Archives of The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 29, Number 2;   February, 2002

Turtle Farmers Seek Relaxed Restrictions on Pet Sales

by Janet McConnaughey

Since 1986 more than 95 million pet turtles, sanitized in the egg and certified salmonella-free by the Louisiana agriculture department, have been exported for the pet store trade in other countries. Eleven million were exported last year.

Most of the nation's turtle farmers are in Louisiana, where the business started during the Depression, picking up turtles from the swamps. There are now 56 turtle farms here.

The big centers are Pierre Part, which has a population of 3,053 and 13 turtle farms. Jonesville's 2,720 residents include owners of 19 turtle farms. Turtle farmers even went to Washington in October in an attempt to convince the Food and Drug Administration to drop its rule against selling turtles less than four inches long as pets.

"We've done some real good work and we've got the salmonella matter solved," said Ed Jolly, head of the Independent Turtle Farmers Association, one of two turtle farmers' groups in Louisiana.

But the FDA may be more likely to tighten regulations on lizards, snakes and other cold blooded critters than it is to relax the restrictions on turtles.

In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that states ban pet reptile sales if education about salmonella risks doesn't cut the infection rate.

And on Sept. 6, The Humane Society of the United States called on the FDA to ban the sale of live reptiles as pets in the United States. Not only do they carry salmonella, but the $2 billion-a-year trade is a threat to wildlife and is cruel to the pets, wrote Teresa Telecky, director of the society's wildlife trade program.

"Reptiles are among the most inhumanely treated animals in the pet trade. An estimated 90 percent of all wild-caught reptiles are dead within the first year of captivity," according to the society.

There were fewer than five cases of reptile-associated salmonella poisoning per 10 million U.S. residents from 1973 through 1983, the CDC said. Then the rate started climbing. The 1973 rate has been equaled or surpassed every year since 1987; it was more than doubled in 1995 and 1996.

During the early 1970s, about 14 percent of salmonella infections came from small pet turtles. In 1999, the CDC estimated that pet reptiles or amphibians were the source of about 93,000 salmonella cases a year - 7 percent of all cases. No more recent estimate was available.

"That is an important public health revelation. This is a dangerous, dangerous pet," said Dr. Eugene J. Gangarosa of Emory University in Atlanta, whose research in 1973 prompted the turtle ban. Seeing the growth of exports, he wrote an editorial in 1985 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, calling for a ban on pet turtle shipments to other countries.

"Undaunted and without conscience, the industry continues to export its lethal product beyond the reach of these constraints to distant lands," he wrote.

In a recent interview, he said his opinion hasn't changed. He said he was aware that Ron Siebeling, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University, had developed and the state agriculture had approved a method of killing salmonella bacteria on and in the egg.

However, he said he and his colleagues were never convinced that the process really solved the problem. The FDA objected to later versions of Siebeling's process because they used antibiotics and because there was no way to guarantee that turtles would stay salmonella-free. Siebeling refused to talk to The Associated Press about his work.

"I think the key question is, have they had peer-reviewed data that says that they have found a safe method? That will eliminate the organism permanently?" Gangarosa said.

That could do more than change the official stand on tiny turtles, he said. "If that data is applicable to other reptilian pets, then maybe this could be a safe pet."