Sorry. This is deeply concerning for a multitude of reasons, which are overlooked entirely by this one sided business story & its promoters. I don’t share the widespread celebrity/rewilder/ billionaire/novice nature lover enthusiasm I’m seeing here.
1/x https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/10/who-doesnt-love-a-turtle-the-teenage-boys-on-a-mission-to-rewild-britain-with-reptiles?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Those doing this have great enthusiasm & passion, but 2 well meaning boys age 17 who literally say they can read animal behaviour using telepathy are not my idea of responsible experts... what could possibly go wrong, we might like to ask?

I’ve worked with, trained with, translocated & researched on herpetofauna over the years. From that perspective I see good reasons why experienced experts are not doing this. It’s like sticking exotic daffodils all over the countryside or willy nilly tree planting, or worse.

It is recognised in research as a high risk:high cost idea fraught with failures. Here are 1,200 examples of unforeseen/often insurmountable complications that have arisen from previous efforts by experienced 'experts' to translocate animals into the wild: …https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/acv.12534

There are pitfalls & unintended consequences galore + animal welfare + diseases + genetic inferiority + ecosystem impacts & all of this risk is for private profit. It is not a charity, it is a business breeding wild pets for profit.

By definition, the bottom line will be budget & customer demand, not conservation optimisation. I cannot see how it can be financially viable for 2 17-yr olds to thoroughly monitor long term welfare & all ecosystem & population impacts and.../

.... and consequentially remove all cryptic animals & any disease they spread at some random time in the future if they discover they’ve messed up in 5-10 years time.

Furthermore, there are likely to be naive rewilding enthusiasts all over the place queuing up with their coin, clueless about the ecology, risks of impacts & unintended consequences of releasing such captive-bred, non-local provenance, genetically inferior animals into the wild.

Are they all going to pay for long term, pre & post-translocation assessment & monitoring at the scale required to assess & secure good outcomes on welfare, disease, genetics, breeding, species population & ecosystem impacts? It will be near impossible with cryptic mobile species

It’s not easy to tag/mark & recapture all individuals of these species.

There will be biodiversity offsetting companies wanting to chuck cash at them to sign off developer obligations, to enable builders to trash existing habitat & release genetically inferior inappropriate alternatives, into unsuitable other spaces, of unproven carrying capacity.

The problem is not just the species absence, whether genuinely native or not. It is the multitude of reasons that they are now absent. For example inferior quality of degraded habitats & population dynamics within them + impacts of introduced species & diseases.

This is one of the reasons why many translocations have been disasters even when done by people with a lot more experience. Controversial professional guidance for ecologists was withdrawn for such reasons over a decade ago.

And this: if I hired 2 teenagers to create a Covid vaccine in my garden shed & then released it on to the human population, or set free mink infected with a possible SARS virus the world scream in horror. Why? Because science. We have the same level of responsibility to nature.