Geckos are Paul Thomson's "bread and butter". Sure, snakes fetch more money. But over 30 years it has been the steady trade in geckos that has kept his reptile shop in Sheffield, England, afloat.
He sells brightly coloured tangerine albino geckos from Africa for $80 and giant day geckos from Madagascar for $99.
A calico tokay gecko crossed with a blue-headed green gecko will cost you $1200; a "normal" gecko just $40.
He also sells skinks and frogs and tarantulas and scorpions and monitor lizards. His is one of at least 100 such shops in Britain.
But one thing Mr Thomson and all those other shops do not sell is jewelled geckos from New Zealand.
"Pretty hard to get them out of New Zealand ... aren't they?"
But some jewelled gecko have made it on to the black market in Europe so it seems not all smugglers found it impossible.
Trading in any New Zealand gecko - buying one, selling one, even giving one away as a present - is prohibited under the 1953 Wildlife Act.
Section 63 1(b) says "No person may, without lawful authority, buy, sell, or otherwise dispose of ... protected wildlife."
The Act gives the ownership of all native species to the Crown.
But some New Zealanders think the Act is out of date.
They think it is time for New Zealand to carefully lift one corner of the blanket ban on trading and consider whether some species - maybe the jewelled gecko - might benefit from being legally bought and sold.
Dr Brendan Moyle is a wildlife economist at Massey University's Auckland campus who is "sympathetic to the idea" of commercialising some native species.
He believes New Zealand has an opportunity to open up a trade in captive-bred native species to kill off the smuggling trade and ultimately benefit wild populations.
"It's worth thinking about. That doesn't mean we should do it but we should at least have a debate about it."
He believes smuggling can be dealt with in three ways.
Firstly, increase the penalties for taking animals from the wild.
Secondly, improve monitoring of at-risk populations.
Thirdly, create a legal trade alongside other conservation measures "... because that finishes the poachers off".
"They are discouraged from poaching because the penalties are high ... and the legal guys are undercutting their market.
"It's a triple whammy that makes it hard for them to cope with."
Dr Moyle believes Australian policies on commercial crocodile trading point the way forward.
"It's actually quite a fascinating example."
Dr Moyle is a member of the World Conservation Union's Crocodile Specialist Group, which aims to conserve the world's 23 species of crocodile.
The reptile's main commercial value is in its skin; the leather turned into fashion accessories that fetch a premium price.
Dr Moyle mentions a Hermes handbag selling for $US50,000 ($NZ60,600).
" ... and it turns out $50,000 US ends up buying a lot of conservation".
Dr Moyle says it is one of the problems facing conservation of New Zealand species that there is never enough money.
"The first line of problem we always run into is that [the Department of Conservation] doesn't have enough money.
"There are some 3000-odd [New Zealand] species listed as endangered and there's just a handful that actually have endangered species programmes even written for them."
He says giving crocodiles a commercial value has meant landowners are taking more care of wild populations previously under pressure from poachers and habitat destruction.
"What happens is suddenly when crocodiles are worth money people start to increase the amount of river bank available for crocodiles because if you want eggs you need adult crocodiles - the more the better - and you need more nesting sites.
"So the more river bank you provide, which you can do by fencing it off from cattle so they don't ruin the river bank, the more females you get adding to the population."
The spin-off for Aboriginal communities is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars they earn collecting eggs.
Dr Moyle likens the egg collecting to duck hunting in New Zealand at the beginning of winter.
"Most of them are going to die anyway over winter so you have very little impact."
Dr Moyle believes commercialisation would reduce demand for wild animals because captive-bred specimens were often healthier, less disease prone and looked better.
"If you are collecting animals, you want pristine examples.
"Animals that live in the wild often get scratches and marks, which make them not worth much at all. So what you do is you can provide a quality and a quantity that means people are prepared to pay a premium.
"And often, if people also think these are legitimate specimens and it's supporting conservation, then they are prepared to pay a premium as well."
"So what you are doing is, instead of really flooding the market, you are going to people who are currently in the black market saying: 'We've got a better alternative. Just drop that market. Come over here'."
He believes regulating the captive breeding market would be relatively simple using DNA testing to confirm animals for sale came from captive populations.
Paul Thomson says no-one has ever come into his Sheffield shop offering to sell him a smuggled New Zealand jewelled gecko but he has no doubt they would be worth $NZ10,000 each on the black market.
"Very feasible. I'm sure there would be people over here who would pay that. No problem."
During his years in the business, Mr Thomson has seen what happens when new species come on the market.
