Reptile Fight Club - Is Reptile Keeping a Right or Privilege? w/ Ryan Dumas

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

In this episode we catch up with Ryan Dumas to discuss the question, Is Reptile Keeping a Right or Privilege?Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

Hi, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. I'm Justin Newlander, and with me, as always, Mr. Rob Stone, how are you doing? Wave to the people. Blow them kisses. Oh, them kisses. Yeah, all good. Nice. You enjoying Snake Week?

um i've seen that some of that stuff's going on and it looks pretty good i know uh what pingle just had kind of became aware of it because the pingle pod there was a show titled snake week talking about some of the various festivities and things i suppose in the year of the snake it's all the more compelling um which is good glad people are you know all the public facing stuff is probably good um i haven't dove in too much i've been busy researching uh for our september adventure misadventure lots of thoughts and ideas and things so that was really good Dustin sent me something that was super interesting oh yeah I need to watch that I've got that on my radar but yeah yeah so hopefully in well what would it be so in three months we'll have people can tune in more details to come

there's no reason to talk further on it it's very right very tough so we'll see what we'll be Yeah, it'll be an adventure regardless of what we find. Absolutely true. That is absolutely true. All right. Well, tonight we've got Ryan DeMoss back on the show. I'm glad to have you here. Thanks for coming.

How are you doing? I'm doing well. Good to see you guys. It's been a while, but always happy to chat and argue. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Ryan's got some great ideas. So nice of him to suggest a few and come on to discuss one tonight. So glad to have you.

Yeah, I just listened to Rick Schein on the snake days or snake week or whatever, and he gave a talk on snake conservation in Australia. It was really interesting. Talked about a few projects that they're working on. I was unaware that sea snakes are declining, like, at an alarming rate throughout the world. And he kind of alluded to the fact that they're still stable populations in kind of a Goldilocks zone, where it's not completely bleached out and destroyed. You know, the coral reefs are still stable,

but there also is enough fishing that it's keeping the predatory fish from eating the snakes. I guess that's the big problem with them is these predatory fish just eat them like candy. So they found this out by moving these snake-shaped lures through the water and the fish just annihilate them every time. It's pretty crazy. So I guess if you're trying to fish some cool,

stuff out on the coral reef maybe use a local sea snake patterned snake lure and you'll catch lots of good fish so yeah it was pretty crazy showed a few videos of that occurring and then the other really crazy thing they they genetically modified cane toads to be less toxic and also to be lighter in color or albino so they they showed that they could you know change the genes or whatever showed using the albino deletion I guess of that gene and then So they're releasing all these, you know, less toxic cane toads is kind of teacher toads. So the goannas or whatever, I'll taste them and be like, okay, that's bad. I don't want to, that made me sick.

I'm not going to eat that again, you know, so they learn. So they have a second chance at life rather than just one bite and you're dead. So kind of cool. But he said, yeah, at first the Australians were like, what are you kidding me? You're going to release tens of thousands of toads into the environment. I thought we'd been doing all this effort to try to remove them, not to add more. And he's like, well, here's what we're trying to do, you know, and showed all this data about how it works and how the Aboriginal communities are buying into it and stuff.

So cool stuff. Really great talks. Yeah, I think they're going to put them on YouTube. So check them out. I think Emily Taylor is one of the organizers of the event. So, yeah, good stuff. I don't know. Got my last clutch out of the incubator.

had some more baby ear pygmy pythons hatch out so happy to have some more of those to pull my hair out for and you know pretty soon i'll be very bald but they can be frustrating i had them i brought them one season one breeding season for them was was enough for me yeah yeah that was a lot a lot more work than i had thought and i've got big not very dexterous not a finesse guy and i think you need to be a finesse guy for those guys. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think you just have to stay on top of them. That's been my problem in the past as I like to go herp and, you know, right during

hatchling season. And so I'll feed them, you'll start assist feeding them, get their metabolism ramped up, and then I'll leave on a trip and then I'll come home and they'll be like, you know, uh-oh, that's not good. So I just need to hurt less, but that's not great either. Or train somebody. That didn't sound right. Right.

Yeah. Well, I made a snake day post today with snakes. I was trying to do like a little grid, you know, picture and had to make four of them from all the cool species I've seen this within the last year. It's been a good couple of years of herping for sure. So, yep. Well, I don't know. What else? I had a little water polo tournament this last weekend, so that was pretty fun and played some water polo out in a lake, which was a little. little different than, you know, I'm used to, but it was a good time and got some nice sunburns and all that good stuff. But, yeah, good times. All right. Well, what's going on in your worlds? Anything exciting happening? I assume you were talking to Rob. Oh, both of you.

Either one. Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Rob. Yeah, nothing, really, other than the or the research angle. That's very much where my head's at right now. Didn't you redo a bunch of your Barrens? Or not Barons. Yeah. Not Barrens. Easy, buddy.

I realize my mistake very quickly. Yeah, I know I had read on the leaf litter on the setups that I've done for pairs of rhinos. And yeah, it just couldn't be happier with them. I put the Universal Rock background in there. Probably what I set those up, maybe 15, 16 months ago, put in a drainage layer in soil and things, have a hidden level of cork bark, have some bamboo holes to give them some verticality,

fill that space, have the luminized bulbs on there, which are cool. Yeah, I mean, they make use essentially the whole thing. With the kind of the structure of the cage, they can hang just off underneath the screen tops, or they can be hanging off the universal rock onto the bamboo. So that effective, right, I mean, either it was one of the one, We were talking on the podcast last week or a podcast that I've listened to, right, a big part of the discussion is always sort of the utility of space in cages and whether we're actually, right, we have this construction in our mind that often then is sort of

we're only utilizing a third of the cage, something like that. And there's this giant empty space that maybe helps with the visualization. I don't know. Maybe it doesn't. But that's sort of a classic cage design or cage utility problem. Right. It's nice to have something where they're not the largest cages. They're the largest cages that would fit relative to the task that I had at hand.

But the fact that they have utility out of essentially all of it, I think really has proven they worked really well in terms of having to gather, I feed them together without issue. Nice. Do you have any issues retrieving eggs or anything like that? Are they burying them deep or is it pretty easy? Yeah. And so I had last season and then this, you know, the eggs from this season as well. And in all the instances, they've either laid them, basically they always lay them underneath that slab of cork park that's, you know, semi-submerged into the soil. It's so dry here that it's difficult to have, you know, that even with the drainage layer to have sort of the right, perfect balance of moisture in the soil.

And in the same way that you described, right? I think this year, four out of the six clutches that I had gotten, I was gone. on one of them Brendan was here to take them out but I don't know if they'd already been there a day or two or whatever so I still need to work on my moisture ratio ratio when I'm anticipating those

make sure that's a priority thing but yeah no that hasn't been a problem at all it doesn't seem like they're super eager to dig they'll utilize access to those underground features and things and it has been super fascinating shifting from Iraq to see like there's definitely one

that just loves to sit elevate you sit on that bamboo elevated all the time that's its reference there are others that essentially never do it but for the most part i see a seasonal shift you know either both within a day and across the year where you know they typically in the in the winter they're going to be for the most part underground and then they'll come out and bask in the middle part of the day whereas in the summer it's the inversion right so that they're they're typically hidden away during the day and then at night they're out cruising around and all posted up and things and it is super interesting relative to the idea of at some point here I'm going to make it work to go either

Tamdao or capa to try and go see him like well I now have many more I just by keeping them now for going on 24 years just the last six you know 18 months 16 months whatever it's been in these cages has taught me a lot more about what I could use in the field in terms of anticipation relative to temperatures and things like that very cool well yeah that sounds sounds like a fun project, but a little bit of headache. I always dread kind of redoing enclosures or, you know, cleaning out when they're like. This was mostly, and I would say that it's been, yeah, that's part of the joy of this, right? Other than sort of, shoot, what's the phrase for just sort of localized picking up the poop, you know, that sort of that sort of deal.

Other than that, yeah, spot cleaning, exactly. But other than that, they've been, this was the first time I was really kind of getting into remixing the soil and that sort of stuff. I do have five more cages to set up. It'll be more in the vein that you're talking about, a process-based thing. It'll be some work for sure. Yeah. Cool. How about you?

Ryan, how's your season going? You got some fun projects going? I've always got something going on. Oh, yeah. I think I really have like kind of slowed down on my Python reproduction. I still have Rockhampton Coastals and some rough scales. And I didn't not prep them at all for breeding last year or the previous year as I was going through my new job and stuff. I just didn't want to allocate time.

So this is the first year. I've really gotten back with snakes. And I have a couple clutches of like my favorite snakes, possibly. It's the Okotie Hunt Club locality corn snakes. So I've got a couple, they could hatch any day now, actually. So we'll see. I just, maybe the most beautiful American snake. Just gorgeous.

