Spiking Your Drink

What was the rancher charged with after his cows walked through the tall grass? Cattle rustling!!

As surprising as it seems, livestock are not the only commodities that are stolen off the range. In deserts of Mexico, it’s the cactus, not the cattle that are being pilfered. The

In fact, the illegal removal of these unique desert sentinels has helped make trafficking in Mexican wildlife the third largest domestic smuggling industry, behind drugs and guns.

As shocking as this appears the illegal trade in cacti is actually fuelled by well meaning individuals wanting to make their homes more eco-friendly.

With burgeoning population growth in the arid portions of the American southwest, many individuals are unwittingly becoming recipients of stolen goods because of their desire to reduce their ecological footprint. Rather than gracing their property with the traditional lawn and shrubs, they are electing to xeriscape, a type of landscape does not require supplemental irrigation.

Since many of these new residences are actually winter homes for snowbirds in Canada and the northeastern United States, their owners often have sufficient money to pay “the big bucks” to obtain rare and unique specimens that have been illegally spirited away from their Mexican homeland. Almost 500 species of Mexican cactus are found no where else in the world.

Adding to the cactus woes are the arduous border restrictions between United States and Mexico that make legal shipments from registered Mexican nurseries so costly and onerous that it can actually be quicker and cheaper for the plants to cross the border illegally. So prolific are these clandestine shipments, that more than one third of Mexico’s 684 indigenous cactus species are now considered endangered