Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiracy to Violate the Lacey Act by Illegally Trafficking Threatened Alligator Snapping Turtles

August 21, 2017

Alligator snapping turtle. Credit: Gary Tucker, USFWS.

The Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week that Travis Leger and Rickey Simon, both of Sulphur, Louisiana, and Jason Leckelt of Wilburton, Oklahoma, have all pled guilty to conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act by illegally trafficking alligator snapping turtles.

The mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. We are both a leader and trusted partner inStat-Pak test (from 2006) (tests are described in [@bib10]). For the sampled cattle, the life histories were made up of the cattle movement data (stored in the Cattle Tracing System) and testing (stored in APHA's cattle testing SAM database) histories. As part of the national TB surveillance program, cattle are tested using the Single Intradermal Comparative Cervical Tuberculin (SICCT) test and results are stored in the SAM database. For each sampled badger, its main social group was defined as the group in which it spent the majority of its recorded life, its sampled group was that in which it was captured when it was sampled, and its infected group was that in which it was captured when infection was first detected. For each sampled cow, the main and sampled herds were identified