Smith infiltrates the secretive subculture of illegal reptile smugglers in Stolen World.
How did you first find out about the illegal reptile trade?
In the mid-1990s, I traveled to Florida to report on smuggling for an alt-weekly newspaper. I especially wanted to learn what had happened to some tortoises stolen from a wildlife reserve in Madagascar, but I became more interested in the people I met. Years later, I discovered that their stories did eventually connect to the events in Madagascar in a much deeper and more interesting way than I could have imagined.
What was it like meeting the reptile dealers?
I was regarded warily. Reptile people are accustomed to having their interests regarded as strange, which makes them defensive, and they've been infiltrated by law enforcement and animal rights groups. Tellingly, the people I was most interested in—the career criminals, not the basically law-abiding hobbyists with a little something special in their collections—were the least wary: they're able to distinguish journalists from police.
The reptiles themselves are only touched on tangentially in Stolen World. Did your feelings about them change over the course of this project?
I like tortoises and lizards and always keep one or two, though never anything really rare or expensive (right now it's a little ornate uromastyx, a lizard native to Egypt). I enjoyed going to the reptile shows, and I can see a zoo reptile collection and have a pretty good idea of the thinking behind it, whether the curator is very serious about a genus, for example. So I am sympathetic to people attracted to them, but in some cases, their interests can be destructive. Right now there's an uptick again in the trafficking of near-extinct tortoises out of Madagascar, for example, and I can't imagine wanting an animal so badly as to participate in that rotten trade. The collection of animals—legal or illegal—often stems from opportunity afforded by another environmental insult, like new logging or mining. The illegal trade usually involves small quantities of valuable animals. The legal reptile trade involves mass quantities of cheap wild animals and can be worse, biologically speaking, than the illegal trade. The trade in captive-bred exotic animals is biologically neutral unless, of course, the animals escape and thrive. Meanwhile, the keeping of exotic species can produce future scientists and conservationists—I've seen it happen.
The book revealed some questionable dealings by zoo curators.
I believe in zoos and their mission: to engender respect for and fascination with wildlife. Have you ever seen anything so wonderful as the Bronx Zoo's gorilla exhibit with its open spaces and family groups interacting? But political pressure has forced zoos to pretend to be conservation organizations. Some zoos do both—the Bronx Zoo spends $50 million a year on overseas conservation programs, and Durrell in the U.K. does incredible work. But most zoos don't have the money for this sort of thing, so they claim that their various activities, including breeding animals, is tantamount to conservation. Zoos should not need to justify their existence in such a contorted way. They can be proud of what they do.
