I'm not familiar with CITES, so I can't address all of your questions specifically. If CITES is a typical environmental bureaucracy, I really don't believe that most of its actions will be very effective. If the market is there and people can feed their families by selling snakes outside the limits, they'll poach the snakes and sell them on the black market.
I'd be more in favor of tariff protection on imported snakes. I wouldn't set the tariff to be prohibitively high. If the tariff is too high, the rewards for successful black marketing of snakes will lead to the same result as bureaucratic control. On the other hand, a moderate tariff would be enough to make WC snakes less competitive in the pet market. Even $30 per snake would be enough to keep many of the WC animals from being able to compete well with captive bred pythons, but a $30 tariff would be meaningless to the high-end morph importer who is collecting only those snakes that could be valuable for specialty breeding.
Would you recommend using CB specimens over WC animals? Please state why.
Using them for what? As a pet, I'd think that they are far superior because they are more likely to be healthy and adjust well to living in captivity. For breeding, there's probably some value in mixing the gene pool occasionally with an import. For skinning them to make purses, I'd also think that CB would be better because they could be raised in a way to minimize the number of scars. I'd hate to think of someone raising ball pythons to make purses, but the CB should be better.
Is this topic really appropriate for a technical writing class? Your questions seem to be more suited to advocacy writing rather than technical writing. If you want to produce a good technical piece, I'd avoid the "do you feel this number is too high" approach and look for ways to explain how this number was determined and what the consequences of the current numbers are. How big is this paper supposed to be? What guidelines did the professor give for writing the paper? Is the point of the paper to teach something, to explain something, to show that you can present data? Those questions might better prepare you to choose a topic.
Bill
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It's not how many snakes you have. It's how happy and healthy you can keep them.