But I've always got turtle stuff going on. I just picked up three new eggs. Today, I happen to go outside and see her digging, trying to cover it up real nonchalantly. And, you know, you can't stare at them. Oh, sorry, this is a Florida box turtle. Okay. Cool. No, you don't want to stare at them because you don't want to spook them.

So you just like side eye them while you're walking by. And then I feel bad because she spent so much time like covering up and patting them down just right. And I looted her way with a pink mouse and then just stole all their babies. Yeah. But it's nuts. Box turtles are crazy. Like you can incubate for females and they can hatch. And I mean, I hatched them in 42 days.

What? Wow. Yeah. And Jordan Danini does a lot of stuff with them in the wild down in Southwest Florida. Florida. I mean, he's had him hatching like 30-something days in C2. It's a while. But now I'm, I'm in the long haul for males. So I stuck them up on top of a cage. And it's going to be room temperature. We'll see how long it takes because, man, I hatching them fast is always that urge is right there. So it's always better to have a few more females. But yeah, I've got those, got a few Holmes Hinchback tortoise eggs cooking. Oh, cool. Um, and should, I wouldn't be surprised to see more eggs from them soon. Nice. Uh, waiting for pancake tortoises to lay eggs.

I had them, I had one drop three eggs, which is ridiculous for a pan. I mean, they're like one egg at a time, maybe two. She must have held one in for a while. So it had to feel good to get those out, but none of them were fertile. Uh, she's any, I mean, I, her weight is up. She should be hammering eggs, but, um, yeah, I mean, for the most part, And I have a trio of crested geckos that are, I loved them. When I was an intern at the Cincinnati Zoo, this is back in, like, 2001, it was like before

crested geckos got as popular as they are now. Right. And they just had regular, like, tanish, beigeish crested geckos. And I love those things. So I had an opportunity to get some like four years ago. And I got a trio and they're just constantly spitting out babies. I just keep them together. I don't pull eggs.

Right. Just occasionally some random ones show up. So I've always got some of those. I try to give them away because I only have one or two at a time. But, yeah, so I'm still in the game. All right. I'm just a lot quieter about it. I can't see myself ever not having reptiles in the garage.

I know. I'm the same way. I probably should slim down my collection a lot more. But, you know, it's always something, I guess. I don't know. It's tough. Yeah. It's tough.

I slim down a lot. And they were not fun decisions. Right. Right, right. Man, yeah. Questions for you then on the box turtle incubation. I had no idea that there's sort of the short end on that, at least at the female temperatures. So in the context of leopard geckos, right, there was so many offspring and so much time put into figuring it out.

And they figured out in incubation what date the sex is established or determined or overwritten. So I bring it up, right? And so in the leopard gecko context, I think it was set at 18 or 19 days after. they're laid. And so what they started doing, because there were so many color and pattern meets, all these sort of add-on factors was both a timeliness thing and because they tend, offspring that were incubated at warmer temperatures tended to be brighter and more colorful and have cleaner patterns that essentially they would leave them at the desired temperature for the window of time to establish the gender. And then they would incubate them warmer so

they would look as good as they possibly could. And it all, Also, it raises a question, like, whether do they come out more vigorous, less vigorous, the longer that they incubate? Is there, like, knock on advantages in terms of that, or in the context of box turtles? Because that's, you know, obviously other factors beyond just, are they more or less colorful, all these different things? But I'm curious. Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I've heard of that before. And I think it's both cool and crazy.

Like, yeah, we need to hash this stuff out quick. I don't care. Like, I don't know if that's been studied in Florida box turtles. I think that it would be studied a lot more often in something that is as marketable as leopard geckos. I'm sure that Crescent geckos, if they are, TSD, have probably had it figured out and things like that. I don't think they are, right? I think is the- I don't think they are, but I don't know.

I honestly don't know. I just assume geckos. I know, like, leachies are, I thought. Yeah. But I guess they're different now, right? they're not the same genus anymore. I've been kept up with my racadactylists. Yeah, but it's wild.

I don't know. I don't know. I think that would be worth, I think it's probably similar for most turtles if you find out. But yeah, I would be interested to find out. Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe I would hatch some males a little faster. I don't know. If you knew you'd set them, and then you could, You know. Yeah. I didn't know that was a thing. That's crazy. It's really cool. There's also something about having like a long-term incubation because you always have a, like, I feel the most empty in my reptile collection when there are no eggs. Like when there's nothing to look forward to except for just like feeding and cleaning. Yeah. The turtles give you a little more, I think, than a lot of snakes. There's a lot of sass and personality with a lot of them, but knowing I've got like 40 days for some female box turtles that have.

hatch out and knowing that I have like who I don't even know how long it takes for males because I have never found I rarely find turtle eggs on the day they're late it's just like something looks disturbed in here I need to dig through this stuff and then I have to take them out and it's like a it's a hassle but it's fine but whilst this this particular clutch I mean I should find out roughly how long males take and I'm sure we we know somewhere but yeah okay yeah that'll be super interesting deep like yeah so just no idea or you think it's doubled up or I really don't know. I've always, well, I've incubated my Florida box turtles, usually at like 84,

but that's before I knew anything. And I guess you can get a little bit of both sexes, but most likely males. But I had one. And then I talked to Jordan, and he was like, females hatch out sometimes as fast as 30-something days. I was like, get out of town. I'm going to incubate my box turtles in my Python temperatures. And I'll be damned 42 days later. They popped out.

I mean, they pipped at 41, but they came. out 42 days. And then last year, I had put my box turtles outside. It's like Mother's Day. I put the box turtles outside. And I think in like the first week of July, I found a baby box turtle in their indoor set up because I just, I didn't go through their soil because they weren't in there. I mean, I didn't miss it. I didn't do anything. Wow. And still, I saw a little turtle walking around. I was like, holy crap, you got to be kidding. Yeah. So I know that one was in there because it happened. a long time but right do you know like when they're laid are they kind of advanced through their progression to some extent already or do you know what like stage they're they're laid at

or i know pythons you know are already you know some some of the way through development so you know keeping the female at the you know higher temperatures or reasonable temperatures for for whatever species is very important and you know because they're already like stage what 40 or something I I forget the specifics there but you know fairly uh I mean if you open an egg you're going to see like a little worm thing it's not like some huge snake but you know like they're they're not a they're not a one cell you know two cell yeah yeah yeah I would not be surprised um I've never thought of that but that's a great question And it reminds me, I don't know if you've ever read about the bowsprit tortoises in South Africa.

They have facultative of a vivipery where they'll just, at certain environmental conditions, they will just withhold their eggs and incubate them inside and delay them and they'll hatch a few days later. Wow. That's unreal. Absolutely unreal. Like a response to climate change, I guess. I don't know. So because I know that that has been kind of like shown that I wouldn't doubt it. Maybe that is a thing. Right.

Yeah. Right. It's a great question. Depending on where they live or whatever. I wish we could figure out what's going on. I mean, it seems like the Bospirit tortoises are fairly common in some of their areas where they're found in the wild. But it just seems like they're not very well produced in captivity. Am I wrong? I don't keep up with the tortoise turtle area.

As far as I know, I've really, since I've gotten my new job, I'm really hyper-focused on the ones that I keep. But I know the South African tortoises don't get. exported much, if at all. So that could be, there could be a bottleneck there, genetic bottleneck on that side. But yeah, I don't think they're produced that often. They are pretty little tortoises. They're beautiful. I see some of those parrot beak tortoises.

And I'm like, well, I'm fine with it. I mean, there seems to be plenty of them in situ. So that makes me feel good. So I don't get there. But yeah, some of them are really crazy looking. Yeah. Yeah. That's a birdie tortoise.

bucket list to go hurt. there you know that'd be cool just i mean just for the tortoise diversity south africa would be incredible yeah do you follow um what's the guy's name tyrone ping yeah golly he posted great stuff he finds everything i love all the horridors and like the uh yeah oh shoot like the girdle lizards and stuff that he posts good lord those weird uh sand lizards what are they they look like three lizards smushed into one like they have like stripes and then they're unbanded and then have a bright red tail or something. I can't remember the species name on the really cool looking.

Yeah. Yeah, he makes me want to go to South Africa. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If I could go herp with that guy, that'd be really cool too. No doubt. They have some of those videos where he's like, this is a neighborhood. And he's like, he turns to the right and there's this tiny little like 500 square foot plot of like greenery. And he's like, this is where we're going.

And it's like, it's like, it's like, chameleon, chameleon, chameleon. And it's like, golly, that must be. you know, we're used to some things here, but it's got to be insane to just turn off a street and be like, all right, we're going to look here for some chameleons and then just snag them. I think you can do that in Florida. You're probably right, yeah. As long as you don't go to the wrong place because I hear you get shot in some of those areas, too. In Florida, probably.

Be careful in Florida, Florida, man. Yep. Yeah, it's, I don't know. There's a lot of cool places out there. I think I'd like to herp. And hopefully I'll live long enough to do all, check out, check off all the places on my bucket list. But, yeah. It's good to have goals.

It sure is. And it's unfortunate that Australia is so cool and has so many cool things that I just keep going back there. But one of these days, I'll branch out a little. Ah, you like what you like, man. Yeah, it's true. And I still have quite a few things I need to find there, too, that are high up on my list that just seem to evade me. You know, it's the way it goes. All right. Well, today we're going to talk a fight about a topic in regards to reptile keeping and whether or not it's a right or a privilege.

So, yeah, let's dive in here. We'll get a couple coin tosses going. Rob, you want to call the first one there? Heads. Heads. It is tails. Let's see. I'll go ahead if that's all right. Yeah, I'll get. Happy to moderate. Brian, all right. Sounds good. And go ahead with the second one there.

Oh, me. Let's go heads. Heads. Tails again. Man, I'm a double-owner. I'm just taking your word for it. Yeah. Well, you know, I try to be honest. I do my best.

Let's go with, it's my right to keep reptiles. I'm going to take that side. I'm a proud American. I can do whatever I want. That's a good one. Yeah. Well, maybe I guess. Maybe as a moderation before we even get into this, right?

We can talk about sort of from the legal perspective, what's a right versus a privilege. So in terms of rights, generally speaking, right, we're talking about legal or moral entitlements with people, you know, have by right of being humans. And that's basically kind of the space we're in where I talking about it. So maybe throw out an idea for you, Justin. And, you know, I think historically, we've probably people have been too willing to concede things that are higher level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs in terms of, you know, as we walk through that, they're probably a little bit too willing to cede those as privileges. So privileges, contraryly, right, are benefits or advantages that are afforded based on social class status sort of. position within society, things of that nature. And those then are more reflective of sort of grants from people of in power or authority,

which is a general construction from a legal perspective to give us that moderated content. Yeah, no, that's very helpful. Although maybe have lost me at Laslo. What was his name? Maslow. Maslow hierarchy. I don't know if I'm familiar with that. Yeah, so it's like a five-step that walks through basically going from your physiological requirements up to self-actuality.

So kind of there's a progressive step through there. And, you know, the sort of social view historically has concentrated on sort of the physiological restraints and security that are the basis of the pyramid of needs. Or as I say, so it escalates to what is it? love and belonging, esteem, and then self-actualization. So I would say, you know, certainly it could be in a space where, you know, someone is a little bit more, as you say, you know, this is my right, then you should be fully on board with the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and say that, you know, my right to self-actualization, you know, should define my position here.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we can necessarily help that we're born just to love these things, You know what I mean? Like, we're just drawn to them. And if we don't get that, fill that need, we'll just be an empty hollow shell of a human, you know? So I think Maslow is on my side here. I think he wants us to have those reptiles. Yeah, I think he's dead, right?

If he's so smart. Yeah. Right. Figure that one out, Maslow. It didn't save you from dying, did it, buddy? That was his right to die. Right. There you go.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I would also say, you know, if we're so, you know, hell bent on the right to bear arms and keep guns, I think, you know, snakes are a small concession in that regard or any reptile for that matter. But, you know, I don't know. Maybe that's the way I'm starting this out. Just give me reptiles or give me death. wow you do love these gings

yeah it's a tough one yeah I mean there's there's legitimate and understandable arguments on on either side

of what you're doing but I mean you know it's a lot of these a lot of the things are different for animals I would I guess I would ask if it's a right

like I think owning a dog is a right um dogs are you know they are beholden to welfare laws and humane ethical laws sure if it's your right to keep reptiles is that something that you think reptiles should should have as well should they should keeping reptiles should that animal cruelty adhere and welfare standards that he adhere to that yeah i mean obviously yes i would say that that's very important but also um i think to I mean, you know, you have a chance to have that right taken away if your behavior or you're, the way you're doing it is not in line with, say, ethics or animal welfare or things like that.

If you're just out there keeping, you know, just churning them out as a puppy mill for lack of a better way to say that. And you're just dumping them, you know, throwing them in the freezer if you can't sell them or something. you know, yeah, you're not doing it right. And so I think you lose that right to keep once you cross that line. Does that make sense? I think you should lose that right if that's the kind of ethics that you be on. But I don't think there's any laws against that in most states, at least. Now, I'm making some claims because I'm not looking up the legal foundations of, you know, animal welfare for all these things.

but uh well i i know there's well we're i think rob got an animal welfare call him once for making a statement on a podcast once and then oh wow somebody sent the authorities over to check well i think they were considering it and that was based on someone else's description of something that happened in australia so yeah i mean it's sort totally wild i would the thing that jumps to my mind when we have that conversation is it's only relatively recently that some laws have explicitly included herbs as animals within their meaning, right? So the sort of pet welfare act in Colorado until, I don't know, the last 10 or 12 years, within the meaning of animal, reptiles weren't within the meaning of animal within the language of the legislation.

Yeah. So, you know, I guess that might not necessarily end your right legally, you know, but I think if we're in a, and sometimes that's a hard call to make, right? What crosses the line and what doesn't, you know, I think there's plenty of dirt bags that persist in our hobby that are not keeping ethically or at high standard that the animal. deserve. And, you know, I think everybody may fall into that at some point, too, because, like, you know, you have a bad week or you're, you know, you're out herping and you're neglecting your reptiles. Does that mean you should lose them all? Or, you know, are you just trying to increase your knowledge of reptiles to keep them better? So it's a, it is a fine line. And, you know, one person's interpret, I guess that's the idea of bringing that example up is one person's interpretation or idea of animal welfare and broad applications of that may not match another persons and so yeah that can be shaky ground I guess yeah I mean you're hitting the nail

on the head there it's all in how you interpret it you know are you talking about specifically exotic wildlife versus native wildlife native wildlife belongs to the states or at least in Ohio all the wildlife in Ohio belongs to the state of Ohio um therefore is it really your right to own that animal is it i mean we we allow it to a certain extent but um i think more along if you read through it it's more of a um like a special privilege it is i think you know and i think it's a privilege a lot of times to keep reptiles i don't it's like a special honor i don't think we're owed the right to to to to to keep reptiles, to keep any animals, really.

I don't think we're owed that right. Again, I'm arguing my side. Sure, sure. I know you're not necessarily owed that right. I think it's something that, you know, you can do. There should be, I think you have a right to pursue it. But I think that the right to just keep whatever you want, however you want, I just don't think morally and ethically that that is the right way to approach keeping animals.

I think that there's a better way to do so. And just like I think it's our, it's a right to pursue getting a driver's license. Sure. You know, but it's a privilege to drive. Okay. You have to,

there are safety standards. There are ethical standards. There are, um, laws of the road and yeah, you have to follow those things. You've done some studying. You've taken some tests.

You've done. demonstrated that you are minimally competent. And I grew up in Kentucky, so you definitely are minimally competent to drive a vehicle, you know, a several tonne vehicle with people around in children and neighborhoods. So I don't think that's a very high threshold. But driving is not a right. And I think that same type of messaging applies towards keeping reptiles. And I would like to see more states actually apply reptiles as animals.

that that doesn't mean I want to see what has happened what happened with birds necessarily with the Welfare Act that was proposed like from the congressperson a year or two ago in Minnesota but I'm not opposed to the idea I just I'm opposed to copying and pasting without you know without scientific or without expertise to guide that path yeah I think that's it can be very problematic too when you have people defining, you know, who can do this and who can't do this or what, you know, what can be done. I guess I'll use a Utah example, right? The Gila Monster, okay? So they, they just, their northern extent of their range just dips into the southwest portion of Utah. And since they're native, we're not allowed to keep them. But you go over to Colorado and Rob State and, you know, they can keep them all day long.

So, and they have Utah hila monsters that are captive bread and born and produced and sold in captivity. So I would love to keep a hila monster, but because I live in Utah, it is not my right to do so, you know. But at the same time, they'll go down there and pave over hila monster habitat all day long, displacing or killing, you know, helo monsters in the act. And so, you know, where does their right to live and my right to keep them, you know, in the case of, say, building a Walmart or something over their habitat, you know, why is it not my right to go in there and kind of save them from that destruction, save, put, give them a nice home in my living room, you know, or whatever and, and keep them. I think they have done a little bit of that with the desert tortoises, same, same situation, right? They just kind of pop up into Utah just a little bit, and there have been some, you know, where they're placing disturbed or what, displaced tortoises with people who can properly house them. You have to meet certain qualifications and minimal standards to keep them, but, you know, there is that opportunity. there is that right to keep them if you can meet those standards.

So I, and again, it is kind of a, I guess that there is a fine line between right and privilege there because, you know, if you're following rules, I still think it could fall in within the right side of the argument, you know, because, you know, if you give up those rights, then you don't have them anymore, you know. then you're unprivileged to keep them or disprivileged or whatever the word is. But I think there should be that right should be there regardless of the hoops you have to jump through to have that right. Does that make sense? I don't think anything should be forbidden, I guess, is my point.

