You forgot to mention that while the hobbyist may collect more of one particular species(I assume you mean graybands), the numbers you gave fall apart when you look at total numbers of all species. Commercial collecters are not just taking 2 or 3 or 4 individual herps for 10 nights of collecting. They are likely taking 5 to 10 various "desirable" individual animals per night, not to mention less desirable herps like garters, watersnakes, atrox, lizards, frogs and toads which are often collected by the dozens per day. Using your numbers of the average commercial collecter hunting 160 nights per year that is 800 - 1,600 individual animals per year, per commercial collecter, not even including the hundreds of lesser herps. Times that by 10 commercial collecters(your own numbers again) and you have 8,000 - 16,000 individual herps per year, plus the lesser herps. By your own example hobbyists pay approxiamately $500 to local ecomomies, per individual animal they take. Contrast that with a commercial collect who probably pays at most $20 per animal, again not including the lesser catches which would bring that figure down significantly.



Also consider that game agancies need money if they are to be able to do studies and those 10 commercial collecters are only actually going to be paying about $1,000 in license fees, Whereas the 100 recreational collecters are going to be paying about $10,000 in license fees. One could look at it as dollars per animal. The animals belong to all of us. The recreational collecter is paying 10 times per animal than the commercial collecter does.



That is why commercial collecting is a hard sell to wildlife agencies. The total numbers of animals taken is frightening to them. I did not say it is bad, just that it's a hard sell. Maybe you should propose that commercial herp collerctors pay licences fees that are comparable to commercial fishing fees. Have you looked at what it costs to license a commercial fishing vessel lately?



The thing that is really baloney about this is that you have got people thinking that the recreational group wants to stop all commercial collecting. The recreational group has never said commercial collecting shouldn't be allowed. It only has said recreational collecting/breeding should be. If you think the formation of a recreational group hinders the creation of a separate commercial group you are off base. IMHO you should be more concerned about getting your group off the ground than in tearing down HCU because HCU is not stopping you from doing anything. You ought to just try selling your group on it's own merits rather than trying to make another group look bad.

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