Exotic Pet Trade?

[Pythonfriend]

i dont believe in "hunting for preservation", because this is basically like {removed}
theoretically it could work.... if the 3rd world nations that are known for corruption actually select the right animals for it, and use the money to protect the animals. even then, its still contradictory and weird, compared to safari tourism or ecotourism.

but when poachers poach animals, and people smuggle them into the united states, and big game hunters pay their money to some guy in the united states who will use the money to pay poachers and hunters to get the next animal into the united states, then i can assure you 100% of the money goes to the bad guys that we dont want to have it, and 0% of the money goes to conservation.

also, i have the impression that these big game hunters are unethical people who do not care about the environment. basically like poachers, except that they pay for the experience instead of getting paid for it. so i think most of them dont care. one year they might kill a grizzly in yellowstone national park, the next year they might buy one of the permits to shoot an elephant in africa where the money goes to conservation, the year after that they pay criminals to be able to shoot a giraffe in texas, and the year after that you find them butchering sharks in some coral reef. i dont believe they like animals, after all they love to kill them.


i agree about the other things. in Germany you can basically keep anything, as long as you can show that you have the knowledge, the money, the space, and the time to properly care for them. so when you want a tiger, its awfully hard to do, but not impossible, it just reflects the difficulty of actually keeping a tiger in a way that makes sense.

and penalties for poaching and smuggling should be higher. there should also be penalties for dealers that get caught with poached animals, usually the risk is over once the animals did the last border crossing without getting caught, and when the poached animals then show up in pet stores and at reptile shows, noone cares anymore.

maybe the responsible breeders and dealers and pet stores could form a system where they get together and corner off their part of the market, making it harder for poached animals to reach the consumer. basically you have a pool of responsible breeders, and then a pool of responsible dealers that only buy from responsible breeders, and then pet stores that only buy from responsible breeders or dealers. someting like a "network of responsible exotic pet professionals for conservation". a system that works, with rules that work, for example, all members could pledge to make the animals trackable from the consumer all the way to the breeder, and to report those to the authorities that deal with poached animals, and a way to kick those out of the system that break the rules.