Let's try to keep politics off the boards and buried in emails
... Lets try to let Webslave make the determinations about appropriate versus inappropriate posts on his own message boards...
He is not a man to stay silent when he feels something is reacing an inappropriate level and when he asks for a matter to be dropped... it gets dropped.
promise I will try to sit on my hands and just curse at the monitor if politics rears its ugly head, anyone want to join me in that pact?
Not I.
There is a very important aspect to the... "politics" involved when making a determination about which sources are credible and which unreliable. When someone can be proven to have motives diametrically opposed to those which sane people hold to be true, the information they give all becomes highly suspect.
For instance... Kevin Eagan (however it may be spelled), Kaplan, Liz Palika, Henry Lizard Lover, Jennifer Sworfield and several others of similar ilk all ripped one another apart and made some really negative statements about one another. Everything from "fixing" prolapses with bolt cutters to freezing animals in order to take pictures of them. This removes a signifigant aspect of credibility from all of them involved.
I happen to like iguanaden's information, I find it to be reasonable and well evidenced, unlike that of several of his peers. I also happen to be able to look at the list of individuals who wrote the website condemning his information and realize that they are all collective individuals in "The other" camp on some major care issues.
The fact remains that there isn't a single well known iguana website avaliable with someone who actually has decent credentials and some signifigant measure of credibility as it's major informational source, it's very important to realize that and analyze Why that happens to be the case when making personal determinations about what is or is not an appropriate part of the reader's care of their own animals.
If one really wants decent information, they need to start hitting research libraries and reading the conclusions to field reports, not crappy books sold in pet stores or crappy websites created by the authors of crappy books sold in pet stores. When an open group of people are asked on a message board to make a reccomendation for internet informational sources however, the credibility of the authors involved will come into play.
Would you preffer it if the credentials and dependability of assorted websites were NOT called into play, allowing potentially negative information to be spread to naive individuals?
