Aaron,

If you go to the turtle forums under "all other turtles" or what ever it is, you will see my post there with the article from Herp Digest.

You don't keep and breed any turtles do you? You don’t collect any turtle species do you? You don’t make your living with herps do you? You are not an exporter are you? You just don't want any commercial harvest so you see things from that perspective. IMO you also don't respect the rights and businesses of others because of this view. Which is your right, but bad for the herp industry IMO. You also don't understand or give enough credit to what a huge benefit to herp conservation and job creation my plan would enable. Most of all it would be fair and maybe you don't want fair?

You can easily come up with some reasonable regs and bag limits for every species in the US with the natural history and GAP data we have. Deer management is not EXACT. Saying we have to do that for herps is ridiculous. Do you think that total annual bag limits that are off by 100 let's say are going to matter? It won't. I think you will find any excuse to disagree with me. And I think it is more about the fact that you don't agree with the sale of wild caught. We know that bag limits and sustainable harvest works for game animals and fisheries. Herp harvest doesn't even come close to fish harvest numbers. There are so few people in the game it would be very easy to monitor and manage. Reasonable bag limits solve the issue without bans and it’s fair. To me that is so much more valid.

Barry only wants to stop food turtles to China? I don’t think so. How are you going to know if a turtle is for food or a hobbyist? You want to throw up arbitrary restrictions. You don’t want any accountability as to the design of the regulations just someone’s opinion and you think it is okay for us to restrict the freedoms of Americans for opinions and easy answers? I don’t. We do want things more closely regulated, remember? We want to require all harvesters (recreational and commercial) to be required to report what is collected. We need to know this data so we can better manage the resource. We want cage and husbandry standards. We want safety standards. We want clear, precise regulations that give us legal pathways to conduct our businesses (or hobbies) don’t we? We want wildlife agencies to be transparent, objective and justify their regulations with data so we can be sure no left wing AR agenda is being pushed, don’t we?

Here is what Barry proposes:

What I believe should be regulated instead is the export market. The law should be a TOTAL BAN on the export of any turtle over 2 inches overall length. If they implemented a BAN like this then they wouldn't need to BAN the catching of turtles because it wouldn't be worth the time to try and find hatchlings. In most states collecting eggs is illegal so if the exporters are not breeding themselves they will eventually go out of business or go to jail for nest robbing. Also, there should be a BAN on the export of turtle meat. This would curb the sale of adults to turtle slaughter facilities. The reason for this BAN would be to be sure that adults are not being caught, slaughtered, and sold for export.

What was that about Barry’s proposal not banning anything? It seems he wants to shut down any commercial harvest of herps. We know that is wrong and unacceptable. It isn’t just about food turtles to China, Aaron (remember TX). Remember, ONLY over-collection is what we want to ban not sustainable harvest and not sales of wild caught. I do support some bans. A ban on cruelty to animals. A ban on improper or lax husbandry. A ban on biased, agenda driven policy that has no scientific backing.

Or we can agree to disagree.

Welkerii
El Paso, TX

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