This conversation has been beaten to death for years on this forum. Government intervention is a dangerous and slippery slope. There seems to be a consensus on here that endangered fish should be banned and that is a bit misguided as well. There is very little reason to ban an endangered fish outside of it's native range. Many Goodieds find themselves in a dire situation in their native homes, but are pretty easy to find on aquabid. Some of these species would not exist if it weren't for the hobby. The red tail black shark is listed on the IUCN red list as critically endangered (
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/7807/0), but can be purchased at petsmart for less than $10 in the US. This is due to the hobby being interested in the fish in the first place. Now much of its habitat is damaged, but the hobby is still humming along consuming hundreds of thousands of them each year most captive bred in Florida.
There are some that would like to see an animal like this protected under ESA. International law already exist to protect animals in their natural habitat. This is why we have CITES. We should invest in making Cites work better.
As for extremely large fish I am very skeptical of the last time anyone bought a RTC from petsmart. The big chains have been learning that big fish come back and create headaches for them. They even dropped tinfoil barbs two years ago. They still sell common plecos and other large fish, but it is getting better. Your LFS probably still sells RTCs, Goonch, Pacu, Cichla, and TSNs, but industry wide those numbers have dropped dramatically. We have made tremendous progress in the hobby educating people to avoid such fish. The onus needs to be on the store owner to set up customers to succeed. They need to do that on their own without outside intervention.
We must always remember that as a hobby we are under siege. There are those that will never accept keeping a fish in a box. For them a 100 gallon tank is not big enough for 5 zebra danios. If we give them any legal power over supply they will wield this against us. The inch of fish per gallon rule of thumb in the aquarium hobby is often recommended as being placed in regulation for fish farms. This makes aquaculture impossible. We know that with adequate filtration we can meet the needs of fish in very dense situations. Many of the tanks on MFK break this "rule", but the fish are healthy. We put that rule of thumb together to help people get into the hobby that weren't going to understand what a stocking density is, much less how to calculate biomass.
Off topic a bit I feel it is important to mention. The reptile hobby went crazy promoting captive raised as the only good source of reptiles. Now some are pushing for regulation requiring only captive raised reptiles. Some are going so far as to request the egg be shipped with the animal. This all sounds good, but what happens when an incubator hatches and you pull out ten lizard and ten eggshells. Someone eventually is going to test the eggshell and say that doesn't match this lizard. Then the farm will be accused of cheating the system.
More importantly this ignores the fact that many animals can be collected from the wild sustainably. Sometimes this sustainable collection provides an economic incentive to protect an environment. This is the core of what project piaba is doing in the Amazon. If you take wild animals out of the trade then you remove the incentive to protect the environment.
It is interesting this conversation started out of Massachusetts. Cambridge MA passed a ban on retail sales of commercially bred pets, excluding fish. Don't be foolish enough to think that fish weren't discussed. It is just too hard to sell that to the general public at this time. Attitudes will shift, and they already have. Look at where food comes from. Down here we have a great grocery store chain called Publix. Years ago they removed the signs from the meat counters that show where each cut of meat comes from on an animal. I talked to several meat managers and they said they were told that "customers don't want to think about their steak coming from a cow". Now many people simply don't think about it. 50 years ago everyone would have told you the most tender cuts of beef come from the middle of the animal. This makes sense because a cow doesn't use his back as much as his legs. Now I meet many people who say I just like to know meat comes from the grocery store and that liquid in the package is just meat juice.
The most important part to remember when discussing regulation is who will be implementing it. No one is going to ask experienced hobbyist and let them set the rules. Instead a government official will write a law based on the loudest voice which is always a well funded lobbyist. Those are never the hobby's lobbyist.
If you want to look at the insanity of rules look no further than the interstate transport ban on salamanders due to bsal fears. Nearly 200 species of salamander (many native) can no longer be taken across state lines due to the fear that they may carry bsal. The fact that they are kept in glass boxes and not exposed to the wild was not taken into consideration. However the native tiger salmander whose larvae are used for bait was not included. It seems there is a huge fear of captive salamanders transferring bsal to the wild, but not the ones that get a hook placed through them and dunked into wild and remote bodies of water.
A final note on lobbying and information. If you want to support the hobby in a meaningful way the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council has an Aquatics Defense Fund you can donate to here. We fall way behind the reptile keepers who support USARK very well. Hopefully this isn't a violation of MFK rules, but here is the link.
http://pijac.org/aquatic
