History in the pet trade
 

I was curious if anyone here knew the history of bearded dragons in the pet trade ? I assume they were smuggled at some point could be wrong though. I'm just curious if anyone knows the story behind it all and the amount of animals that are massive amount of dragons came from. Either way, thought I would ask out of curiosity. Thanks.

Well, there's still ongoing trafficking of Pogona species:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile...ESTINATION.pdf

While that article correctly points out that Australia's wildlife export legislation dates only to 1999, I don't see that it notes that basically the same protections were in force at state level for quite some time previous. Some info on the earlier legislation can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enviro...ation_Act_1999

I've seen a few off hand published references that suggest that trafficking of common beardies began in the 1970s, which seems to have been the Golden Age of herp smuggling so the assumption is pretty easy to make. For example:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5630957/

Someone will certainly point out here that zoo offspring is part of the captive population, which is of course very likely true to some very small extent. It isn't often noted that early (like, most of the 20th century) zoo stock is also quite likely to have the same questionable origins as hobby stock. See Jennie Erin Smith's 'Stolen World'.