Laws aren't written very flexibly in many cases.
I can see the extenuating circumstances in this case, and you would hope the enforcers would as well.
He has one fish.
As far as I know one snakehead won't reproduce. So it would be different if he had several fish.
And he had it before the law.
So it should be a matter of protecting the public which is what the ban was supposed to do.
So let him keep his fish with some conditions. It cannot leave his house. Absolutely no other snakeheads. Drains to sewars and such should have screens installed to ablsolutely prevent the fish from entering the sewage system under any circumstance.
And there is a bottle of rotenone, which if the owner is forced to evacuate due to natural disaster, he agrees he will dump the rotenone into the tank with the fish on his way out the door.
If he had obtained the fish after the law, then it should be put down, just like the illegal snails people in places like Texas have.
And there is certainly going to be more banning of exotic animals. The hurricane in New Orleans showed that. You have a natural disaster destroy and bunch of homes at the same time and animals get released that never should be released.
And honestly, I don't think much of a blanket exemption for anyone with a zoo or such. Though new homeland security laws are forcing many of them to finally come up with a reasonable plan to deal with difficult situations. Most zoos don't have the plan in place to prevent the release of exotics into the environment and they often have not just an individual but a whole breeding colony.
I know a lot of people have no appreciation of the damage their pet can do, there is no such right as the right to have a particular animal as a pet. And laws are frankly way to lax either in the letter or in the enforcement.
I was wondering if we are going to see a few more chimpanzee laws now after the latest incident?
Marv