Brad,



I suspected that this was the case as well. The records and data were skewed to push an agenda. I knew that there was no way that 84,000 (or whatever the number was) turtles were being wild caught and shipped out. I knew that a good majority of them had to be captive born red-eared sliders from LA. This is what agenda pushing academics do, they twist and skew things to fit agendas. Take Michael Smith and Tim Cole’s Box Turtle Partnership group, one of their propaganda papers had a statement similar to this: “TPWD data indicated that last year 804 box turtles were collected in Texas. This included three different subspecies. The USFWS export data indicated that 84,000 turtles were exported last year to the Asian turtle market.” I couldn’t find the exact quote but you can see how the sentences are structured to inflate the problem and mislead. It leads people to believe that 84,000 box turtles were exported not turtles of all species.



The Bayou Bob argument is a good one. He contends that he was catching turtles out of man-made bodies of water on private land and that ranchers didn’t want the turtles in them. And that the ranch hands would use them for target practice if he didn’t remove them. He further states, turtles never occurred on these private lands before and it was only because of these man-made bodies of water that they were there in the first place. Thus they are not natural populations. So he defines them as nuisance turtles. I don’t know how much of that is true but that was the argument.



You should be skeptical about everything academics and TPWD says. There goal is to protect herps at all costs. Have you heard about all the cases of academics falsifying data? Usually, this is related to continuing to get grant funding. But it wouldn’t surprise me if many of the turtle academics were skewing and twisting over fear of the trade to China. Not that they shouldn’t have concern. But we need to be concerned about how they react and how those reactions affect all of us.



Mike Welker

El Paso, TX

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