Word: wildes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...study by the World Chelonian Trust. The turtle traders have not focused on harvesting in Africa or Latin America, largely because transportation logistics and costs are not competitive there, van Dijk says. Dallas-Fort Worth Airport is a major regional shipping point for turtles collected in the wild and harvested on turtle farms in Oklahoma and Louisiana. The turtles are packed in containers and shipped by air to Asia. Customs officials at both ends monitor the shipments, but accurate numbers and reliable records of which species are being exported are not complete, conservationists...
...tortoise and freshwater turtle biodiversity program at Virginia-based Conservation International (CI). Turtle meat is still eaten in parts of rural America and there is a growing domestic market in urban Asian-American communities. The meat also has found its way onto high-dollar menus at fashionable wild game restaurants across the country. But ever since China opened up its economy in 1989, conservationists have become alarmed at that country's insatiable appetite for turtle meat...
...Popplewell, who wants more hard numbers on the effect of wild turtle harvesting, says as a bottom line he could support banning harvesting in public wetlands and waterways - in fact, he urges his co-op members not to collect there and he does not collect certain species of turtle. Four land turtles in Texas are defined by the state as threatened...
...reality that 95% of the land in Texas is in private hands, Wagner says. But even in states with large areas of public land the turtle harvest debate has been contentious - Minnesota has grappled with the issue for over a decade. Other states have banned commercial harvesting of wild turtles -among them Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina and Alabama and just last month, Maryland. But until now, Texas was one of a handful of states that remained wide open...
...establish a turtle-farming industry in China - Popplewell has exported breeding stock from Texas - and a recent study co-authored by van Dijk found about 1000 turtle farms in China. But van Dijk says the farms cannot support the rising demand in a country where incomes are also rising. Wild turtles are still valued by consumers over farm-raised stock and Chinese turtle farmers prefer wild breeding stock. Turtles may be slow movers, but when they escape farms they can pose a breeding and disease threat to already diminished local species...