Quote:
Originally Posted by smy_749
So are you against WC in the hobby, if the option of CB is not available? Like most of the indo species in America.
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If anything, I'm even more against WC in the hobby in places where the animals don't occur natively, such as America.
Here if WC were allowed it would just be the odd animal taken and it would only affect the individual animals (the extent of the effect would depend on the species), but when you have an import industry you are adding several other factors: It starts with people whose motivation to capture animals will be high enough that there may be some habitat destruction involved (breaking open rock crevices or hollow logs, cutting down small trees to get the animals down) and who aren't overly worried about overcollection, as their livelihood may be at stake. Then there's the death toll from transportation in substandard conditions, followed by languishing in a reptile importer's warehouse. The survivors end up in a pet store, where the staff don't know how to look after them and then, finally, most end up being bought by new keepers with no experience that buy them because they're inexpensive compared to other, CB, species. A huge percentage of them are dead before long.
Big death toll, no recruitment. I've been on these monitor forums for over 12 years and every year there's a dozen new keepers who post about how they are going to 'break the mould' and be the pioneers of producing CB Indo monitors of the
indicus complex, particularly
doreanus and
melinus. Eventually they disappear from the forums without achieving that goal. The imports keep coming in. There's a reason CB aren't available: No one succeeds in breeding them and if they do, it's a one or two clutch run max.
I guess this was a long winded way of me saying 'yes, I'm against WC in the hobby'.
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