Snake man beats 11 Bogus criminal charges
Media release dated 31 July 2013.

This week the DSE withdrew 11 criminal charges laid against Snake Man Raymond Hoser because of a lack of evidence.
The charges, all laid to justify an illegal, violent 11 man raid on the Snake Man’s home on 17 August 2011 were widely publicized by the DSE at the time they were laid and caused immense damage to the Snake Man’s wildlife education business Snakebusters. The allegations included “extreme” acts of animal cruelty and numerous breaches of the Victorian Wildlife Act.
The Snake Man asserted at the time the claims by DSE had no factual basis and this was vindicated in the Melbourne Magistrates Court this week.
The 11 man-raid on the Snakeman’s home led to his two young daughters being traumatised as they were dragged out of bed at dawn by heavily armed police and wildlife officers. In the following 9 hours, the Hoser family was subjected to arrest, a prohibition on making phone calls and forced to wait in the kitchen while their home and business was systematically destroyed, with cars, furnishings and office equipment smashed.
A search warrant had been gained on the basis of a false and misleading sworn statement by DSE officer Emily Gibson, who has now left Australia. Computer equipment taken during the raid was returned so badly damaged, that it had to be replaced.
In preparing the defence to the charges, Hoser had spent thousands of hours and many thousands of dollars, including getting legal advice from several lawyers and lining up several expert witnesses from the United States and elsewhere. The 51-year old herpetologist, Raymond Hoser is widely known as the world’s foremost snake expert, having published nine major books and hundreds of definitive scientific papers. He’s also named more species and genera of snakes than anyone else born in the last 120 years.
As a result of the DSE’s actions and damage to his business arising from it, losses have totalled several hundred thousand dollars already and that’s before lost repeat business is factored in. The DSE war against Hoser started after rival businesses, including the DSE itself (as both regulator and main competitor) decided to gang up on Hoser’s business to try to remove him from the wildlife education business, as none could match his standards and ability to draw clients and Hoser owned a number of coveted registered trademarks that they wanted to use, including of course “snake man”.
The former head of DSE’s enforcement branch Ron Waters, who had also fancied himself as the “snake man”, had been a party to unlawfully infringing and using the registered Snakebusters trademarks in 2006, over which Hoser sued and was paid out $29,500 in damages. In retaliation, Ronald Leslie Waters improperly and in breach of the Victorian Wildlife Act, imposed special rules on Hoser’s business, which were not enforced on others, which he later retrospectively reinterpreted in order to falsely allege Hoser had broken the DSE’s rules, even though Hoser had spent many thousands of dollars in order to comply.
In February 2010, Hoser exposed a fraud involving other DSE employees, who had scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars from innocent members of the public, by duping people into thinking they were donating money to a registered charity, when in fact the money was being diverted to fund home renovations. The publication “Sam The Scam: Sam The Koala is an impostor.” in Australasian Journal of Herpetology, issue 8, demonstrated that the Koala allegedly found in a fire zone during the Black Saturday Bushfires that had drunk bottles of water was a bootleg and fraud.
The Koala was in fact a bottle-raised pet taken into a previously burnt area and filmed drinking from CFA Fireman David Tree’s bottle as part of an elaborate hoax. The footage sold to the world as a random encounter in the midst of the bushfires was anything but that! The drinking koala and the fraudulent story used to market it, was also hijacked by the DSE to deflect attention from the department’s own culpability in terms of the circumstances leading to the deaths of 172 innocent people during the Black Saturday bushfires of 7 February 2009.
After Hoser refused to stop distributing hard copies of the journal and remove the same from the internet, as posted here: http://www.smuggled.com/AJHI8.pdf, the DSE declared war on Hoser and his business, the result being numerous attacks and illegal raids on his business, home and also the homes and businesses of staff and suppliers.
Hoser is now seeking that the DSE officers responsible for the illegal raids and bogus charges now be charged for the criminal offence of Misconduct in Office and that his staff and family be compensated for the damages caused. Raymond Hoser’s definitive books from the 1980’s and 1990’s, including “Australian Reptiles and Frogs” and “Endangered animals of Australia” were used by politicians on both sides of politics to put environmental issues on the public agenda for the first time. Former environment ministers Graham Richardson and Ian McLachlan both heavily promoted Hoser’s books at the time and referred to Hoser in media appearances frequently as Australia’s leading wildlife expert. Hoser’s scientific publications since then have been cited as authoritative and referred to by others in the field of zoology more than a million times, which is a total only matched by a handful of other zoologists in Australian history.
The International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), lists Hoser as having performed over 500 taxonomic acts, this being the discovery of and formal naming of new species, genera and the like for the first time, which is a greater number of reptiles than that of any other Australian person in history, although the majority of species named by Hoser are in fact outside of Australia. These include species as diverse as giant pythons, numerous vipers, pitvipers, tree snakes, king brown snakes, death adders, Cobras, blind snakes and boas.
More details at:
http://www.snakebusters.com.au
Or phone: (Melbourne, Australia) 9812-3322 or 0412-777-211

Non-urgent email inquiries via:
The Snakebusters bookings page

Urgent inquiries phone:
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia:
(03) 9812 3322 or 0412 777 211