Nice Leopard, Steve, wish I could get one.

The Aussie prissiness about animals grew, I think, out of the disenfranchised city-crim beginnings of our earliest settlers (the convicts). They'd had no right to hunt and didn't fancy getting their necks stretched for doing it, so only bothered to leave town to see horse races. Then, when free settlers released rabbits and foxes for sport, those who did want to hunt spent most time chasing exotics, which soon became pests. This continued until Peter Singer and Laurie Levy came along. Australia was a place with a distinct fauna, and greenies soon hit on the idea that anything native should be sacrosanct but that hunters could chase introduced species if they really had to.

Because the game species on most other continents are native to their lands, urbanised Australians now shrink in horror from the idea that anyone hunts them. So, whenever there is a whiff of endangerment such as a CITES reference, Australia can be expected in the vanguard of import bans.

That's my take on it anyway

- Paul