How the TSA Plans On Inspecting Your Monkey 114
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the I'm-gonna-need-to-check-your-monkey dept.
from the I'm-gonna-need-to-check-your-monkey dept.
The uncertainty of what might happen to your service monkey at an airport security checkpoint won't keep you awake at night anymore, thanks to the TSA. They have issued an easy to follow list of how they will ensure your helper monkey won't go all Planet of the Apes on your flight. Some of the security techniques used to make sure your primate is not a terrorist include: "Security Officers will conduct a visual inspection on the service monkey and will coach the handler on how to hold the monkey during the visual inspection. The inspection process may require that the handler to take off the monkey's diaper as part of the visual inspection."
Re:Where's Dieter When You Need Him? (Score:2, Informative)
I'll admit it, I only ever watched Sprockets for the dancing.
"And now is the part of the show where we dance"
wow. they *exist* (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.monkeyhelpers.org/ [monkeyhelpers.org]
Wow. Seriously - wow.
Re:I'LL Say It: Shock The Monkey!!! (Score:1, Informative)
Umm...
Peter Gabriel?
Re:A service monkey? Really? (Score:3, Informative)
Or eat their face [hubpages.com] [NSFL]
Re:That's not unusual. (Score:3, Informative)
I cultivate rare and endagered plants, to try and reduce the strain on habitat populations from poaching, or to assist in ensuring we have a healthily sized pool of genetically pure reserve specimens. Part the problem of ex-situ conservation efforts in the past is that they've involved only cultivating a few specific individuals of a species that was likely to go extinct in habitat but could be reintroduced, when you only have a few then you don't have enough genetic variation to ensure a viable population to reintroduce as they may not be able to adapt to disease or similar fast enough.
Because this plant material is rare and endangered, it is not sensible to collect more than just a small amount of seeds, or plant material, and some propagation therefore involves taking cuttings and rooting them down, which gives you multiple plants, but they're all clones of the species from that one cutting. It is imperative to keep all plants whether grown from seed and hence genetically different, or grown from cuttings or using tissue culture well documented and labelled, as it would be a tragedy for example, if specimens were lost and only those remaining all happened to be cuttings from the same original parent on a plant that requires cross-pollination between two genetically distinct species as you would not get any seed- effectively although you had multiple plants, they'd all be a clone of the same plant, and that plant may well end up being the last of it's kind making the species effectively extinct.
With this material I send it all across the world to various botanical gardens and nurseries who are responsible in helping with this type of conservation and will also go on to propagate these species ensuring a good healthy global reserve collection. As such I've had a lot of experience with CITES as pretty much all of the species are CITES listed (although some are not). I've found the results to be wildly different from country to country, the theory is that any species that is CITES listed should need a CITES certificate to move between country to country (although the EU is a special case- it's treated as one country so movement from say, England to Germany requires no such certificate).
Enforcement ranges from strict to the point where some countries wont even allow export of CITES materials at all (Mexico generally tends to be this way) which actually hurts conservation because it means the only materials that get out do so through illegal smuggling, to pretty much no real enforcement at all even though the countries are CITES signatories (some Eastern European countries).
CITES really is a mess in this respect, for example I have seen for sale on eBay illegaly habitat collected plants from Chile (you can tell they are habitat collected because they have a white tint to them which only occurs on that plant from the salty mists in that region- something you can't replicate in cultivation) for sale by a seller in Bulgaria, so whilst you'd never get a plant like this into the UK directly, you can transfer it to Bulgaria whose customs officers appear to simply not care about any CITES enforcement and then move it using EU rules from Bulgaria to the UK. Of course, the Chilean export controls are clearly lacking too.
It doesn't suprise me that CITES one way was easy, but the other was a problem for you, and it really reflects how utterly pointless and counterproductive it generally is. If you were smuggling endangered species up from Mexico into Canada no one might bat an eyelid, but if you were trying to move legitimately cultivated specimens into the US to take to say Huntingdon Botanical Gardens in California, then you may well face the inquisition, and sometimes even with valid CITES certificates, or perhaps valid certificates with a slight typographic error on the species name may find these specimens seized and destroyed regardless- vital conservation material simply burnt because pretty much no country in the world actually understands how they're really supposed to enforce CITES.