In article , "Cereus-validus"
wrote:

Not true, bluenose.

Nurserymen need to get permission to dig up Cactaceae in Arizona. Nowadays,
they are rescue missions to relocate the plants before the valuable
succulents are plowed under by disinterested land developers. Blame it on
suburban sprawl by people who have no reason to live in the desert, land
speculators and greedy politicians not the nurserymen.

Oh cum'on. You know too much about cacti to believe that for a second.
Someone gets a liscense to "salvage" a couple dozen plants & suddenly his
stocks are up so high he can ship scores of them around the country
wholesale. Or they obtain with dubious documentation cacti poached in the
Chihuahua or Sonoma, & illegal stocks become indistinguishable from legal,
but the vast majority were not legally taken. And cacti alleged to be
nursery-grown have mixed into them strange looking scarred plants that
were obviously taken from the wild -- but try to prove it, it's a
completely safe type of theft. Or cacti liscensed for collection in one
state or county are actually collected in a state or county that
prohibits it, & no way to prove where they came from once the poachers get
them to the highway, putting them into the marketplace complete with the
"proper" papers attached so that poached plants appear to be legal.
Vendors use every trick in the book to turn a dozen legally gotten snakes,
lizards, & cacti into hundreds or thousands of profitable specimens; many
are smuggled to other countries for sale to cactus collectors.

The organization TRAFFIC which attempts to monitor the international plant
& wildlife trade says the problem of poaching plants in the
Texas-Arizona-Mexico Chihuahua Desert is on the rise. Many of the plants
reach the international market, primarily in England, but also in Germany,
Sweden, Spain, & Italy, the poachers finding it easy to unload thousands
of plants, then going back for thousands more. TRAFFIC warns that at the
present level of combined legal & illegal collecting, the Chihuahua will
experience a complete ecological break-down for loss of a key component of
its ecology.

Cactus clubs number close to 500, representing an estimated 40,000
club-oriented collectors worldwide. They all give lipservice to legality &
conservation, but when sleezy poachers join the clubs, the membership
treats them as superheros. Each new batch of cacti of dubious provenance
brought before the eyes of the lucky cactophiliacs brings about orgies or
feeding frenzies of eager purchases. The clubs even arrange international
field trips to make sure increasing numbers of future poachers know
exactly where to find these plants.

The problems of incidental damage from foot traffic or off-road vehicles,
tourist thefts, & willful destruction of plants by teenagers or gun
owners, are all dwarfed by the problem of poaching. Ron Kass of the Bureau
of Land Management in Utah says wholesale poaching is on the rise in all
western states because of its extreme profitability & low likelihood of
being caught. Kass says the present level of protection cannot possibly
save these plants from wholesale commercial theft. Kass says that several
sensitive species face extinction for no othe reason than the trade in
illegal specimens. Tom Clark of the Capitol Reef National Park confirms
that his attempts to protect even a small area of the park from poachers
has failed utterly, despite the use of small transponders imbedded in key
plants hoping to make them trackable after they are stolen. The poachers
are just too clever, & the plants cannot be guarded night & day -- bnot
even in a small area where the attempt was at least being made to protect
the cacti. Outside this small area there's even less chance of poachers
being caught.

Ted Cordery of the Bureau of Land Management in Arizona says that the
smaller species are being taken en masse from the deserts & parks because
the plants are easy to remove, easy to hide, & have a ready black market.
But what is more surprising, the poachers will arrive by night with flat
bed trucks & hydrraulic lifts, & remove large saguaro cacti, which Ross
says are valued at $100 per foot to landscapers, with bonuses paid for
each arm.

Dr. Mark Dimmitt of the Arizona-Sonoma Museum says there are several cases
of new species being documented, & as soon as the information is
published, poachers arrive to drive the new discovery to the brink of
extinction, feeding the domestic & international trade in rare cacti.

Nursery owners invariably tell a different story of how well the cacti are
protected, & can sometimes trundle out the proper papers to prove their
stocks are legal. But there is really no way of telling what the
provenance of each plant really is, & as Ron Kass said, the current
methods of protection have proven to be absolutely worthless in stopping
this trade domestically & internationally in American cactus species.

The problem is gigantic. I cannot fathom how you as a cactus lover could
so overtly misrepresent what is really happening as "rescue" from
developers. It's the kind of excuse that makes those 500 cactus clubs
lionize the criminals in their midst. It is international organized crime,
&protection even in guarded national parks has been ineffective for one
reason only: commercial poaching.

-paghat the ratgirl

wrote in message
...
Any one else have a problem with plants that grow legs and walk away?

Genevieve
zone 9


http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/stra...palmtrees.html


i hate to say this, but evil nurserymen have been stealing saguaro cacti
for
more than 30 years!! they dig up young babies and take them back to their
city floral shops and/or nurseries and sell them for HOUSE PLANTS!

and then, too, are the ever wise folk of phoenix, arizona who decided to
turn phoenix into an agricultural wonderland and proceeded to put in
irrigation canals which aid in adding humidity to a land which is supposed
to be arid and they, too, have aided in the "stealing" of saguaro and
other
cacti by killing the native climate. saguaro and other cacti need
aridity;
too much humidity causes their death.

gee, arizona may have to change their state tree from the saguaro to
russian
olives before much longer. (sigh) another wonderful mechanical disease.
we can add this to the list with kudzu and water hyacinths.


--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/