Numbers of veiled chameleons....

Hi all!
I need information for a project I'm involved with...
I need numbers as to how many veiled chameleons are kept/ bred/ imported/ sold in the pet trade in GTA/Canada/US/North America. Can anyone give me any of this information or tell me where I might be able to find it? I would really appreciate any help you can give me on this!

I would suggest to contact the EPA for the US numbers, or a big breeding company, they may have an idea on where to start digging. Do you also need numbers for Europe? I am in quite good contact with a store and breeding facility that is among the most eminent ones in western Europe, they could certainly help as far as local numbers in France and the nearby countries are concerned.

For the # imported you might try contacting TRAFFIC (www.traffic.org).

kinyonga said:

Hi all!
I need information for a project I'm involved with...
I need numbers as to how many veiled chameleons are kept/ bred/ imported/ sold in the pet trade in GTA/Canada/US/North America. Can anyone give me any of this information or tell me where I might be able to find it? I would really appreciate any help you can give me on this!

Click to expand...

I would to it by ratio. The number of certain species, or imports, can be reasonably "nailed down". Then, you could compare the ratio of sales of those known quantities, to the unknown quantities.

For example, if the known number of imported Panther chameleons is 1000 per year, and a random sampling of 25 keepers here revealed that they own an average of 4 panthers each (100 panthers total), and only 3 of those were wild caught, then you know that for every panther sold, 1 in 33 is a wild caught. That means there has to be about 33,000 cb panthers. Then, if you compared this to the RATIO of the number of Veileds owned, compared to the number of Panthers owned by the average keeper (lets say 5:1), you might come up with a pretty good number (putting our number at about 165,000). The problem would be that conducting the survey here might skew toward a higher proportion of panthers relative to veileds because there are probably more people here with panthers compared to the overall pet trade since we're net saavy and most trade over the net.

Thats how I'd do it. I used that method to try to estimate the rarity of certain collectibles. I don't see how you could otherwise tally them up when so many are sold directly to pet stores.

Steve

Just some clarification...I just need ONE total of how many veiled chameleons there are in all of North America. However, it would even be helpful if I had the total number in any of the smaller areas I listed.

Sorry for the confusion!

Thanks for the replies so far!

I'm curious to see what you will find, Kinyonga. Since sellers and breeders aren't required to provide any paperwork to buyers, I don't see how the number of CB chameleons could be tracked. I'd like to be wrong though.

I'm sure that the numbers I end up with won't be very accurate.
At the rate I'm going, I don't know if I'll even have any kind of an answer.