I know this is not the most popular thing to say but I agree with you 100%. Some of the LFS are partly to blame but...
I have been in a lot of hobbies and most of them have one thing in common.
Ham Radio: You Need to pass an exam and each level of Amateur Radio operation require you to pass harder exams. You cannot buy new radios or amplifiers at a store without having a License in hand. Of course fleebay has now created a bypass.
Scuba Diving: License not required but it's almost impossible to dive without one. Each level requires harder written and physical exam passes.
RC Planes: You don't need a license yet in the USA but you do in a lot of other countries. Licensing is coming to the USA very soon.
Drones: You can't do anything really useful with an expensive drone unless you pass a exam and get licensed.
So yeah IMHO there in lies the problem. Anyone can just buy a fish or corals, even an extremely rare animal that is most likely an endangered animal without having a clue as to how to keep it alive.
If twenty years ago we had adopted a licensing system that required people to pass exams in order to have the ability to buy livestock we would not be in this situation. We could have easily created maybe a dozen levels of licenses that ranged from a Level one that allowed you to go into an LFS and buy the easiest and most plentiful animals like live rock a common anemone and clown fish. Then as you gain knowledge and experience you could take a level 2 exam and move up. Eventually some dedicated people would reach the top through a lot of hard work and proven success. These people would become a certified breeder in either fish or coral category or maybe both.
These top level people would be the only ones allowed to buy rare fish or corals and if I was setting up that exam I would require proof that you could breed certain fish like Clowns plus others and have meticulous logs for review.
A system like this would have spurred more people to become captive breeders because it would be lucrative. In return as fish stocks grew for a certain breed they could be added as approved fish for people with lower license levels.
If we had self regulated with the aid of the government early on when the signs of problems were already visible to us but not on most countries radars they would have agreed to enforce laws that we helped create and they would have recognized a licensing system that we created. Then we could have gone further and created a lobbying organization that was funded by the licensing fee's, manufactures and LFS.
This new organization would have the ability to influence the politics so that by now we would have a seat at the regulatory table because we would have fish like Yellow Tangs and dozens of other fish already being sold by the thousands each year as captive bred and now available to level one license holders and the excess released into the wild to build up the populations.
At this point we would be respected as a organization/Hobby that was helping to fix the problems instead of one that is making the problems worst.
I am not guessing at this outcome, I have seen it play out in Ham radio. In Amateur Radio we have Radio Spectrum that we use that is worth billions of dollars to commercial companies and the FCC would love to sell it to them. The problem for the FCC is that we have over 750,000 licensed operators and a lobby group called the ARRL that makes sure they don't take away any of our radio spectrum or usage rights.
As it stands the reefing community is just a lot of individuals and small companies that are not organized into a cohesive group and are therefore vulnerable to every new law that pops into some politicians head.
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Yes it’s so hard to understand that the least effective way of telling someone not to do something is just to tell them “don’t do it”.
