They were still common when I took that picture. You'd come across the occasional old-timer grumbling about it being illegal to hunt them for food (this has been illegal since 1983, by federal law) - not because it's now impossible to do so, but because it's more inconvenient.
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Dhubs have been food for the bedouin for centuries, they'd argue. It's tradition. Centuries of hunting them didn't wipe the dhubs out, so any law banning hunting for that reason can't be accurate. Pointless - and unenforced - laws can be ignored with a clear conscience.
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We'd bring up habitat loss, explain that the hunting was just one issue endangering the dhubs - hunting plus the fact that there was less and less space for the lizards to live in because of urbanization. The desert was, after all, changing fast. More fantasy towers, fewer dunes.
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They would scoff. Wave at the massive expanse of empty desert all around us and tell us we were speaking nonsense, that the coastal cities might be growing but "out here" nothing had changed. And besides, they were not the ones building.
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They were right. They weren't.
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Even if we were right, even if the dhubs were in decline; why, they argued, should they be forced to abandon a tradition their grandfathers and grandfathers' grandfathers had passed down to them because of what rich men in the cities were doing?
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I didn't have an answer beyond, "Because if you don't, there will be no more dhubs. Your children and their children will know them only from your stories." I still don't have a better one.
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A few years ago we started noticing the "show killings." (I don't know if they'd been happening all along, and we only found out about them then because of social media.) Guys posting photos of coolers and boxes filled with dead dhubs, bragging about how many they'd bagged.
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These men were not hunting to eat. This was not cultural. This was sport. Someone suggested they were doing it in part for the extra frisson of breaking the law, knowing how unlikely it was that they'd ever be prosecuted, and in part because some men just like to kill things.
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U. aegyptia is now listed as "Vulnerable" by the IUCN, and declining. The official drivers of its decline as listed as "habitat loss and over-harvesting".
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