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213 Wayne King was so busy working to defeat Mariculture’s proposed amendment to the Mason Act, New York’s faunal protection law, that he could spend only a bit of time on the petition to the US Department of Interior to list the green turtle. On April 23, 1974, he sent a letter to Secretary of Interior Rogers Morton, asking Interior to list the green turtle as endangered. He knew Interior’s staff had data supporting the December 1973 proposed listing still in their files, including three reports Frank Lund had written on the status of foreign sea turtle populations . Rather than repeat all that material, King simply stated that it was the New York Zoological Society’s scientific opinion that listing the green turtle as endangered was warranted. Renewed international demand for green turtle products, revitalized by a Caribbean turtle farm, was increasing an already too severe drain on wild green turtles. Moreover , the farm was promoting consumer demand by falsely claiming that turtle mariculture was an important asset in turtle conservation and could provide a new source of protein for starving nations. If Interior placed the green turtle on the federal endangered species list, its importation would be prohibited.1 Making full use of the new categories of risk, King asked also that the secretary list the loggerhead and Pacific ridley turtles as threatened. The loggerhead was being subjected to a variety of threats, including shoreline development adjacent to its nesting beaches in eastern Florida and ensnarement in the nets of shrimp trawling vessels operating offshore of Georgia and South Carolina. A threatened listing would provide a basis for selective implementation of a set of regulations to address these threats. For supporting data, King referred Secretary Morton to information already on file with Interior’s Office of Endangered Species and International Activities and to the reports of the 1969 and 1971 meetings of the chapter fourteen Conservation through Commerce 214 The Case of the Green Turtle IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group. King concluded the letter by reminding the secretary that the United States had ratified the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which listed the loggerhead and ridleys as Appendix II species. To conform to CITES, these two species had to be on the US list of threatened species. Although the green turtle was also on the Appendix II list, “the problem resulting from the proliferation of turtle farms has become critical since the Convention was drafted.” This reason warranted listing the green turtle as endangered rather than threatened. From King’s perspective, if Mariculture succeeded in getting New York’s Mason Act amended, it would be because of the same set of inflated claims the farm’s supporters had made to the California assembly: the company’s success in captive breeding and in augmenting wild stocks through head-starting. He would have to deflate these claims with data showing how few of the eggs laid at the farm actually had hatched. When the Mason Act amendment passed, King urged the governor of New York to veto it. Fortunately, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation made the same case, and Governor Wilson did veto the bill. Mariculture did not take the New York governor’s veto lying down. In October, the company’s lawyers filed suit against both the environment and agriculture departments to stop them from enforcing the Mason Act against its sales in the state. They argued that the Mason Act did not apply to farm-raised green turtle products because they were not made from “wild animals.” Moreover, importation of the farm’s products would in fact serve the purposes of the act. Its products would greatly enhance the green turtle’s chances of survival in the wild by displacing products made from wild-caught turtles. While it was true that Mariculture was still buying wild-laid eggs and hatchlings to build up its breeding stock, the lawyers argued that the products to be sold in New York were from turtles raised from doomed eggs and claimed that at least 1 percent of the eggs collected were released as yearlings on the nesting beaches.2 In January 1975, the trial judge granted Mariculture a preliminary injunction, barring the environment and agriculture commissioners from enforcing the Mason Act against its sale of marine turtle products in New York. The state attorney general appealed, and lawyers for King’s New York Zoological Society filed a friend-of-the-court...

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