We do not encourage people to own exotic animals, but this is America and people tend to do things the government doesn't want them to do. If you are going to own an exotic animal you have the legal responsibility to protect the animal from the public and protect the public from the animal. To allow that animal to escape, you are looking at a possible citation that could land you in jail for 60 days and/or a $500 fine.

Basically, any non-native animal is going to prey on or displace native wildlife, compete for food and water and whatnot. We regard them as a type of pollution.

The animal is not likely to survive and if it does survive it's going to take a toll on the native wildlife that defines the character of Florida.

America is hungry for people who believe in something. You may disagree with us but we believe in something.

This is America! They have a right to state their peace, and I don't think it's right that people are telling them they can't.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.