If you want to keep a saltwater crocodile, I think you should. have the right, but I also think you should have a lot of barriers in place so it's not just a willingly decision. Oh, I saw this on, you know, the crock hunter. I'm going to go get a saltwater crocodile and keep it in my, you know, bathtub until it gets too big. And then I'll worry about it from there, you know, like those kind of... And I'll call the zoo. Yeah, I'll just dump it at the zoo. And they'll be fine with that. Or I'll just release it in my neighborhood pond. And that'll be fine. What could go wrong? So, you know, I think there should be an avenue to do just about anything you want.

Maybe that's like a libertarian view, but I think you're right on. You can meet the minimum standards. You should be able to have that right to do so. I think having the right to a pathway to do something is important. And I think there's two definitions of like really a right as well. There's like, it's my right as a cold-blooded American or, I said cold-blooded because, you know, context. We're reptiles. Yeah.

Yeah, and then there's rights that are enforceable by law. And that's one of the things that I do like that U.S. Arc does is, you know, they fight for these enforceable laws that are written and documented into code. And that's what they focus on. And that's, that's good. It's not like, it's my right to do whatever the hell I want. I want to touch back on the Gila monster thing for a second because based on the. information I have, your state is failing you to that animal should probably be listed as a state endangered species at a minimum. And there should be a lot more work to go through in order to

develop on those lands, at least have some sort of remediation. Not that that always works, but some sort of remediation to compensate for any losses to habitat. That's usually pretty common in a lot of places that if that's not happening, that blows. Well, yeah, to be fair, Like they have set aside and a great lot of land and very nice habitat that Rob and I have both herped extensively with great success, you know, finding a couple of Gila monsters and several desert tortoises and all sorts of other cool wildlife. So, you know, they did set aside a lot of land. But, you know, sometimes you run into those like things like that happens in Florida with the gopher tortoises where fine is easily coverable and it's it's not. worth the headache of stopping construction, just pave over it or kill it with cement and move on and pay the fine, you know, if you get caught. Florida is a train wreck. No, right, yeah.

So, and I think that's where you run into problems with like, if the punishment doesn't match the crime, which, you know, paving over, just entoming a live gopher tortoise in cement should be punishable by removal of fingernails or at least, you know. right yeah what would nick say exactly yeah those are horrible i i hate reading that and i hate the uh like oh well there's that company that was out a while ago i can't remember the name of them but they were like they were developed company but they were they set aside like a thousand acres put all so they could put all of their um tortoises geez what go for tortoise oh my gosh i'm supposed to be a turtle guy, but to put all their gopher tortoises in this one spot, but the density

of tortoises was immense. And it was really just a ploy to help them get some more development done. And there's a lot of that crap out there. And it does provide a lot of gray areas. But yeah, I mean, some of the stuff you touched on makes a lot of sense. I do think that there's a pathway. But, and I think a pathway to reach some of your goals is it should always be open for debate or discussion but where I feel the worst is you go to a reptile show and

you just go ahead and buy that saltwater crocodile. Right. Or you go buy that black mamba. And when it's really bad, is when those species have, well, some very specific needs and those specific needs are a

shit ton of space and requirements and they also pose a danger an immediate danger to lead general public. I feel like that's a animal that it should be more of a privilege than a right to own that animal. I think if you have a pathway to prove your competency at a minimal level, I'm not saying that people need to register their animals in the past a 100 question exam and cite their

sources. That's ludicrous. But like there has to be, if there's going to be a pathway, has to be accessible, achievable by a competent person, but we just can't keep selling these things to folks. Yeah. And I think, you know, that is not a right. Sorry, if you're infringing on other people's rights when you do that.

Exactly. And I think that kind of goes along with, you know, enforceability. Like if they make all these laws that allow people a pathway to keep a, you know, a tiger or a saltwater crocodile or something, then they also have to enforce that. And there just may not be the resources to do so. So it's much easier just to prohibit, you know. Frequently that happens.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Most states probably prohibit a lot of these things or cities or counties or, you know, depending on where you live. I know Utah, we can't keep any venomous, no crocodilians, you know, even though some crocodilians might not fall under that, dangerously large and meeting you know but they don't want to go through it no you got baby crocodilians they don't need someone saying that's a cuvier's store for right or a nile they're just gonna yeah yeah yeah and i mean that's what happened fairly recently like two or three years ago in um for the federal

listing of the megacophilic grapt hemis like the big map turtles yeah where you have the pearl river map turtle that's an endangered species a pascagulose petition to be listed and then they just through all the big-headed graptemies on there for similarity of appearance. So they're all, all the species are protected as well as, well, I don't know if all those species

habitat is protected. The Pearl River is protected because there's a number of species, at least for now. Right. Let's see if that changes, but and that is something that makes, you know, it makes sense on one side, but it doesn't on the other.

You know what I mean? But as a casual observer, You're like, come on, I can tell the difference between a barber's map turtle and this past Gula map turtle. But when you have a wildlife law enforcement officer in the field and they see you with a bushel of turtles and you've got, you know, two barber's map turtles and, you know, a bunch of the endangered ones is it really fair to train everybody to be able to identify when they're also trying to identify between butterflies and grasshoppers and. you know birds and all and fish and all the other wildlife that is out there so they they have a tough task and there's that side of it that slows things down for sure yeah i i think if if places can make common sense laws you know like that that's the best case scenario and i i think utah has progressed a bit um they've they used to have a lot of things that were on the no you know

no go zone and and uh one example of that is the California king snake, similar to the desert tortoise and the Gila monsters. Cal Kings make a brief entry into Utah down in southwest corner and, well, I guess they range over into the east as well, bottom, bottom portion of Utah, but very, you know, south part of Utah. And they're very hard to find in the eastern part of their range as well. 5% of the state, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, you know, they're, but they're in every pet shop and and but they were prohibited to keep california king snakes but you could go to your local pet shop and buy one you know it's like no big deal so having them be prohibited was kind of ridiculous because you know

what are you going to make all these criminals of people going into pet smart and buying a cal king so you know other other ways they finally kind of relented and said okay that's that's right we don't want to make criminals of children you know and they also changed it so you could get a permit to collect Cal Kings in Southwestern, you know, part of the state where they're reasonably, you know, stable populations and easy to find. And so, you know, that's, that's been introduced into the regulations in the state. And now you can keep a cow king and not get arrested. Well, that's excellent. It's surprising. Yeah. Yeah. Part of that was taking advantage of citizen science, though, right? In the sense that you have to, for it to be legal, you know,

to get that protection, you have to, is within a day or two, you have to submit the record of where you got it, what you took, all those different. So there are different, actually, you know, it's more like a managed game system. It's non-game animals, but sort of a managed game application in Utah. Yeah, I totally agree, right? So much, so much progress from, what was that, 2019, 2020? Yeah. And, you know, again, like in, in regards to that, it kind of introduces a conundrum because people from outside the state can come in Utah, and there's no enforcement for them, you know, like, you don't know how many they have at home because you can't go check out their collection or something, you know, because they're in another state.

And so being enforcing those things, you can only enforce it with folks that live in your state. And so, you know, where you have the capacity to do so, right? Exactly. And Colorado, that's been a huge issue with people. There's a particularly well-known hog-nosed spot that the logistics are from. And, you know, it's everybody's common. holiday to go out to this spot and you know grabbing it they're still out there i you know only when i was going back through my pictures did i look and see like oh yeah that was a header

zygus one um because they're like a fire type lecistic so you i was looking at oh there's no black on this thing oh there you get so they're they're still around and about but yeah a few and far between but people are coming and as you say justin you know they're not uh you know in nebraska or kansas or what they don't have that same uh prohibition citizens of those states to come or to access or wherever, you know, literally anywhere that isn't here, sort of the law doesn't apply as long as they're not caught in hand in the field, you know? Right. And yeah, I guess the fact that there are Utah Hila Monsters for sale in the hobby, you know, just not in Utah is kind of ironic, I guess. If they're protected in Utah,

and I, you know, I don't recall a time when they weren't protected or prohibited from keeping in Utah, how are there Utah hila monsters in the hobby, I guess? Well, I think some of that, right, it depends because it goes, we get sort of an Australia question, right? So as much as it's, well, they've been, had some level of protection, was there ever an arrangement by which a licensed facility was given, you know, either given some or they had received a communication or whatever, but still had that sort of lineage associated with him. He was born as then, you know, and, you know, the first name that springs to mind when we're talking about those because he's, what, six or seven generations deep on Utah Eilas that are out of. I think probably that context of, like, they definitely originated in a facility that had them. I don't know if it was confiscation or what that it put them there in the first place. But, you know, it's even six or seven generations later, well, here was the paperwork that came with those initial.

And I mean, now they're so while, he selectively bred those things so that, you know, the ones that are least expensive are the ones that are the sort that look like what we've seen, you know, whereas these other ones have, or truly, you know, designer. heel monsters. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also lots of liars out there. I mean, this person sounds like their document. I'm not talking about this person, but it's like if someone hatches a healer or finds a hila and it looks like something, like think about Okitee corn snakes.

