Thanks for your kind words. Almost every Aussie herp on the market today came in from illegal ancestors yet NO one today would think about trying to smuggle anything out of Australia. The reason is that they are more expensive in Australia than here. That's right, a Woma is still an expensive sought out boid in Australia. When you commercialize anything the poaching of it stops in a rather short time. Even though technically it was illegal at the time I'm NOT sure it was a crime to bring ALL those herps here as now IF anything were ever endangered in Australia certainly there are many thousands here for repatriation if need be. My greatest regret is giving my pure lewisi to AZA Zoo's which let them die and eliminated them from the private sector [who originally bred them anyway]forever. Life Fellowship and myself were breeding these lizards and talking about their desperate situation for decades before the AZA was interested in any way. Yet now it seems that Life Fellowship or myself would be denied the right to breed them even though we were the ones worried about them in the first place. I pioneered the outside enclosures for Cyclura in S. Florida and produced my first Rhino Babies in the 1970's. A lot of people today cast a bad light on past smuggling but don't realize it was a different time and place. Many of these same people themselves have and breed many Aussie and other herps with illegal origins without a thought of the hypocracy involved. Early on many of the AZA Zoo's themselves were the knowing recipients of smuggled herps and were happy to aquire them at the time. I KNOW THIS IS FACTUAL FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. What bothers me is that saving all kinds of wildlife has to do with paying for it, you know real $$$$$. Why is renting Pandas from the Chinese for millions of dollars to have them on exhibit so you can increase the Zoo Admissions and sales any different than selling progeny produced to finance saving the other wild ones? In actuality it's NOT any different. Money can be derived from a great variety of ways to save wildlife in nature. Eco-tourism, Zoo admissions and sales, big game hunting, sales of wildlife products[croc skins etc], and of course the sale of living animals are only some of the ways. The sale of skin products derived from killing herps disgust most herpers yet the REASON that many crocs have been brought back from the tip of extinction is because of Crocodile Farms all over the world that do just that. Alligators here in Florida are a shining example of that. Once Alligator Farming was legal the poaching STOPPED and now Alligators number over a million in the wild here in Florida alone. If I've upset anyone with these FACTS I'm sorry but it is what it is, Many years ago I coined the phrase "CONSERVATION THRU COMMERCIALIZATION" and I believe I have been proven correct many times over these many years..Again this is all "food for thought" for a lot of you out there who may not know the real history of Herpetoculture and all the political nonsense involved...Hey, I was just and am a guy who always loved herps...The fact that I made a decent living from it was always secondary to my love for the critters...
-----
Tom Crutchfield

www.tomcrutchfield.com

[ Show Entire Thread ]