Ah, the age-old question...which I feel has been beaten to death on this forum and others. It was not my intention to bring it up, but I suppose it's inevitably linked. My intention was to corroborate what Mike had to say and bring attention the person's dishonesty about the origins of the native animals and their disregard for wild populations.
It's totally up to your conscience, Cataldo, whether you choose to support such activities financially or not, just as it is up to the rest of us. If you're buying wild-caught newts (and we all have at some point), then let's not kid ourselves, we are directly contributing to their demise in the wild. We all have to rationalize that to ourselves at some point. If you're personally ok with it, then fine. I used to feel ok with it, but I no longer do. That is just my personal opinion, and I'm sure it is not shared by many here.
But don't get me wrong, I like to keep newts and sals just like anyone else here and they all originated from the wild at some point. So let me clarify: I'm not anti-collecting, I'm anti-
commercial collecting. There's a huge difference in my opinion between a person going out and responsibly collecting a series of larvae or adults in the wild (as in 4-8 individuals) for themselves and a person collecting as much as they possibly can for profit to the highest bidder. Likewise, we do rare and threatened animals like Tylototriton an immense injustice by attaching such gaudy price tags to them. All that does is ensure a continuing market for mass collection of wild adults.
As for selling captive bred offspring, it's certainly preferable to selling wc. Still, it has its problems as well. The higher the price you offer for your cb, the more lucrative it is to simply poach wild populations instead. In a perfect world, we'd take the profit out of it and simply give offspring away to people we know would take good care of them and keep the captive population going. But this world is far from perfect eh? It sure seems that most people would
much rather sell captive bred than
*gasp* give them away. Always makes me wonder where their motives truly lie to begin with. But I'm just an extremist I suppose...
So to summarize for a confused reader such as yourself Cataldo, I'm appealing to all those people who claim to have any interests in caudate conservation to at the very
least, don't buy from a person as blatantly environmentally unfriendly as this guy.
These are simply opinions on my part, now unleash the hounds and let the harsh rebuttals begin!
