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Were just wondering how many of you have actually checked these programs?
Us Southern African herps tend to feel let down when we find some pedestrian selling indigenous tortoises / reptiles on the side of the road, whilst a law enforcement officer shoots past without a safetybelt, talking on a cellphone & giving a lift to some friends on the way to a mall...we still shrug it off to uneducated law enforcement officers doing it for a payslip & probably some other illegal activities too. Besides from all that, we do have a good couple of people (like most involved on the Forum, THA & other accosiations) that tend to keep things in the green & oppose to habitat & animal destruction. Good on for a considdered Third world country! ( I stay in the DRC & travel a lot around Africa, it could be worse! Imagine being stoned & set alight for accidentaly knocking over a stray cow)
Regardless, one would expect a leading country to have invested a lot more sense & considderation into alowing hunting / collecting seasons to the general public, which is uncontrolled. Due to this I'm a suporter for catch,transit & keeping permits of indigenous animals.
This brought some though to mind. These snakes gets hunted & collected across the country, fortunately not all are killed & used, a percentage will be released back into the wild after the Rattlesnake Festivals are over, right back into the "wild" miles away from their caught habitat.
I attended a very informative talk about evolution in snakes & snake venom once. Snakes & their venom of the same species can addapt to the area they occur in. Example Bitis Arietans in the Southern region has a slightly different venom than that of their cousins appearing in the Northern regions, not a significant difference that they are considdered to a new venom group, but yet there is a change to adaptation for prey & conditions. how ever, it is still considdered natural.
So man has done it again,the fact that these snakes are hunted by the warning sounds they give when approached (proven) has caused the rattlers to become silent, being more dangerous to the general public!
Snakes are released into new areas, so what's the chances of a new cocktail of venom being created when the same species from various areas interbreed?
Snakes adapting to a new area after release.
prey availability versus concentration of snakes released.
The list goes on...
Makes one wonder when you hear the justification when they use words like "deadly menace to society" "cold blooded killers" "keep their numbers in control" "wranglers that risk their lives" "MONEY" on these programs. (I wont comment on how these wranglers represent themselves or their antics)
Will they one day learn from the black footed ferrets that were killed & hunted in the Praire plains, eventualy it costed millions to repopulate the ferets, and keep the praire dogs in check again.
To top it off, a nature program dedicated to wildlife, broadcasts a program that hosts this kind of BS
It seems like history is about to repeat itself.
cheers.
