I'll post this here since she has me blocked on FB and probably missed it.
She compares herself to me, yet the big difference is I EUTHANIZED EVERYTHING. I shut down my collection, nothing in or out, for 10 months while I spent THOUSANDS of dollars on necropsies, bloodwork, histology, etc. Finally when it was determined to be an unknown new virus with no cure, I made the decision to euthanize every single snake I owned that hadn't already died -- and not just ball pythons, but rainbow boas, cornsnakes, kingsnakes, and carpet pythons, despite the fact that the virus had never affected any of them. I didn't want to take that risk. I lost $20,000 in animals and equipment, not counting the value of normals, hets, babies I'd produced, and brand new one-of-a-kind morphs and dinker projects. I had one of the ONLY Argentine rainbow boas in the U.S., and the only breeder producing them (where I got mine), lost his solitary breeding female to old age, and they are no longer being priduced anywhere in America. I had a clown when they were still $4500, and a g-stripe on breeding loan from a friend who took the financial hit because he couldn't take him back. Above all, I lost my very first ball python Spoon, who was 9 years old and the most beloved snake I've ever had.
Since Mindy would have been 11 years old when that all happened, she wasn't around to witness how I was crucified and attacked relentlessly by about 1/2 of the hobby -- because I was an idiot and made mistakes in QT that resulted in the spread of the virus in the first place, and in the very beginning had listed 3 mojave babies for sale as they'd been cleared by my DVM due to being eggs and having been removed from the collection before hatching. I then realized the error in my decision after it was pointed out to me by John and Deb that until the tests came back, it could be something more serious. At that time I was literally the only person that had ever gone public with an event like that, and the other victims of the same seller had not yet come forward. Within a few days of listing them, I pulled the ad down. Nothing EVER left my collection, and nothing EVER was attempted to be sold or otherwise given away. I continued to be attacked and condemned, until people started seeing the effort I put into testing and researching this virus, and started seeing other victims from the same seller come forward. Finally 10 months after the first snake got sick, I did what needed to be done to prevent my animals from suffering horrific deaths, and to prevent my fellow hobbyists from any possible risk of transmission on me, my clothes, etc. I *LISTENED* to what more advanced, experienced, knowledgable keepers were telling me, and did the right thing.
Damian Wyatt, on the other hand, kept selling off his collection, first under his name and trying to deny the virus, then sneakily under his girlfriend's name. 11 known people were affected by him, a few among the bigger breeders, and most of whom lost their entire collections. Those that didn't had been lucky enough to catch it in Quarantine in separate buildings. If someone had posted an FYI warning on him from the very start, I'd still have my animals. If I hadn't been so public about my case, many more people would have bought his animals for the dirt cheap prices he was blowing them out and lost their collections too.
But, then again, if that hadn't all happened, I wouldn't be in veterinary medicine today -- doing what I love and making a difference. At least my animals didn't die in vain.