Canon No Longer Support EF 500mm L IS !!!!

A little birdie told me that Canon had dropped support for the EF 500mm L IS which is of course my main birding lens.Having a think about it I was saddled with two options:

1. Keep the 500 until it dies a death
2. Get shot and find a replacement

As my particular lens was 14 years old, and obviously the older it is the more chance of a failure I more or less decided to sell it, but before I made a final choice I contacted Canon and had them clarify the situation.

Canon explained that that lens was no longer supported under its Canon Professional Services programme and that when the bring out an upgrade to a lens (mk2 version) they start a countdown to dropping support for the original, the support lasts for seven years once that is up what ever spares are on shelves are all you will find and if your lens suffers a major failure you will not be able to get it repaired.
I also contacted Colchester Cameras they informed me that spares were already becoming difficult to obtain.
I didn't pay a lot of money for my 500 but I still did not want to lose the investment that I had made so I decided it was option 2 for me, get shot.  !!

I put it on Ebay but didn't really want to sell on there as these days the fees are to high (approx 14% of the final sale price), I asked MPB and Park Cameras for quotes but was disappointed with both of them.
I then came across Camera Jungle (part of the Jessops group of companies) they had an on line quotation system and the prices were very good with a well worn lens coming in at £2200 and Mint lens at £3400 ish.
That was a too good a price to miss, they even come and collect it for free so it was good bye 500.
I must admit to being torn as it was a damn fine lens, but I was not impressed with Canon's handling of the support dropping issue, I was lucky that my good friend Dave tagged me on a facebook conversation that mentioned the Canon support issue, else I would have carried on using it and been totally unaware until it needed a repair.