. They allow the shipping of turtles but not snakes. USPS allows lizards, but not snakes. It can be demonstrated that a small snake poses no more threat to anyone than a tortoise, so by then allowing some but not others it is discrimination. I could understand posing a size limit on snakes allowed for shipment, and refusing venomous, but to accept some totally harmless reptiles while imposing a blanket ban on snakes regardless is wrong and I do believe a court would rule in that way. The result however may be the opposite of what is desired. The shippers would be right in either banning all animal shipments or allowing snakes along with lizards. They'd likely take the first option.
With lizards, UPS normally requires a daily pick up account. This is account has a charge associated with it (granted you do receive another service benefit) but the primary purpose is to increase the account fees and encourage a volume of shipments (the fee is less the more you ship).
And to bring in some revenue to compensate them for all the days they come to you when you have nothing going out. The daily pickup account fees are applied equally regardless of what you are shipping, it's not just for lizards shippers.
A fee just for the ability to ship reptiles would penalize us for no reason.
Some sort of fee may be an option, but an across the board fee of $100 is wrong. Someone shipping 10 boxes per week can easily factor that into their prices, but why should someone who ships 10 per year be assesed the same fee when they are responsible for a fraction of any perceived liability.
(Note: She was less than impressed)