There's there's an Okotie mutation because it has the appearance of an Okitee. You just call it an Okitee. But it's Okotie for my experiences is a locality, specific animal from Jasper County, Carolina so you see some you're like oh that's a Utah that's a Utah heila yeah add $200 what do they look like just over the border in Nevada or Arizona you know like right probably going to look very similar yeah but the location is so small in Utah so you know that's a rare species right right yeah you're going to want that one maybe you already have that same locality on the Nevada side but you're like oh Utah

Yeah, you got to label a Utah or else nobody wanted, right? We're all hoarders to some degree with this stuff, so we've got to get that one, too. Yeah. Sorry, Rob Wood, do you want to say that? So, yeah. No, yeah, and I was just saying, I think part of that, too, might be, I don't know if there's sort of the legal background to make a gray-listed animal from those other places, right? So Utah, there definitely is a historic, you know, in the Australia's sense of, well, as much as Australians might like to say, None have come out legally or huge in the context.

They've been protected my whole life, you know, and whatever. I can't imagine, you know, anything violated of that. I don't know that I've ever seen someone marketing like, yeah, I mean, again, so their range is small, you know, in all those places. And I don't know that I've ever notably seen because the, so the helis should be, you know, those Utah helis should be from the same spot that we saw, or my first spec, you know, out of right below, well, east of. Vegas and whatever, like that should be, I don't think I've ever seen those, at least marked as such, right? So it's not as much benefit or the utility of saying Utah while also being land dirty sodas and all that is, you know, it ties it into something that's acceptable, whereas

if you were to say, oh, this is my Clark County, Nevada, Gila, that probably raises a bunch of questions of like, oh, well, I'm familiar with Washington County, Utah. You know, that that's a thing that ties into stuff that I know I've seen. So maybe that's a great, you know, in that gray area. If you said Clark County, Nevada, Heala, you're inviting questions. Right. The way is the unrelated rough scale pythons. Oh, you know, these are unrelated rough scale pythons.

Well, you're raising a lot of questions. Unrelated to the five that were collected originally? What are you saying here? Tell me more. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, definitely. a lot of gray areas and things but I you know right you know what you're saying I've just sort of you know there is a propensity in people generally but certainly in herpeticulture we know plenty of known

violators who are in insistence on gilding the lily right where it's like you have something that should be cool enough on its own right you don't have to make a fiction to try and persuade on that and that certainly well and two we we've also seen unscrupulous individuals like collect studying animals from prohibited areas. And so, you know, Hept for Blue Rattle, you know, twin spotted rattlesnakes. Yeah, for nail polish. Yeah, for nail polish. Just, you know, luckily they were so dumb that they could get busted and hopefully, you know, well-fined for their actions there. But, and, you know, that there's definitely certain

states that take it a lot more seriously than others where, you know, there's, we, We had a friend who heard a story of a guy in Arizona that found a twin spot, and he had some tongs, and he grabbed it and went, I got one. I got a twin spot. And all of a sudden, a ranger was kind of came out of the forest and said, here is your $5,000 fine. Enjoy us, you know. Setups aren't necessarily cool. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not. And I don't think he had any intent to collect or anything like that. It was just excitement of finding one, but you're not allowed to interact with them or handle them. Same thing with like throwing a, you know, a toy or live heela on the road to try to entrap people to stop and handle it or mess with it. Then they can pull out of the bushes and say, you touch that hila monster. I saw it. You know, I've got you on camera or whatever.

Yeah, so it didn't get run over. You know, yeah, obviously. Or if they didn't see it and just ran it over, you know, that's a risk to that animal. too. I don't know. Oh, that's not that you do. Right. Yeah. The one thing to highlight, right, particularly in the Twin Spot context and all of this you guys have hit on is enforceability

and a willingness to do so, right? So the context with our head per nail polished stuff is they, you know, when I'm saying, oh, well, you're scout free to go to another state. Not really. It just becomes a federal crime if there is one. Right. And you know, but then it's just a question of

and obviously this is even more exacerbated now, but a question of funding and resources and interest in terms of pursuing that. So that, you know, those were the, it was federal agents who were monitoring Kingsnags seeing the head for nail polish and saying, hey, let's do this, not Arizona Game and Fish, at least as far as I recall. And if it was Arizona Game and Fish, then they were reaching out to Fish and Wildlife, federal Fish and Wildlife to say, hey, here you go, you know, got a live one for you.

Yeah. Yeah. And thank goodness. I mean, there does need to be some enforcement of that. You just can't have willy-nily, you know, well, and I think that's, you know, well, and I think that's a, I guess, probably a very sad example is what the Egyptian tortoises. I was listening to Ralph. Ralph Till on your podcast and talking about the situation of Egyptian tortoises in Egypt. You know, like there just is no protection for them or they've almost been extirpated because,

you know, they're cute and they're easy and whatever. You know, that's very sad. And there's just no recourse. There's no, no buy-in of the Egyptians to consider these a national treasure or something to be protected. Yeah, and they started the Kleinmanai Trust or the Kleinmanai Breeding Assurance Group. Yeah. I'm sorry, Ralph, if you, I don't know if you'll ever listen to this, Ralph, but my bad. I didn't remember that, but a great group of keepers are getting together and doing their best to fund some genetics work to make sure that they have a stable assurance colony for captive populations, and that is one of the coolest things I think you can do as a keepers work together. Same with like the Galapagos Tortoise Alliance and things like that that they're doing.

And by the same token, having those federally protected or endangered species protected might inhibit the efforts to help save them in some way, you know, because if the place where they're from doesn't care about them. What good is protecting them here do? It just reduces our ability to reduce the market for them from the wild. If that's a, you know, if that's an issue. But yeah, it's a kind of, it kind of boils down to a word that I think everyone feels is really naughty and it's exploitation. And I mean, essentially, I think that's what you argue about writer, a privilege to exploit reptiles and people think exploit. Oh my gosh, no, that's not what I want. It's like, yeah, well, yeah, do you want to exploit dogs too um i exploit dogs because they make me happy when i pet them usually

unless they just like crap on the floor or something but you know we exploit we're exploiting reptiles for our personal gains one way or the other um we all are because we like it um we're trying to make money off of it and if you don't like it and you're trying to make money off it your life sucks and i'm going to tell you that now uh that that's not a fun place to be um but you know With the Egyptian tortoise, basically it was demonetized. I mean, you can still gift these tortoises to anyone you want. And usually when you're gifting something like that, Rob would probably done it with, like, Puerto Rican boas, right? Or Jamaican, Jamaican.

Right. So you're kind of careful with who you might give those to at some point, and you vet them. And they've kind of proven that they can handle the responsibility. And that's kind of what is done here. It does hurt commercial value, and commercial value usually has a strong drive in making these decisions. Reptile hobby is like a, I don't know. The last stat I saw was like from eight years ago, it was like $1.2 billion a year. So it's a lot of money.

Yeah, especially after 2020. Right. But I think that's where the crux of this is. Do we have the right to exploit reptiles? And it's Probably not Maybe to some degree Again it's a big gray area right

Right Saying yes or no It's very difficult to do In some regards yes But is it my right to make money off this reptile I don't know Maybe Depends on the reptile

Depends on the habitat Depends on how you got it Depends on where you got it Like there's a lot of things Should there be a $5 you know Monitor lizard or should there be a $50 monitor lizard

or should all monitor lizards come with a barrier to entry kind of thing where there are especially large monitors that are just going to languish if they're not given appropriate amounts of room and you know yeah heat and all sorts of things food and at the same time there's being free sometimes as Brian you're talking about with the Egyptians Jamaica's Puerto Rican bows with me being free can be as much or more of a barrier to entry than just being able to buy

it, right? Just whoever's, you know, X amount of money spends just as well as someone else. In our context, it's some ways it's actually more difficult. The barrier to entry is actually higher than if it was just some arbitrary amount of money. And I would argue that those free animals that are ESA listed that are, you know, can only be gifted and or sold within the state, I guess. But that seems like it's not exploitation. It's it's trying to do something for the animals maybe i don't know is that uh fall under a different category because i think it's a linguistic construction around the word exploitation and what that means right i think we take sort of the common construction has that negative

connotation that's what ryan's getting as in its true form right that's sort of the argument that well our utilization even if it doesn't have that negative connotation could fit within that meaning still external gain yeah i mean it's and that's it's it can be good it can be bad The same thing can be good and bad. So, where was I going with that? I just lost, I had a steam like rolling around in there, and I just went off the rails and I forgot it. Exploitation by a flesh peddling, you know, flipper that's buying as cheap as he can

and selling as quick as he can before it dies. That exploitation I'm not on board with, but exploitation of a species to keep them, you know, established like a Jamaican bow at Rob's house. you know, that's a good exploitation. Agreed. Exploitation is not a bad word. Yeah. It feels bad, though.

It does feel bad. Like, that does not, like, if you had a sign, a positive or negative sign to exploitation, it's likely not going to be a positive. Exactly. But to the ESA thing, one of the, I fully support the ESA. I think the Endangered Species Act is a wonderful piece of legislation, but they drop off a lot of places. And one of the places they've dropped off is it's impossible to get a CBW. permit anymore. I think people would happily go through some of these permitted things. Having that pathway, I think, should be a right. But the privilege just to grab an animal,

I don't think should be there necessarily in this context. Yeah. And you look at some of the, and again, should it be limited to just United States species or should, I just think about all those radiated tortoises that were kept in that house, you know, 20,000? What was the, it was some ridiculous number, just poor terrible conditions waiting for, what, export on a container or what? I mean, like, how do you even move that many tortoises? It's ridiculous. And then, you know, what happens?

Like, they get, you can't, like, put them in jail or something. Well, maybe they did. I don't know what happened. I think there's some, I don't know what, I have no idea what Maddof's law is for trafficking, but. Yeah, if you're snooping around too. near to the uh the the big the big the big one out there the the the other big tortoise oh the plowshare yeah if you're snooping around there and they're wrong place you might be dead yeah or have armed guards around the turtle survival oh yeah compound and there's that story of the

guys who got shot and they were out looking for chameleons or something or so they're geckos yeah exactly yeah so that's uh yeah that's well i'm out of gas car you just just get the plague, although I guess you get that in Colorado or something. Right. Oh, boy. I think that, my microphone tried to run away. I was thinking back to what you said about the king snake, and I think that one of the helpful ways to determine right versus privilege

is advocacy to some degree. The odds of finding enough people to advocate for king snakes in Utah feels like really astronomically low. And that's why I was very surprised that that was able to get done. And that's why some of these states have their regulations in place is because there's either there's not someone to argue the other

way. It's just like it's always been that way and that's where we go. And there's not a lot of support. We have like in Ohio, you can for six months of a year you can collect an unlimited number of soft shell turtles or snapping turtles above a certain carapace length with a

fishing license. You can commercially collect them. You can't send them across state lines unless it's meat, but that is a lot. And, you know, no one's really advocating for where are the snapping turtles going. Where are the Midland soft-shell turtles going? Didn't that apply to alligator snappers as well? I don't know. I don't have alligator snappers in Ohio. Oh, in certain states. There was like some stories of like people see, you know, you go to the house and there'd be just shells of alligators.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Probably Louisiana and Texas. Right. Because they had conflicting regulations for a while and people and I'm going to get the states wrong. But you couldn't get them in one state, but you could in the other. And if you lived on the border, and you have been. Cross the border, grab one, take it home, have a meal, you know. Especially that's been your livelihood forever. It's right.

Yeah. And I mean, again, you know, should they be denied that? You know, what's the difference between an alligator snapper? Personal consumption versus sale to someone else maybe becomes the, you know, an issue there. The issue. Yep, that's another great point. And also the pathway to do it responsibly. And I think that's why if you're not doing it responsibly, that's not right, man. You know, are we doing our best? I mean, just think of the reptile hobby in general. There's so many great people. But you all know, and equally are more amount of shitheads. Am I led to? I'm sorry, I've said a few slightly bad words. Well, we had Ron St. Pierre on last week. Oh, I'm good. Yeah, you're all right. yeah so if we made if we made reptile laws based on the from my perspective the majority of reptile keepers it wouldn't be good yeah yeah and like you said you know there's that the negative connotation that goes along with a lot of people

and i think anybody can cross that line fairly easily you know if they get in a bad financial situation and they don't have time for their collection anymore and don't have time to sell it or, you know, they're trying to dump it on people, you know, or they get a mite mite infestation and just go, well, whatever, I'm sick of this anyway, you know, like, that's not a great thing. Or release it in the wild, which is, you know, kind of the worst of all worlds, depending on where you're, what species you're releasing and where, but yeah, there's a lot of stuff that goes into this for sure. It's not simple, you know. and I don't know, that's how to, how to regulate everything.

I guess that's why you have states that regulate their own resources and figure things out. I think for Utah with the Kingsnake thing, there was a group of us that were interested in getting laws changed. And we had some, you know, some efforts. We had some coordination. They also, the state of Utah was very helpful in this regard in one way where they actually, funded us to they reimbursed this gas money to go out and herp basically to do kind of a survey to try to show that some of these things are not as rare as they're made out to be um for example like the mountain king snakes right they those were prohibited you couldn't keep a utah mountain king snake

because um they just were so rare you would never see them but then once you go out herping you learn how to find them you go out looking for i mean uh they're they're out there you know They're just very, they live underground at most of the year, and you don't see them very often, except for, you know, maybe a couple months out of the year. Milk snakes, you got to look under rocks, and they're there, you know, but you're not just going to see them crawling around too often. So I think these common sense things, and then we got those laws changed. You can now collect, you know, two mountain king snakes on permit, and you can even breed them and sell the offspring, if you so desire. and which I think is good for the population of Mountain King Snakes in Utah, you know, instead of just having illegal trade or people coming over grabbing some, taking them back to their state and not, Utahans being none the wiser, you know, it's like now they can be kept in responsible manner, trackable manner. Now, the downside of that is like we, we were having this influence or change or whatever and, and for some reason they wanted to target us and,

find out what we were doing illegally and they had arrested a guy that had poached uh hila monsters and sent him out as a as an informant he was part of the group and so he came around trying to find people that were breaking the law or whatever trying to make stuff up exactly he and he basically made something up and and got uh ryan hoyer busted for his rubber boa that he said was illegal but ryan assured him and showed him the paperwork and everything that it was collected in a legal place and with permits and everything. So it's just a big mess. And then that

spooked everybody like, oh, if they're going to do this kind of thing, you know, I can't be a part of this group. And the group disbanded and kind of went away. It was really kind of a sad thing. Yeah, it sounds like a group that could have gotten a lot accomplished. Right. And it's trackable, not to like a crazy

degree, but at least the state has some idea of how many snakes are removed from the wild it up and you can do some sort of population dynamics on that and just at least have the data for when you might need it. I think that's important. That's being responsible. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, you know, giving that pathway to doing those kind of things is important, I think, but to letting us have those rates. Even that, right, reminds me of our trip to Western Pennsylvania to go find a Mastoga, right? Where it was like Nipper, you know, engaging with ranching

Taylor, right? And that's to, yeah, okay, I'm on board. You know, I get it. I appreciate, you know, why you guys are here, what your interest in doing, how this fits into your deal. And that it's not problematic. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Relationship and, hey, you can engage with them in this way and all that. You can be a help, literally help, you know, help to the project instead of always, you know, presuming negative intent and being sort of cynical. So that it's, I think there really is utility there. Yeah, yeah. And it's nice to meet a Ranger Taylor versus a Ranger, you know, no-go, you know, whatever you like. The blockers versus facilitators. That's kind of life struggle, right? Working with blockers and you sure enjoy facilitators after working with blockers. It makes a huge difference. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, I agree. We agree. It's a privilege. I'm glad. Did I win? I think so. I think you got it. Everybody wins. We're still keeping reptiles, and that's good. But I think it's one of those things you have to think about. You really, I think as an individual, you should have those thoughts. Hopefully people are having these types of discussions with discussions with themselves.

It's a weird way to put it. But, you know, hopefully you're thinking about this. And that means you care, I think. Whether you think it's a right or a privilege that you would have that, you know, that thought, I think is a positive sign. It has consequences either way. Right, that's the thing, right? Which every way we fall in it and however you want to frame it.

It has, Brian, you do a great point of, you know, in terms of the exploitation discussion and things of saying like, hey, what are the consequences? And we typically think of those in very human-centric context. And it's like, I think that's what you're mostly calling out there is saying there is an impact here. And let's make sure we're being responsible and respectful of that. Appreciate it. And I think just like exploitation, the word right has a, can have a negative meaning to it as well when you're just, you're getting caught doing something that you shouldn't be doing. Well, it's my right to do whatever I want to do. And, you know, you can't tell me.

You know, there's a, there's a lot of that that goes on too, you know, like, don't tell me what to do. The right to self-actualization, but that doesn't mean that I can negatively impact you along the way. Exactly. People do lose that. Good point. threat like that. So, yeah, I think. Oh, we didn't even touch on like the,

the right to, to buy a reptile without knowing the source, without, you know, where did it even come from? Like, there's, I mean, there's deep conversations in, right?

And if this, you could probably have a pod. Right. Oh, my gosh. There's a lot of those. I mean, yeah. Sheesh.

Yeah. Yeah. Well. In both contexts, right, if we're talking, even going back to the 80s in terms of particularly coming out of jurisdictions from which they're prohibited

with those conditions like. You know, it's cool to think in terms of it getting here and sort of the progression and the story and the narrative of AWOMA, you know, crawling into a cassette tape case and then being posted.

