AGFC approves captive wildlife regulations

After six months of often contentious debate with amateur and professional wildlife handlers, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission approved captive wildlife regulations Thursday at its monthly meeting in Little Rock.

Among the new regulations, the commission created a permit with associated requirements to possess venomous reptiles and also a permit to collect wildlife for scientific purposes.

Additionally, Game and Fish Commission staff will evaluate risks to human health and safety, to native fish and wildlife populations and to agriculture in its permit issuing process. The regulations also will encode standards for safe and humane confinement of captive wildlife, as well as inspection protocols.

With some exceptions, the regulations will prohibit issuing breeding permits for animals like apes, baboons, bats, box turtles and large carnivores.

Permitted species will include boa constrictors, cottonmouths and rattlesnakes.

Unrestricted wildlife will include American bison, various peafowl, gerbils, guinea pigs, wolf/dog hybrids and camels.

During the draft process, the commission received extensive input from citizen herpetology enthusiasts that keep and breed native and exotic venomous reptiles, as well as from professionals like Susan Altrui, director of the Little Rock Zoo.

In other business, the commission awarded elk hunting permits to the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation, the Arkansas Wildlife Federation and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. The permit awarded to the Game and Fish Foundation will be a youth hunting permit. The recipient organizations will auction the permits for fundraising purposes.

In non-regulatory business, Darrell Bowman, chief of the commission’s fisheries division, briefed the commission on efforts to restore the integrity of various streams around the state by removing low head dams. Many of these dams are slab crossings, Bowman said.

Others are obsolete water retention structures, such as the one on the West Fork of the White River in Washington County. They are dangerous in high water, and they have profound consequences for aquatic species movement and migration, sedimentation and erosion.

Bowman said the agency has teamed with 18 other government and non-government organizations to form a stream connectivity team to develop strategies for removing outdated dams and creating more suitable structures where needed.

“This is not an advocacy effort to attack functional dams, but to address dams that don’t function anymore or stream crossings,” Bowman said. “The goal is to restore the natural, free-flowing heritage of Arkansas streams.”

Jessica Feldtz, a human dimensions specialist for the commission, briefed commissioners on a recent survey of commercial fishermen.