Australian Water Dragons in the U.S.

[paigemk]

Does anyone actually know why Australian Water Dragons are so hard to get in the United States? Why do you need a special licensure to import them?

My Fiancé is in love with the animal and he already has one, but getting another has been one hell of a ride with imports going through the Netherlands!

[dannybgoode]

There's a ban Australian species being exported out of Australia whether captive bred or wild.

Therefore you need absolute proof the animal is captive bred outside of Australia. Real pita.

[paigemk]

Is the ban in Australia? I thought it was just a US thing

[jjhill001]

Is the ban in Australia? I thought it was just a US thing

Australian wildlife has been devastated by invasive species, they take it very seriously. It'd be nice to see other countries take wildlife as seriously as they do, despite their new gov'ts perspective on killing the reef. So in all honestly they might change that policy if they keep going the way they are.

[pet_snake_78]

I see for sale fairly often. Check any of the rare reptiles groups on facebook. Agama Int. obviously made them more common in past but they are definitely still around and available numerous times per year in USA

[dave himself]

I haven't seen one of these in years, but then I haven't been looking:)

[dave himself]

Well I hadn't seen them in years:D

I have just uploaded these images:
http://fs5.directupload.net/images/170910/zyq85exa.jpg (http://www.directupload.net)

[Scubadiver59]

What are all those white blobs on the lizard's skin?

[dave himself]

They're wee bits of damp kitchen roll, these wee guys were just fresh home from Hamm;)

[pet_snake_78]

The inbound ban for Australia makes sense to protect against incoming disease or invasives, the outbound is a little more puzzling. One of the worst ideas to become common is that the small scale collection of a few snakes here or there causes a decline. There have been numerous studies done on the skin trade which show this simply is not true even when collection on a moderate scale. Additionally, thousands of balls have been exported from Ghana for a very long time with and the populations have remained stable and can continue to be harvested. Of course, you need a quota as we do for all species like deer, fish, etc, and of course you must make that quota a little smaller to allow for some amount of cheating and off the books trade which always happens even in fully closed countries like Australia. The habitat and food supply can only support so many of a given species, the excess die off. Human predation (collection) of small numbers do not generally result in less numbers of snakes existing in the population for this reason. If there were a decline additional restrictions such as sex/size, time of year, and total quota could always be adjusted.