esmithiii, I understand what you are saying and am sorry that you and others cringe when I post. I will say that the only reason I post anything is out of a deep caring for the animals we keep. I am not an elitist, I have seen well done 20 gallon reefs that look much nicer than my 180. As I have mentioned before, I waited 40 something years before I could afford a reef tank that I felt had the kind of equipment needed for long term sucess. I spent 6 months reading every thing I could that dealt with reef aquaria, and reef related subjects. During this time of planning I knew (from all my freshwater days) that I did not want large fish that seemed to be cramped in the home I provided for them. I also made the decission to purchase only tank raised corals and fish, and that I would only have fish in pairs to allow for reproduction, so as you can see, my choices of livestock are rather limited.
When I began my research I was absolutely amazed at the archaic way that livestock was still collected and the raping of the reefs that still occured. I would come to this board and see the long time dedicated hobbiest trying to promote ethical reef keeping and thought, thats great, there still is hope. Yesterday I went to about 7 other reef boards and read the first page of each. Only one, RC, had any threads that could be looked at as possibly controversial, and that thread was Tangs. There were about 10 posts on this thread and more than half said the same thing that some of us have said on our Tang posts. The last post, as of yesterday however, was by the RC administrator saying bad idea to the stocking plan of chris who participated on our latest Tang discussion.
I think that maybe a good idea would be to have a poll of some kind on this board to see if the membership is even interested in the ethical part of this hobby,maybe things have changed, or that maybe like you have said it needs to be in another area on this board. One last thing, and I mean this with no sarcasm, if you had my views would you even bother to post to this board or would you find another medium to discuss these subjects. Again, my apologies to anyone I might have offended, it wasn't personal.
Steve
[ July 27, 2001: Message edited by: SPC ]