Importing farm-raised butterflies?

[Chris J. Durden]

At 06:41 PM 11/6/2001 -0500, Anne Kilmer wrote:

>I've seen the ads; the bug farmers as well as the butterfly farmers
>claim them bugs died a natural death.
>Right.
>At the time that the Audubon Society was created, we were told that the
>beautiful white feathers that society ladies used to trim their tresses
>... the aigrette --- was collected from the mud below the nests of the
>egrets who shed them.

    You can still buy most of these feathers at the larger Pow-Wows 
including ostrich and macaw. They can be used to create fantastic outfits 
used in wonderfully expressive dances, bringing traditional pleasure to 
hundreds of people. These feathered outfits are then used to decorate the 
walls of at least one important museum director (as reported recently in 
the New York Times).

>Of course this was nonsense.
>It is also nonsense that these bugs are being allowed to live out normal
>lives (ah, the songs of their little children as they play on the front
>porch in the evening) before dying naturally.

    Usually birds, reptiles or mammals have some part in the normal death 
of insects.

>We are being assured of this because it is supposed that sentiment,
>rather than a concern for a healthy ecology, fuels anti-collection
>action, and that, once we realize that the bugs had happy lives, we will
>wander off and hug some other tree.
>Me, I can't see any reason why you can't raise butterflies and harvest
>them, just as you raise chickens and pigs and cows ... as long as you
>don't release gene-altered bugs back into the mainstream. (Yeah, yeah, I
>know, we keep being reassured about that one, too.)
>I also don't think it's nicer for a butterfly to hang about in a screen
>room until it kicks off naturally (we are feeding them and offering
>suitable recreation, I hope) than it is for a butterfly to be "gently
>killed" as Monty Python would describe it, and displayed in a nice glass
>box.
>Either it's ok to kill and display butterflies (cage and display, if you
>like) or it isn't, and I don't see all this middle ground we seem to be
>attempting to create.
>I think they're just bugs, and that creating and preserving habitat is
>so much more important that sacrificing a few individuals for the common
>good ... why, that just has to be a good idea, doesn't it?  (Or was that
>Hitler that thought that? The moral high ground is so tracked up these
>days, you forget which were the heroic sentiments, and which the
>villains dreamed up.)
>Anne Kilmer
>South Florida

Right. Hitler banned butterfly collecting in Germany. As I understand it, 
that law was never repealed (please someone tell me it was!). Anyone in the 
United States having a German-caught specimen (from Germany in any of its 
geographic manifestations) from that time period to the present, is in 
violation of the Lacey Act. Things are topsy-turvy when our government is 
obliged by law to enforce the law of a maniac like that. Life does imitate 
art - in this case Pythonesque art.
............Chris Durden

> > soupy wrote:
> > >
> > > I've seen beautiful displays of preserved butterflies for sale and the
> > > seller says they were all imported from South American butterfly farms
> > > so that they were allowed to live their full natural lives before
> > > being packaged and exported.



 
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