"When a thing is not available over here, the first things that come out fetch ridiculous prices.
"There have been wild-caught snakes for example which has fetched [$NZ40,000-$60,000] no problem."
A wild-caught albino snake, he says, produced baby snakelets worth tens of thousands of dollars each when first offered for sale.
Mr Thomson says the value is not so much in the individual animal but in the new bloodline it brings to the captive breeding market - in the industry lingo, a new colour or design "morph".
"If you find something strange and unusual in the wild, you breed it and you put it into more things and then the offspring you get from that become valuable.
"Obviously the original colour morph ... loses its value with the spread."
That is why most of the geckos in his shop retail for not much more than $180 - too little, he points out, to make it worthwhile for a smuggler to fly to New Zealand and risk several months' jail by stealing a wild animal.
"We have the same thing over here. We have European tortoises which are found in France and Turkey.
"People used to go over there and smuggle them back.
"But now ... there's no point going over there and smuggling them because you can buy big ones over here quite cheap."
Former Act New Zealand member of Parliament Gerrard Eckhoff got a "huge roasting" when he raised the idea of commercialising native species 11 years ago in response to a gloomy outlook for kiwi in the wild.
Much of the barbed humour directed at him involved the image of kiwi being bred as Sunday roasts.
But, Mr Eckhoff says he also got support from people "who understood that it's not about eating the species at all".
"It's just about breeding them. Breeding and releasing or breeding and selling to other breeders."
Mr Eckhoff believes the farming principles that apply to sheep and cattle should be applied to the conservation of native species and that supplementary feeding during winter, along with predator protection, is of fundamental importance to the survival of native species.
"There was a family ... that lived on Waiheke Island and the kiwi used to come out of the bush and feed when they fed their chooks in the morning.
"So while they weren't domesticated, these things, the kiwi soon worked out where the food source was coming from."
Mr Eckhoff suggests the owners of land inhabited by jewelled gecko might improve the chances of the species by leaving a few dead rabbits around to attract flies.
"I'm not a zoologist. Far from it. But I do know that supplementary feeding of animals aids their breeding capacity."
And, Mr Eckhoff "can't see too many reasons" why landowners breeding gecko should not be able to sell their surplus.
He suggests there is little difference in principle between selling native flora and selling native fauna.
"We sell kauri, rimu, totara, all sorts of native trees.
"So does that make a kauri tree less special because it's been traded?
"I don't think so."
Mr Eckhoff said he knew a breeding pair of kea were worth $30,000 on the black market in France.
"Now I also know that mother keas lay three eggs and she kicks out two because she can't feed them. So I see no reason why animals should be kept in their natural surroundings and have the privilege of starving to death just simply because it's natural.
"If you are really serious about the survival of the species ... I think you just have to leave aside the old adage of better dead than privately bred and go for something that is actually going to work."
Only the Christchurch earthquake stopped the commercialisation issue being put to the test at the Hokitika Wildfood Festival in March.
Christchurch weka breeder Roger Beattie says he was all set to put Chatham Island weka on the menu.
"We were booked in to be selling weka, or at least giving it away.
"We would have been pushing the boundaries at Hokitika."
Mr Beattie says he now plans to offer weka at the next festival despite a warning from Minister of Conservation Kate Wilkinson.
In a letter to Mr Beattie in March, Ms Wilkinson noted selling weka was prohibited.
"If, having received that advice, you were found to have proceeded with your intention, the department would have little choice other than to refer the matter to the police."
Mr Beattie says Ms Wilkinson's response was "just like a red rag to a bull" and she was "overstepping the law".
"Where does it say in the great books of history that there shall be some species that shall be never commercialised?"
Mr Beattie, who describes chicken as "bland rubbish" says while weka were scarce on the mainland they were not hard to breed.
"It's really simple ... feed them regularly, give them a high-protein diet, give them a bit of variation, make sure they've got water, make sure they are not under stress and they are happy and they will breed."
Mr Beattie gives the weka he breeds to such places as the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch but says it is "awfully hard" to carry on the breeding long-term while not getting paid.
"People's passion runs out and the wonderful thing about the marketplace is that it has an inbuilt engine that keeps it going.
"The problem with our socialised system of saving wildlife is that it takes away the incentive mechanism.
"We need a fundamental shift.
"It's a disgrace what's happening. If you were 'ginga the gecko' and we said 'you've got a choice - you're either going to die out or you're going to live your life in a cage'. What's the choice? 'Ginga the gecko' is going to say, 'the cage looks pretty good to me'."
