they mention chinchillas being imported in this article. I don't have the time to look this up right now however I do seem to remember seeing chinchillas listed as an appendix I species on the cites list. Wouldn't this put a serious roadblock to importing them in any great number other than captive bred ones...and even then most likely still not worth the effort for a $60 to $70 dollar rodent (if you're lucky these days) that is domestically captive bred here by armies of school age children?
The mention of hantavirus is also interesting as I can recall 2 major outbreaks of that disease right now (I seem to recall there were 3 that are documented as major outbreaks) one was among U.S. soldiers during the Korean war the other was in the early 90's in the 4 corners region of the U.S. which of course involved native rodents (not sure of the species but most likely some type of deer mouse.) In fact the most notorious carrier of hantavirus I am aware of is our own eastern white footed deer mouse. My wife and I tried raising them at one point we did not have ours imported we caught them at the time in our house which was then in upstate N.Y. after many years of raising many different kinds of rodents we are both still here and have not died from hantavirus.
I am sure I could find some more flaws with this article but when I got to the figure of 39,679 (673? can't recall now.) nile monitors running wild in Fl. I couldn't read anymore of this crappy article.
As a taxpaying citizen I want to know who counted these 39,670 (whatever) nile monitors and how much it cost us. Especially since the guy doing the research on them admitted himself they are notoriously difficult to spot. It would be interesting to know how they came up with such an accurate number.

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• BC (FL) Press: Unusual pets, ? results - W von Papineäu, Thu Dec 16 09:32:35 2010
• RE: some interesting insight on this - Calparsoni, Thu Dec 16 10:48:21 2010
• RE: some interesting insight on this - aquick, Thu Dec 16 20:25:44 2010
• RE: some interesting insight on this - emysbreeder, Mon Dec 20 20:47:56 2010