I had many orders for juvenile cataphractus and put out the word that I would purchase these. Maurice Abelanski, the noted French crocodile hunter, based at the time in Bohicon, Dahomey, shipped hundreds of niloticus hides to France each year, but did not recount ever seeing any cataphractus . In nearly seven years of collecting in the wetlands of southern Dahomey, of which five days a week were spent in good crocodile habitat, I neither saw nor heard of any cataphractus in the region. Nor did I see any cataphractus skulls for sale in the local markets where there were usually niloticus and Osteoleamus parts available. Grain is stored by villagers in granaries raised on stilts.
Rodents are a persistent problem.
For at least the last 600 years pythons have been venerated as god, with local priests exhorting villagers to bring them into the villages as sacred animals where they are kept in a kind of religious farming. No python worshiper would ever harm a ball python or think of eating one. The village python collections and their offspring keep the rodent population down and protect the village grain stores. The python cult is so strong that the Portuguese in the 17th century built a cathedral directly across the square from the python temple. Sustainable use may be a difficult concept for some today, but the Dahomeans in their corner of Africa have been practicing species protection through value for hundreds of years to their advantage and that of the pythons.