Chinese Pet Trade Threatening Endangered Turtle

The Chinese pet and food trade is now threatening an endangered Philippine turtle:

http://news.yahoo.com/china-obsession-p ... 04159.html

Joe

It is unintelligible for me that this is even happening.  These things bring feelings of despair, deep down in my guts.  And in your other post, why would a tourist pay $60K to murder an rare elephant?  Does he read the news?  Why would Zimbabwe allow this to happen?

This is my Biosphere too…that is being destroyed.  Do they not know there are many other in the world who want to visit healthy ecosystems that have not been ravaged of their wildlife by selfish people.

I took a look at Tibet yesterday, as a remote place to visit that would be relatively unimpacted.   Nope. Tibet is loaded with endangered species.  Can you believe it?

Regarding the turtles and ivory demand, could it be that the relatively closed Chinese society is uninformed of the damage they are causing ?  I have difficulty believing that they do not care.

It is all unintelligible to me, all of it.  Decades ago, I never foresaw anything like this happening.  I knew the loss of habitat was likely to continue, until and unless the world began to harness unbridled human pop growth.  

But I would never have even believed that humans would someday be so horrible as to relentlessly murder entire families of elephants to support terrorism.  

I would never have believed that humans would contrive a scheme to auction the rights to hunt and kill an old rhino under the guise that this action would save the species.  Outrageous!