It was with a sense of great foreboding that Bronx Zoo herpetology curator John Behler complied with a mandate to return 33 young endangered ploughshare tortoises to the island of Madagascar in 1998. Behler had rescued the animals—less than half of those stolen from a conservation breeding colony in 1996—a few months earlier from a small zoo in the Netherlands, where the Dutch government had stashed them after an illegal exotic-pet dealer got cold feet. But Dutch commercial animal trader Olaf Pronk, who was well known for dealing in rare Malagasy reptiles, pushed the Madagascar government to sue to get the tortoises back.
“It became a messy legal battle,” recalls British conservationist Richard Lewis, director of Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Madagascar program, which originally bred the tortoises. “The Bronx Zoo was worried, rightly or wrongly, that the animals were going to just disappear again.”
A national Dutch court ruled that ...
