(02-25-2011, 06:44 PM)Philsuma Wrote: But first, let's get this out of the way....and you may as well chisel it in stone:
We are ALL Hypocrites
We keep frogs in glass boxes.
We perpetuate the importation of wildlife thru our hobby practices.
Now that we got that out of the way. You cannot claim the higher moral road unless you do not keep a single frog in captivity.
But
I know what you are thinking. If that's the case...we are all "bad" and if so, everything doesn't really matter, and , and , and....
Not so fast. although there is technically one true "black and white" - legal or illegal as defined in a federal statue, there are still shades of gray. Our human social life contains all manner of shades of grey and any hobbyist pursuit does so as well. For your perusal....
The hobby ethics tree:
i. Any frog, from anywhere. No questions asked. Ever
ii. A species is in the country now, so it is absolutely fair game to acquire WC or EU imports.
iii. I realize it may have come here illegally, so I will only acquire CB offspring of that species
iv. I will acquire Legal WC frogs, but only from permitted businesses with tax ID numbers ect.
v. I will acquire only CB frogs from legally acquired species
vi. I will acquire only site / locale specific frogs from hobbyists that can back them up.
vii. I will not keep any frogs whatsoever for a variety of personal and moral reasons.
There's a lot of ethics talk, but the point we miss (but looking at join dates, most probably haven't been around long enough to see the pattern) is our hobby is just that, a hobby.
We don't preserve anything, we don't appreciate what we have, and we invest next to nothing into curating the locales in the hobby already. Even if you pick VI, the ethics question goes way beyond just the legality of a locale and encompasses how we manage the frogs we have. Pick your favorite frog in that legacy frog thread, and
you'll see a history of frogging travesties where the hobby has simply abandoned older locales to move on to the next one - always the latest and greatest. Breed for a few years, move on to the next locale. Rinse, repeat. Then when we look back in 10 years all those locales are gone, and if any remain, the stock is so limited there is really no hope for long term preservation in the hobby. I've seen seasoned hobbyists make horrific choices on relabeling animals without locale data simply by phenotype in the True Sip fiasco, completely mismanaging these imports, then moving on to large obligates as the next shiny object.
We have a proven history of poor locale management choices that litter our hobby over the past 30 years, and until we fix that behavior, we really aren't deserving of ANY new locale, even the legal ones.
