Jamie as you know i used to operate a licenced quarantine facitity and have worn the expense of extablishing import and export protocols. My issue is that by not allowing legal movement of animals they drive it under the table and in doing so have no idea what is going on.If you do ( or dont do) the same thing the same thing happens! Making legal import and export illegal isn't working so something needs to change!
Yep Warwick, I think you have a better understanding than most about the protocols of import & export of creatures, and I also agree that if we keep on doing what we've always done, we'll keep on getting what we've always got... which is this standoff and continuing tensions between the practical and philosophical. But what we do have here now is a system that makes management relatively easy - if you have an exotic and you get caught, there is no question that you are breaking the law - easy for the authorities. I'm making no value judgement either way about this - it's just the way it is, and I can't see the authorities wanting to complicate their tasks any more than this by having to prove provenance to establish legality.
I can make a list which more or less demonstrates my opinions on matters exotic...
1. I would love to have some of more beautiful critters from other parts of the world - Chameleons, some of the incredible Vipers for example. I'm old, I'm no longer a stamp collector, and I've learned to rationalise my choices about these things. No pythons - we have more than enough here already.
2. Presumeably, by selecting species carefully, the seed animals could be assuredly captive bred from disease free facilities. Thus it would be fairly easy to put up the protocols needed to manage import & quarantine (this is what was done for the bird imports in the 90s, although that operated on an "all in, all out" principle - if one bird got sick or returned a positive blood test, all birds in that stream were destroyed). The cost of the first animals out of the system would be considerable - probably far more than illegally imported animals, which undoubtedly would continue to come in and blend with the legal stuff, as happens with birds... I don't believe that allowing legal imports would slow illegal imports much at all, so disease potential would remain, could even escalate in the short term. Having said that however, I'm not sure what disease threats actually exist - we all assume that do for reptiles as they do for birds, but the bird thing is different - the potential for catastrophic disease outbreaks in birds, especially poultry, is a real threat...
3. OK, so I've got my Panther Chameleons and my Eyelash Vipers out of quarantine, and I've undertaken to import antivenom every 6 months at my own expense in case of accidents (a licence condition...). But my mate, who envies me knows someone who knows someone who will sell him the same animals (his tastes are identical to mine) for a third of the price I paid for my legal animals. My animals are captive bred and pose no threat to wild populations, his were picked up in some market in Thailand, obviously illegally collected wild-caught. The question is - once you open the floodgates, and demand escalates astronomically in the first few years, how do you manage the environmentally sound supply of captive-bred animals to satisfy a very big initial market?
The problem is not just one of what keepers think they want here, it also goes to the (almost impossible) management of the international wildlife trade. How many members here would harshly judge someone they see wearing boots made from the skins of pythons or some unfortunate lizard species? Do they stop to think that killing those animals for the fashion trade is just as damaging for the species as making a live example available for them to keep in their loungeroom? Environmentally, it may as well be dead, and in some cases it would be better off dead.
So, I see a very few, mostly selfish advantages in allowing the market for exotic reptiles to develop more in this country, but there are many more reasons, both domestic and elsewhere, why the status quo with it's self-limiting nature, should remain as it is now.
Jamie