David Quammen

Orinoco crocodile, Crocodylus intermedius) or meager remnants of habitat (the Chinese alligator, Alligator sinensis). By the early 1970s, many of those had been badly affected by decades of unrestricted harvest. Three million American alligators had been killed in Louisiana between 1880 and 1933. Seven million caiman skins had been exported from Brazil’s state of Amazonas between 1950 and 1965. In

the early 1960s there were twenty-five reptile tanners operating in the United States; one company alone tanned 1.5 million crocodilian skins per year. Export had always been a central fact of the trade, since most of the tanneries and most of the customers were in countries other than where crocodilians lived. Somewhere between five and ten million skins were shipped internationally each year

Since gold was a patriarchal symbol of virginity,