You know, there's sort of a romance to that, I think, sometimes. At the same time, and, you know, what's made reptiles so adaptable to that is the fact that it is there sort of physiology, right, allows that to be possible in a way that it wouldn't be for most other things.

So adaptable to those conditions, but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily okay and certainly not cost-free. Yeah. And also given a path to legal acquisition, you're going to avoid a lot of this black market nonsense. Right. It's such a, it's such a two-way street. I think, right, Cisora State Columbia, you know, in the various Vancouver, you know, the different projects in situ, right, down in particular in South America in the context of dark frogs, you know, led essentially, right, it's trying to combat the illegal frog trade by, you know, making captive in situ produced offspring legally available and that, but they're still competing on price point, you know, and it costs a certain amount to actually produce those animals.

those places and they're generally speaking they're fine with when they have new animals but they always need to have something new every year or two otherwise invariably the price dropped you know the the prices people are willing to pay on the things that have been readily available for a period of time go down and the ability to you know make sure that that number stays where it can still support the venture is probably going to put those frogs priced higher than frogs that are not, don't have sort of that verifiable legitimate on them. And, yeah, commercial pressure definitely negatively impacts the ability of those industries to keep working. Right.

I mean, that's a great point of why the black market is not going anywhere anytime soon. It just kind of fluctuates with what we can do. But, yeah, I love those stories. Have you guys ever heard of Project Piaba? No. but the cardinal tetras no it's like an old old i remember this from back in my aquarium days in the early 2000s but basically there's the whole village in brazil that they've done population studies on the cardinal tetra there and there's a certain amount that they um harvest every year and

sell to the pet trade and that money helps them stay there they don't sell their land for agriculture and other sources and the whole the whole thing is buy a fish save a tree yeah right so it's It's well done. It's sustainably done. It's ethically done, responsibly done. And I think that, you know, it used to be like, what, the Inabiko project in Peru, whereas like Zuri Ventures Start Frogs, they put out a ton of artificial nest sites, and they would just harvest the eggs and just like you would do in captivity, probably

similar thing in Colombia. Right. Anyway, so. Yeah, I think that could probably be done just about anywhere, you know. Like you say, you know, if you're if you're overproducing and producing just a ton and, you know, exporting, you know, 3,000 or something to, you know, small area or something, you're, you're going to run out of that. The market demand for whatever it is. Exactly. So you've got to balance the market demand with the price and the, you know, how much you're doing it.

Man, that's too much thinking for me. I know, right? Yeah. I always think about shinglebacks too because, you know, over in Australia, they're, you know, a couple hundred-dollar lizard. Over here, they're a couple tens of thousand dollars. You know, they're just ridiculously expensive. And, I mean, when I was there in one stretch of a mile stretch,

and, you know, it was pretty good shingle back habitat. There were a lot of shingle backs in the area, but there were so many, like, carcasses. And, again, you know, shingle back carcasses probably stick around for longer than other carcasses because the, you know, the osteoderms or whatever. lots and lots just in this one mile stretch there were probably 20 30 dead shinglebacks in this in a mile you know it's like yeah it's crazy so you sell you sell like 20 shinglebacks out of australia you probably fund uh the bio tunnels or bridges for those things and not get hit on roads right yeah especially in those concentrated areas you know yeah well it reminds me the malcolm douglas video

right from the late 80s mid to late 80s where he's out with some indigenous folks, I think on the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, I think even Western Australia, but very isolated. And they find the most beautiful Woma Python, and they club it over the head and eat it, you know, as three bucks worth of meat. And it's like, particularly at that time, you're talking about, obviously the means didn't exist, you know, A, it's illegal. B, you know, the means don't exist, whatever, but it's like, well, that got eaten as $3 is worth of meat instead of. you know something that would double the the GDP of that community for the year like

it's tough yeah mm-hmm that's what you know sort of where where does the utility fit where does the exploitation fit is it the personal consumption you know of that hey you know those two guys had a you know had a meal that day versus you know sitting in a box in somebody's house you know I don't know it's all it gets hairy right the deep the right the onion you know so well and and i mean at least it was a three dollar piece of meat rather than a d or jersey absolutely well i don't think they're maybe i was going through that well that was i was listening to ross mcgivin um he was on was it expert in the idiot expert in the idiot and talking about you know photography and stuff but uh coming across

walmas in uh up in that area you know northern northern Northern Territory, but in the sandy areas and seeing three or four crispy critter walmas, you know, even though, well, there's a lot of trucks moving through there. Yeah. So that's a, yeah, that's a challenge for sure. But yeah, those remote areas, I mean, there's got to be pretty good populations, you know, they potentially could support some. That doesn't mean, there is easy to turn up, but. Exactly. Yeah.

And, I mean, if somebody said, hey, I've got this new blood, locality, WOMA pair that I found, you know. Oh, my God. The pressure point on that would be unimaginable. Right, right. And you say, you know, I got permits to export this one pair. Who wants it? You know, highest bidder gets it kind of thing. You know, there could be something to that.

To do some serious community development with that money. Yeah, yeah. Then all the Australian exporters are like, let me get in on that. And then they descend on the land. land and it's I'm just playing devil's advocate. Right, right. But I guess that's the thing is that control is,

is imperative because, yeah, like you said, if you open the floodgates, then, you know, that's bad. Right. And you're going to tell you the thing. It won't be that sort of, right, yeah, that price point. Yeah. So I don't know. It's a, it's such a complicated issue.

And yeah, it's crazy. It's right and it's wrong. Yeah. What is that damn? cat Schrodinger's cat. Schrodinger's MoMA right there. There you go. Good stuff.

Well, yeah, I think this was a good discussion and some things to think about for sure and more things to talk about down the road. We've kind of scratched the surface and, yeah, but I appreciate your input. This is really a good conversation. I'm curious about your job. We forgot to ask you about your job. And you've left the zoo field and you're doing a more environmental impact. Is that what I'm, am I remembering wrong?

Do so. My job is all over the place. I look at my job descriptions, like several pages. But yeah, I left the zoo field and now I'm a conservation biologist for the county I live in. I'm a state employee at the county. But yeah, we're the largest landowner in this county. And, yeah, basically, I am responsible for the, not solely, but the conservation of wildlife in Southwest Ohio. And some of that is managing our deer herd.

So it's not all reptiles. Managing our deer herd. It's learning plants. I'm getting a free college education, botanical education in this job. I've learned unbelievable amounts of information about plants. Right. And now I can't go anywhere. I'm looking at plants.

I'm looking at bugs. I'm looking at, oh, but that'll help you find your reptiles. You guys know that. That'll help you find anything you need to. But it's crazy. It's really, really cool. Awesome. Some of the stuff we do, like we have caves salamanders, which are prolific in most of the

states where they're found. But we have a very crazy population in Southwest Ohio where there aren't, we don't really have caves, but we have a lot of cars. We have a lot of limestone. and they kind of live in mini caves and it's a it's a very cool population but we go as far as to some managed to find through aquifers their way into one of our restrooms and that restroom was slated for removal and so instead of just bulldozing it down we took time and made a plan to remove it slowly and carefully and look for salamanders and now it came down we didn't lose any

salamanders and now we're looking at a habitat improvement project so then in case they're still there we don't even know if they're still there if they go really down deep but yeah um to make sure that we create a space that um is aesthetically pleasing but also meets the needs of these salamanders in case they're still there that's like wild to me but incredibly cool that's really that's just yeah and then we had a bear that was going through our county uh ohio has very few bears, but that was wild last week. It went through many townships and so

yeah. Cool. So I'm talking about all those crap you probably don't want to hear. No, no. That's awesome. Yeah. Doing a population estimate survey or population estimates on curtland snakes, which is a state threatened species. We found northern rough green snakes.

Hadn't been documented in the county for 20 plus years and now we've got a study going on with those, which is really wild and that's awesome. Really cool. And I'm trying to get a lot of turtle stuff done, but that's, that's difficult. I can go, I can have a whole PowerPoint presentation on Grap Tammies in Southwest Ohio and how the hell they get here. But, yeah, doing a lot of stuff, and it's really, really rewarding. There's lots to miss about the zoo, a lot of the animals.

But as I, as I evolved as a human being, the rewards for the conservation work I'm doing now is as much more meaningful to me as an individual. I still love zoos, but, man, I made, personally, I made a great decision, and it's really fun. Open my eyes to a lot of things. Yeah, yeah. Especially the terms of natural area and disturbance. I use that way too much. Yeah. My, uh, my grandpa was a mule deer expert.

So he, you know, he would, uh, he, he was one of the, probably the foremost expert of his time back in the, you know, early 1900s and, and, uh, but, yeah, my, my, dad knows a lot of plants because of that, I think, you know, going through and just, and he'll quiz me and I'm terrible at retaining that information, a lot of plants. And, and you'll watch him and his brother fight over what a plant is. And you're like, you know, it's pretty funny, pretty entertaining. Just like we'd argue over somebody, you know, whether that's a young long-tail salamander or Cape Salamander. Right. And I got salamanders on the brain. So, yeah, we had that with Chahira in Australia, like there's, I guess there's some speech, I asked an expert, you know, that wrote the field guide, Chris Jolly.

