The Deadly Shell Game - illegal trade in turtles - includes related article on prehistory

Animals, May, 1999 by Wendy Williams

A major problem in controlling the global trade is the inconsistent laws regulating turtle harvesting in the countries of origin. Although the issues surrounding the harvesting of sea turtles have been in the forefront for several decades, few nations have clearly thought through the question of harvesting land or fresh-water turtles. Laws in the United States are particularly confusing, since, with the exception of animals listed under the Endangered Species Act, individual states make their own decisions about the disposition of wildlife within their boundaries. This may change, however, as the public becomes more savvy about what's happening to native wildlife. And the issue is suddenly rising to the fore. The March issue of National Geographic shows "snapper turtle hunter" John Rogers, resplendent in pith helmet, photographed alongside a 50-year-old, record-breaking common snapping turtle that weighed a humongous 76.5 pounds. Rogers, said the caption, "gaffed the giant male in Lake Rohunta, near Orange, Massachusetts. He sold it to the Toronto Zoo, where it later died from an infection."

But perhaps the most pressing and the most delicate issue is the need to address the system by which global decisions concerning wildlife are made (or, in the case of the turtles, simply not made). Which culture's values will prevail? When humane issues concerning the live markets in American cities are brought up, Chinese community leaders ask, What is the difference between slaughtering a turtle in the Chinese-American fashion and boiling a lobster alive in the Caucasian-American fashion?

For a melting-pot society, there is no easy answer. "It's easy," says Gramieri, "for me to make decisions about how people in China should be, but over there in China, there are plenty of people having lives of their own, just like me." Says McCord, "Who is going to step in and tell the Chinese to stop doing something like that? It's part of their culture. You're telling people to stop doing something that they think is normal."

RELATED ARTICLE: Tasty or Tasteless?

Some modern cultures may well find turtle eating repulsive, yet people have eaten these animals since Paleolithic times. In a paper published in Science, anthropologist Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona in Tucson documented the eating habits of early humans at a site in what is today Israel.

Tortoises were the favored food for the village's earliest residents, Stiner found. She suspects this was because the animals were slow-moving and easily taken. Only when those animals were gone, she believes, did the villagers go after faster prey such as hares.

Biologist Kraig Adler wrote that the Iroquois also ate turtles and that box turtles may have disappeared from western New York because these species in that region were overhunted.

Invading Europeans found diamondback terrapins in America so plentiful along the coast that the animals became slave food staples. Eventually the slaves rioted, going so far as to risk their lives, because they so strongly craved something else to eat.