Re: Australian Water Dragons in the U.S.
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.
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