By Mark Brodie, Published: Friday, January 6, 2017 -KJZZ.00rg
For full story on audio
Arizona
law generally prohibits taking, possessing, buying or selling wildlife,
except in certain circumstances. But, that doesn’t stop poachers from
capturing and selling reptiles and other exotic animals. Russ Johnson is
president of the Phoenix Herpetological Society, and he talks about how
big of a problem reptile poaching is in Arizona.
The
Maricopa County Attorney’s Office tells us they’ve only received two
submittals for prosecution in the past 12 months under the part of state
law dealing with Game and Fish violations.
MCSO
spokeswoman Amanda Jacinto says the office generally doesn’t get a lot
of cases, and those it does get are most often misdemeanors — that’s the
charge for someone caught illegally taking reptiles from wildlife. She
says if prosecutors can prove a poacher’s trying to sell the reptile,
that becomes a felony.
"Proving
possession, for the most part, for our prosecutors is pretty easy –
most of the time we have Game and Fish agents that are out there and
able to verify that these people were in possession of these animals
illegally. The hardest thing, of course, is that burden of proof –
trying to figure out where they actually obtained them, and trying to
prove whether or not they were trying to sell them those animals, as
well, because it is such an underground community," she said.
And, Jacinto says, the punishments don’t always seem like big deterrents to poachers.
"In
a lot of cases, they would rather go in there, and plead to the Class 2
felony and accept the fines and charges of that, knowing that they can
turn around and perhaps do it again and make more profit out of this
illegal activity," she said.
Jacinto
says most of these cases come from Game and Fish agents, like Tyler
VanVleet. He’s law enforcement program manager with Arizona Game and
Fish. VanVleet talks about how easy or difficult it is to catch poaches.
Posts
