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Reported this afternoon....

Hundreds of Venus flytraps poached in NC, arrest warrants out for 2 suspects

Darn. I have seen worse though. I don't know what they plan to do with 600 trashy wild flytraps, I doubt anybody would want illegal horrible venus fly traps on the black market

"from conservation land in Boiling Spring Lakes".

Congratulations, dip-sticks! You just committed a Class H felony offense in the state of North Carolina. I hope the judge nails your hairy butts to the wall to make an example out of you.

MikeB wrote:"from conservation land in Boiling Spring Lakes".

Congratulations, dip-sticks! You just committed a Class H felony offense in the state of North Carolina. I hope the judge nails your hairy butts to the wall to make an example out of you.

LMAO. That would teach them. Why poach a plant when you could sell something like gold for an instance. What are people’s main intentions with these plants? They have everything else they could be selling but no, they think a plant that is on the verge of extinction is a better choice to go with, what a shame.


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Do a Google search on "Venus Fly Trap Extract" and you'll see what they're doing with the plants. The snake oil industry is alive and well.

Wow!!! It’s even being sold on Amazon (what isn’t? ). That makes more sense than them selling the plants to individuals. And there’s no proof the extract does any good…just preying on scared people. I wonder how many “backpacking trips” those guys have made in the past!

A similar thing happened on Orton's Plantation by Cape Fear several years back. The caught two guys with backpacks full of over 1,000 flytraps. I believe they all got jail time. If I'm not mistaken, taking them on protected land carries a $5,000 fine and 10 years in prison. That is per plant.

Greenleaf_999 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2024 12:52 pm LMAO. That would teach them. Why poach a plant when you could sell something like gold for an instance. What are people’s main intentions with these plants? They have everything else they could be selling but no, they think a plant that is on the verge of extinction is a better choice to go with, what a shame.

Gold is harder to pick up off of (or dig out of) the ground, expensive to buy, and may not make you a profit depending on what the market does. Poaching plants is free if you got a shovel and a backpack.

(Don't get me wrong, they shouldn't be doing that. But I can see why they do it, in the same way that I can see why phone scammers try to steal people's savings. Profit.)

I wish I lived down that way just to watch for and catch their slimy asses. People just like them are why we have so few wild animals and plant life remaining. In Africa they openly hunt poachers.

Only one solution. Poach the poachers.

In the immortal words of Charlie Daniels:

Just take them rascals out in the swamp
Put 'em on their knees and tie 'em to a stump
Let the rattlers and the bugs and the alligators do the rest

I’ve got a little piece of swamp that some surveyors told me has some cottonmouths that ain’t ever seen a human…I could loan the use of a stump out for a while, I suppose …been a gator seen a little piece down the creek, too.

Panman wrote:A similar thing happened on Orton's Plantation by Cape Fear several years back. The caught two guys with backpacks full of over 1,000 flytraps. I believe they all got jail time. If I'm not mistaken, taking them on protected land carries a $5,000 fine and 10 years in prison. That is per plant.

That is correct! I did see that on the news when I was visiting my grandparents up in North Carolina when they were visiting friends, but I was young and also very interested in Venus fly traps, so then I only cared about the news at that time and I didn’t pay attention to my grandma telling me to go get her a Pepsi from the fridge. It was honestly funny to see her reaction when I asked her about what she needed. There are too many people that think they can do this and take plants from the wild, if they have All of this money, even though it isn’t much per plant, they should’ve invested in a research to make a synthetic extract, instead of taking the plants from the wild. They have been doing this for as long as I can remember, it’s not brilliant at all, it’s only going to get worse and worse for these poachers and the plants of course! The poachers deserve a larger punishment, they should also find the main source of whoever is distributing these plants, because the plants aren’t going to survive in their original environment with people that don’t care about them but only money. They could be buying these plants from the big box stores if they really wanted a safer route, but they instead insist of theft/poaching. And I laughed at the one man in NC that went to jail for every plant he poached with his "metal spoon"


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Fishkeeper wrote:

Greenleaf_999 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2024 12:52 pm LMAO. That would teach them. Why poach a plant when you could sell something like gold for an instance. What are people’s main intentions with these plants? They have everything else they could be selling but no, they think a plant that is on the verge of extinction is a better choice to go with, what a shame.

Gold is harder to pick up off of (or dig out of) the ground, expensive to buy, and may not make you a profit depending on what the market does. Poaching plants is free if you got a shovel and a backpack.

(Don't get me wrong, they shouldn't be doing that. But I can see why they do it, in the same way that I can see why phone scammers try to steal people's savings. Profit.)

But here’s the thing, they have gotten smarter, I remember reading that they will use regular teaspoons to dig them up, and leave them all over the place. It was an article I looked at and I was in complete shock. If they had a shovel they would be seen farther back by the park rangers or even the guards. It is more obvious. If they didn’t do it at all, they wouldn’t be there in jail!


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Bluefire wrote:Only one solution. Poach the poachers.

lol, rob em. Take everything that they are worth!

No but really why can’t they just get a life like everyone else? This is why I think it’s stupid to be poaching plants. They don’t make hardly anything off of them except the extracts like the other user stated. I hope that someday the park rangers can start using lethal force, that’ll blow them away, then they’ll be saying;

"Hey dude get off of there!! Did you see what happened to bob last week? Some angry cop in a truck started blasting at him with a 12 gauge shotgun! Go man go!! It’s not safe."

At least that’s what I am hoping they’ll do and they’ll go find something better to do with their scummy lives.


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