Bryan Christy has Moved!
July 24th, 2015
Thank you for visiting this site dedicated to The Lizard King book. For more, and latest on Bryan Christy’s work, please visit www.bryanchristy.com.
On the surface, Strictly Reptiles of Hollywood, Florida is the world's largest reptile import-export company, legally selling hundreds of thousands of snakes, spiders, and other creepy crawlies each year, and the likely source behind the green iguana or turtle in your local pet store.
But to Special Agent Chip Bepler of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, owner Mike Van Nostrand and his father are the brains and bank behind a vast global wildlife smuggling network.
In his non-fiction book, THE LIZARD KING, author Bryan Christy takes readers on a wild ride into a criminal jungle extending from South Florida through Europe, terminating in Southeast Asian mastermind Anson Wong, "the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking," who uses cheap reptiles as a front to traffic the world's most precious animals, including rhinos, pandas, and snow leopards.
THE LIZARD KING is the true story of crafty smugglers supplying rare animals to collectors and zoo curators worldwide; it is the story of an amazing multi-million dollar industry in genetically-designed snakes selling for $100,000; and it is a story of obsession.
...And not just the bad guys'. In researching this book, Christy was bitten between the eyes by a blood python, chased by a mother alligator, sprayed by a bird-eating tarantula, and ejaculated on by a Bengal tiger.
Read More Behind The Lizard King››
Thank you for visiting this site dedicated to The Lizard King book. For more, and latest on Bryan Christy’s work, please visit www.bryanchristy.com.
Here’s my take on the Florida Python Hunt, running in National Geographic.
Opinion: Floridas Great Snake Hunt Is a Cheap Stunt
The case against the states wildly popular python hunt.
You can read more on this over at www.bryanchristy.com/blog
For all this theAtlantic.com calls me Lisa Simpson. Now, if only I could get a call to do a voice on the Simpsons. Moe, a beeuh Moe. I’m dying over heah.
In 2010, I took some of the first video ever seen from inside an Indonesian reptile slaughterhouse and have written a bit about the business here. Last year, after Swiss filmmaker Karl Amman showed The Medan Connection (viewable below) exposing the inner workings of the trade, Swiss parliament voted to ban imports of python skins from Indonesia on grounds of animal cruelty. Since Switzerland is important to the three major buyers of reptile skins-the fashion houses Hermes, Gucci, Prada-this was significant.
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In the wake of Amman’s film, the International Trade Center (ITC) of the World Trade Organization in cooperation with CITES launched a project to study the python skin industry. I attended an early meeting in Geneva in which the ITC-CITES skin project was first discussed and because of what I had seen in the field and because of the role Amman’s graphic film had played in prompting the study, I pressed the participants to include humane treatment as part of their report, over the objection of some participants. Since I had begun my legal career specializing in WTO issues, I also questioned whether it was appropriate for CITES as an international trade and conservation body to lend its name to a wildlife effort conducted by the WTO, a commercial treaty organization. Giving a CITES ‘stamp of approval’ to a WTO project was a dangerous precedent, I suggested, and would likely not be tolerated by CITES parties if the WTO were researching trade in more popular wildlife species, such as lions. I questioned whether governments should be funding a study that clearly benefited a small group of powerful fashion houses, who could certainly afford a study, but whose spokespeople claimed ignorance of where their snakeskins came from and how the pythons they bought were killed.
“In Viet Nam, the research team observed at one slaughterhouse that the live snakes (P. bivittatus) have their mouths and anus sealed using rubber bands. An air compressor is then used to fill the animal’s alimentary canal with air which has the same effect as filling the animal with water (i.e. to facilitate skinning), only the animal is still alive, not having had its head cut off or its brain crushed first. Post-inflation, a rubber banc was also tied around the heart to cause cardiac arrest.”
Some other of the report’s findings: