I don't know of a satisfactory solution. I see your point, but the issue is very different from a matter of driver's licenses. There is no risk of PEOPLE being extirpated due to deaths on the road (drunken or any other kind). There is, however, a very real risk of whole populations and whole species being extirpated from areas. As many of us are well aware, this is happening at this very moment. Just because individual turtles may hang on for years and decades in areas, doesn't make them any less extirpated on a functional population level. Whole species are being hunted and collected into extinction in the wild... and this is NOT being dramatic. So placing moratoriums on possession could ultimately be the only way to police (or attempt to do so) these people who collect and sell with no regard for the species' future in the wild.

That said, I'm not sure you could effectively or safely equip neonate turtles with PIT tags. I'm no expert on them, but I'm not sure you can get them small enough yet. Here in Ohio, turtles are required to get PIT tags, but not until they are 4 inches in carapace length. And for that matter, that wouldn't solve the problem with folks collecting wild gravid-females, harvesting their eggs, and selling the hatchlings. Maybe there is a way around this, but I think that possibility shrinks every time poachers find a new angle to make money off wild turtles. They give the whole "industry" a bad name.

...I think this puts my at 4 cents now? sorry.

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