And I'm like, what species is this? And he's like, do you have any DNA analysis of it? And I'm like, no, like, then you're not going to know. Like, that's the only way to tell though, you know, that group apart from each other is, is DNA analysis. They just are too similar. They look identical, but they're vastly different in genetics. I told you we needed to make that part of our process.

Yeah. Have a little thermocycler out in the desert. Quick, grab a toe. We need to analyze this one. Cool stuff. Where's RGI? They need to get on it. Yeah. There you go. Come on, Ben. Where are you at with that? Move it. Well, yeah, it's been great having you on. So I guess people know where to find you? Where do you frequent? I'm freaking anywhere anymore, but yeah, thanks for having me on. I always like chatting with you, fellas. So it's always a good conversation. Your guest we like to have back. I feel like we were a little off.

I felt like I went a little off the rails today, but it was great conversation and lots for people to think about. But I still maintain rad reptiles. You can find me there if you're in the market for Florida box turtles or soon Oketekorn Snakes. more homes hingeback tortoises let me know but feel free to reach out it might take me a second to get back to you because i'm not as quick on there anymore but um as justin probably figured out when you were asking me i was like oh but uh yeah fellas it was great thank you so much for

having me on and thanks for um keeping up with the consistency of the podcasts i know how hard that is and how much time it takes so thanks for putting out good quality content for folks oh happy not being shitheads yeah We'll believe that later. Sorry, threading that from the conversation. I love a good callback. It's obvious. Well, yeah, we usually kind of end the podcast with, you know,

cool things you've seen in herpeticulture, herpetology lately, or, you know, nature in general. I started watching the reality show, I guess, all the sharks. Mike Clarkson helped develop this show. it's a really cool concept and it's been really fun to watch basically you have four teams they're sending them out into so they started in the Maldives and then they went to Australia and now they're going to Japan so we're on episode three but they just go out and dive they can pick us pick different spots and they try to find every you know species of shark they can they have a point value so you take a picture and you get certain points for finding the sharks and it's really a cool concept and really fun. I'd love to see it applied to reptiles and herping. That would be really cool to get dropped off in Australia for a couple days to go compete to find the most cool

herbs, you know. But yeah, pretty, pretty fun. I would really recommend checking it out and supporting it so we can hopefully get more cool wildlife positive. You know, there's no like danger of sharks or, you know, they're just outfinding cool sharks and showing the diversity of species in different areas and things you wouldn't even like oh that's a that's a real thing you know it's really fun yeah that sounds awesome thanks for sharing that yeah it's on Netflix so yeah check it out on netflix all the sharks it's it's really cool so um and then yeah check out the uh the snake week stuff that's really some really cool talks i i don't know i just love uh scientific presentations you know people

people somebody like rick shine i mean he has over a thousand publications like that's ridiculous like i think i'm at maybe 80 or 90 you know i'm like a less than a tenth of what this guy's churning out and some of the most cool research i was reading his book one of his books uh again rob helped me with the title but right yeah snakes without borders i think snakes without borders and he's talking about you know learning about the skin and you know the skin um industry and the the folks in Indonesia wanted him to study, like they kept dumping the carcasses at his feet. So basically, he would study them because he didn't have approval to study reticulated pythons. He was studying in other species.

And finally, he's like, he couldn't resist. So he started analyzing, you know, the different stomach contents or whatever, you know, that kind of thing. And basically found out, like, through his studies that the skin industry was sustainable. They were mostly pulling reticulated pythons out of cities and towns and homes and things like that. They weren't going out into the forest and getting these giant females or anything like. Very rarely would they get a big female in, you know, so found it to be sustainable. And this is people's livelihoods, you know, and I guess we don't necessarily like it, but, you know, that's somebody, somebody's right. Are we providing an alternative, right?

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of things we wouldn't like if we knew how it worked. Right, right. And I think, too, like he discovered that reticulated pythons live fast. You know, they grow quickly. So they, you know, they're reaching eight to nine feet in very short order. So, and they have a lot of babies, you know, lay a lot of eggs. So, you know, I think he said one female laid 200 pounds of eggs.

if I'm getting the stat right, but I mean, that's insane. Maybe it was like 50 pounds, but it was a lot of weight of eggs. I believe either. Yeah, it's insane. So, you know, if you're hatching out, you know, 60, 80 offspring and they're all growing very quickly and, you know, it's a sustainable thing versus a slow growing, you know, difficult. Yeah, so very cool. Yeah, exactly. We did that in the States with a slow growing.

growing reptile and the American alligator. Right. Still doing it. Yep. Crocodiles, too. I mean, that's the reason there are crocodiles in Australia. They didn't kill them all because there's a sustainable industry. And now they're overpopulating.

They need to start hunting them again, probably. But now it's kind of like wolves in the Americas. You know, you just get running that problem of, okay, we protected them. Now they're eating the cattle rancher, sheep, or cows. and what do we do now? You know, like, I guess that would be weird if a cattle rancher had sheep, but anyway, ignore that.

That's all right. I'm sure they throw a few... Point was made. Yeah. But I don't know. Lots of cool stuff out there, exciting stuff. I don't know. You guys see anything neat lately that's spring into mind?

I'm so Hamilton County, Ohio specific. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe the rough green snakes have been awesome to see. We don't have a big population, but hopefully putting together a head start program just to enhance. We talk at work all the time about, like, restoring prairies and feeding prairies. And I'm like, well, let's do the same thing, but with rough green snakes.

And it sounds weird to people because it's an animal. I'm like, it's the same concept is what we're viewing frequently. So this year I was able to get some surveys done and to mark exactly when we can find them gravid. And so we found a few gravid females. So in the next year or two, we'll do that. But yeah, the rough green snakes, I don't know if you've found them. I'm sure you have before.

Well, the Lord, they're one of the prettiest snakes you've ever seen. I mean, it's just a green snake with big eyes. And they don't do anything at night. You walk around at night and shine flashlights in the trees and just find them. That's cool. because I well we have smooth green snakes that make their way into Utah they're a little harder to find and you know not but so I had an experience that I'm not sure if it was a dream or if it was real when I was a kid I swear I saw this green snake in a tree and I was trying to and I and I lost it you know it made its way out so then I'm like did I just dream that or did I actually see that you know one of those things so I need to go find one so I can say definitively I found one in Utah yeah. Yeah, very cool snakes. So maybe I'll have to go out with a flashlight at night and shine in the trees.

I don't know. Like usually they're found under rocks here. Yeah, smooth green snakes are a little more terrestrial, at least the ones in Ohio, they're a little more terrestrial. Rough greens are almost entirely arboreal. Really? They migrate throughout the year to different habitats that take advantage of the different invertebrate prey. Like they stick to like the, those initial forest. I can't remember the successional forests because there's a lot of caterpillars, soft-bodied prey at the beginning of the year.

And then they metamorphose. And then they go to these prairies and thickets where you see a lot more like grasshoppers and what is the right word? Orthopterans. I don't know. Someone correct me. No, that's true. But it's crazy that they do that, that stuff. That's really cool.

So they're seasonal, just like a lot of things, eating things seasonally and chasing the tasty, soft stuff one part of the year. and the crazy hard stuff the rest of the year. I wouldn't want to eat grasshoppers. That doesn't seem fun. No. Nice soft caterpillar. Yeah, that sounds great.

I can see that working. Yeah. I would rather a caterpillar than, yeah. Yeah. Very cool. That's awesome. Anything, Rob, I mean, Ross McGiven on that podcast was a fun listen. Yeah, he is quite the photographer.

Yeah, absolutely. You probably want to watch that one. one on YouTube instead of listening to it because you go through photos, you know, talks about the story behind the find, which is kind of cool. Yeah. That's very cool. So, I mean, you can still listen to it. You just won't have the visual visualization there.

Yeah. I guess the thing that really jumps out to me is how many cool stuff's turning up in Texas between Jordan and Instagram, the Herper Bros. It seems like they're turning up a ton of cool stuff out there. Right. Right back in May, early June, it was the Southern California with the Rosie Bowes. Seemingly, early to mid-July is the West Texas. Yeah, he said, I mean, Jordan, I just missed a call from him while we were recording.

Sorry, Jordan. We were busy, but he said that there's been just like a crazy amount of Alternative being found in West Texas this year. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. And the Chiricows are getting lots of rain. right now so I think he said it messed up there they're herping out there

he's got a lot of frogs but that's about it yeah okay well maybe it's good news for two months from that right hopefully hopefully that's the case right cool well thanks guys and

thanks Eric and Nohan and the NPR crew and we'll catch you again next week for Reptoff Highball Thank you.