Is banning exotic leather bad for reptiles?

There is no excuse for tolerating that they to torture of animals that feels as much pain as a child!. It is a huge moral problem and a root of violence in humanity. Killing species that contribute to the health of our world is just destroying our own environment and if we do not change and respect other species, pandemics are not going to be the only disbalance we are going to have to face.

I'm writing on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 6.5 million members and supporters worldwide regarding the above article, which is riddled with misleading and false claims.

Contrary to the authors' claims, exotic skin producers do not ensure high standards of animal welfare. Every year, millions of reptiles are killed barbarically so that their skins can be turned into belts, handbags, shoes, watchbands, and more. PETA has exposed the extreme suffering of reptiles on farms in the U.S., Africa, and Asia, and each revealed that animal welfare is not a consideration at all for those who hunt, poach, and factory farm these animals. Please take two minutes to watch this video, narrated by Joaquin Phoenix: http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=exotic_skins_trade_peta_rc1&chgpref=1

Snakes and lizards—who are an integral part of many ecosystems—feel pain acutely and are often decapitated and then skinned alive.

Pythons have hoses inserted into their mouths and are pumped full of water to loosen their skin. Impaled on hooks or nailed to trees by their heads, the snakes are often conscious when their skin is peeled off their bodies. Still writhing in pain, they are tossed on piles and remain there for days before finally dying. Some animals live for up to 4 days after being skinned.

For an accurate glimpse into the miserable lives of crocodiles and alligators, please watch PETA's international exposé (https://investigations.peta.org/crocodile-alligator-slaughter-hermes/) and read the CBS.com story (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/price-of-luxury-storied-brand-tied-to-animal-abuses/). In Zimbabwe—the world's second-largest exporter of crocodile skins—tens of thousands of crocodiles are confined to concrete pits from birth to slaughter and deprived of every opportunity to engage in natural behavior. Please also consider this footage (http://investigations.peta.org/vietnam-crocodile-skin-farm/) and the Forbes article (http://www.forbes.com/sites/davisbrett/2016/12/22/crocodiles-in-vietnam-skinned-alive-in-service-of-fashion/), which explains how tens of thousands of crocodiles in Vietnam are confined to cramped, filthy concrete pits—some narrower than the length of their bodies—before being slaughtered and skinned. Workers electroshocked them and then attempted to kill them by cutting into their necks and ramming metal rods down their spines.

In Texas, alligators—who can live up to 60 years in the wild—are kept in filthy, crowded tanks and beaten to death with metal bats when they're about two years old. They, too, are often skinned alive if the beating leaves them only stunned. Alligators who are caught in the wild are snared or caught with a hook and line and then shot in the head or stabbed with a chisel to sever crocodiles’ spinal cords—which paralyzes but does not kill the animals.

All reptiles have highly sensitive skin mechanisms to help them hunt, protect their young, and thrive in the wild, making their lives and gruesome deaths in captivity all the more harrowing. Because of their slow metabolisms, reptiles can remain alive and conscious for hours or even days after being completely skinned.

These animals endure a lifetime of stress related to intensive confinement, lack of a natural escape, harsh and unnatural enclosure materials like concrete, lack of fresh water, an irregular temperature, and rampant disease. Even after generations of captive breeding, these animals never become domesticated, as their behavior and biology remain wild.

Secondly, contrary to your claims, the use of exotic skins is environmentally disastrous. You condemn synthetics, but ignore the devastating effects of animal agriculture and the nitrous and oxide rich products such as leather. The production of animal skins results in water degradation, land clearing, increased water and soil pollution stemming from waste effluent, increased air pollution resulting from airborne particulate waste matter, increased petrochemical energy use associated with housing so many animals in close confines, cleaning and maintaining the buildings and enclosures, and transporting food in and waste out. These processes result in massive amounts of ammonia, methane and greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere. In addition, the chemicals used for leather tanning are known carcinogens and environmental pollutants. Tanneries also commonly have abysmal working conditions, resulting in the deaths of workers.

Third, exotic animal production does nothing to help conservation, or reduce poaching. Even where there are strong penalties for poaching, there are too few patrol officers to be a deterrent. After weapons and drugs, wildlife trafficking is the third-largest black market in the world. Skin dealers amass skins through a loophole in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which allows stockpiling. The practice even has a name: “snake laundering.” The skins may be exported to Singapore, then re-imported and falsely labelled “captive bred” (Source http://www.intracen.org/The-Trade-in-South-East-Asian-Python-Skin/, p. xiii ). Illegally caught and traded python skins constitute an estimated $1 billion (£680m) black-market activity in Europe alone, and an estimated 500,000 skins are imported legally from Southeast Asia to France, Germany and Italy. Lizards are also exploited for their skin, and trade data indicate that a considerable number of them are collected from the wild – including from jungles, forests, farms, rivers and streams – as a first step on a gruesome black-market journey.

Even the legal trade in the skins of crocodilians worldwide has tripled since 1977. More than 90,000 are killed in the wild each year, and more than 255,000 are killed altogether, including those who are farmed. Some farms raise captive-bred eggs, but thousands are taken from nests, and there is a push to allow more wild-egg collection, which threatens wild animal populations.

In Cambodia, crocodile farmers switched from feeding the animals fish (their natural diet) to water snakes, a cheaper alternative. Not only is this change unhealthy for the crocodiles, the water snake populations have been nearly decimated, causing a devastating imbalance in the local ecosystems. In China and the Philippines, native crocodile species are almost extinct in the wild despite being intensively farmed for meat and leather—clear evidence of the lack of correlation between the production of animal products and wildlife conservation.

Lastly, the article argues incentive-based programs are necessary to ensure conservation of the environment and local wildlife. It highlights the “success story” of the Australian crocodile population which has “recovered from devastation.” The article fails to mention that these crocodiles first became endangered as a result of more than a quarter century of commercial hunting. Further, the tepid success of this incentive-based program was possible only due to strict regulations and heavy monitoring of crocodile hunting. Developing countries—where the majority of exotic skins are produced (often illegally) —often lack the capacity and resources to implement a similar program.

Claims of "ethical" exotic skins, or claims that production boosts conservation can never be substantiated. The only point we can agree on is the article’s final line; we too, believe, “it is time as a global society to educate ourselves about what sustainability, morals and ethics truly look like.”