I have to agree it is good civil action when lawmakers and law enforcement officials create ordinances to quiet the “safari” syndrome that sometimes follows in a flap of reports. It is the humans that are being controlled.

This seemed to happen often in the 1960s and 1970s with various flaps of Bigfoot, Lizardmen, and Mothman sightings, where carloads of teens, hunters, and sightseers would crowd a location that was in the midst of a hot series of encounters. Sheriff departments would have their hands full, and there was a real fear someone would get killed.

In the case of Nessie hunting, it was the monster that the lawmakers were afraid was going to be harmed by, for example, Dan Taylor and his attempt to harpoon a Loch Ness cryptid from his minisub in 1999.

Broken down, individually, there appear to be reasons for each passed ordinance or legal action that have jokingly been referred to by the media as “monster protection laws.”

Actually it’s not a waste of time from a law-maker standpoint; as there are other considerations from a public perspective. The Scottish protection proposal was probably in the same spirit as the Skamania County sasquatch ordinance, which was primarily concerned with trying to keep a mass of armed, jittery wanna-be “Bigfoot hunters” with high-powered rifles out of the woods and reduce the chance of what could have been a very legitimate danger to the public. At the time the Nessie laws were being pondered, there may have been a perceived increase in enthusiasts’ activity aimed at trying to capture it, so much so that a potential public nuisance or threat was perceived by the authorities. The thinking is that if you make it illegal to catch it, nobody would bother trying to look for it.

While it might be fun to talk about, cryptozoologists that I know do spend more time trying to establish the actual zoological reality of cryptids as opposed to wasting their time with setting up protective measures and reservations where the as-yet-to-be verified animals will be safely “protected” or “housed” some day.

The general public know this, and recognize that someone is jumping the gun, and it makes us look foolish.

I know many wish to do this because they think it brings publicity to the cryptid, but the publicity is the wrong kind. Cryptozoologists who want to bring legitimacy to the field should spend more time searching for the creatures, and less time trying to “protect” them.