I've never kept herps. They don't interest me as a fish guy. But everyone around me does. Where I live, there is a carousel of bankrupt reptile stores, more than with fish by far. The business side of the hobby is a shambles, but there are a lot of keepers, and a lot of overlap with the aquarium crowd.
I've only ever stumbled into conversations with two groups of aquarists looking for banned in the trade fish. One group was fooling itself that they were in a conservation program, even though they were disorganized, solitary keepers with no structured program. They talked the talk but didn't do the work. The other was straight out obsessed with keeping ecologically dangerous species because they were all very special people.
But it seems the herp conversations around me regularly take that turn. Because I had connections in the fish trade for years, I was semi regularly asked if I knew someone who could smuggle in whatever herp. I don't engage, but there is something in the reptile hobby that is going to come back and bite the serious, ethical people there. There are so many keepers who flit through, want things they can't manage, and then go do something else. You can't change that, I guess, as it seems to run deep. Just as with the monster fish people who 'need' to have snakeheads, there's a moth to the flame thing with reptiles.
I think the fish hobby ends up whitelisted in a couple of decades. Already, the selection of fish through the near monopolies has created a virtual whitelist. If it weren't for online sellers, there would be very few options. If Petco and the like were all that existed, the market for fish would be brutally limited by their choices. For fish, the danger of legal regulation is one thing, but the reality of market control is a more serious one right now. The average hobbyist no longer finds it easy to become informed about possibilities (the internet is great if you know what you're looking for, but with the collapse of the organized hobby's collective knowledge base, new people don't realize what they could be looking for).
I'm pessimistic. I think there's a lot of good in both hobbies, but we're possibly in the tail end of them. We have to follow our own ethics, and maybe build alternative distribution networks if breeding fish ever becomes fashionable again. If we could rebuild physically meeting, uncommon fish exchanging clubs, save the ones that are still thriving and be able to present a case that weren't just consumers of fish, but producers who value them, we might have a chance.
