Very good point! Over a lifetime of collecting rocks/wood in the wild for aquarium use, I have on one occasion run afoul of a local ordinance banning collecting alongside the road. I was unaware of the rule...had never even heard of or imagined such a thing...and I had stopped alongside the roadway in a quiet, lonely section to give my dog a chance to relieve herself (on leash) near Bancroft, Ontario, which bills itself as the "Mineral Capital of Canada"; we had a cottage nearby for many years, and a rock-collecting friend asked me to look out for a specific type of stone commonly found there. While Lotus diligently searched for that "special spot" required for her ablutions, I started to notice some cool little pebbles on the ground, and began picking a few up and pocketing them. When I heard a car slowing and pulling over, I looked up to see a young OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) officer coming towards me.
He was friendly and polite, and we chatted for a few minutes. He asked if everything was alright with me, and I explained why I had stopped and what we were doing. He was okay with a 140-pound Mastiff/Dane mix taking a typically melon-sized poop along the road...but perked up when he saw my new rock collection. He informed me in no uncertain terms that I had broken the law and should drop those pebbles right back onto the ground or face a citation. It sounded so silly and ridiculous to me that I did one of the things you should not do when dealing with the law; I laughed at him.
It all ended well enough, the pebbles were released back into nature, and later my rockhound friend and I had a spirited discussion about the ethics of sending unsuspecting people into the world of crime without proper warnings.
