On Saturday, March 5, our Thirteenth Annual Chat Month will kick off with guest Jennie Erin Smith, author of "Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers and Skullduggery." Jennie will be joining us live from Germany in the Kingsnake.com chat room at 5 PM Eastern Time (note early time!).

This controversial 2010 book investigates the beginnings of the modern reptile community at a time when laws where not strictly enforced and conservation was not a watchword. From Jeff Barringer's review of the book here at kingsnake.com:

Jennie Erin Smith's "Stolen World: A Tale Of Reptile, Smugglers, and Skulduggery" is a fascinating read that I found both hard to put down, and hard to pick back up again when I did. I can't put it down because it reads like a Ludlum novel, but I am afraid to pick it back up again because many of the stories she relates make me cringe.

Back in the days before the internet, before captive breeding, before the word "herpetoculture" existed, and before most of the laws and regulations about reptiles and amphibians were even proposals, there were the snake men. Reptile cowboys who strapped on the boots, jumped in the swamp and wrestled the python into a bag, or a cobra, or a krait, or a mamba.

Those men would fly around the world, collect the animals, box them up, put them on a plane, and the animals they acquired would show up at the world's biggest zoos, or in the hands of the few private collectors of the time. It was a loose group of people who maintained their own "internet" based on phone calls, letters, and the occasional mailed price list. There were no reptile expos, no magazines, no clubs, and few organizations open to non-academics.

Want to see our full pethobbyist.com line up for the weekend? Click here.

This year, like last, we'll be bringing you our guests in live streaming audio, with a text-based chat room running simultaneously so you can ask questions and discuss the interview with other listeners.

New this year, we'll be streaming over the Animal Wise Network, a popular, successful 24/7 channel featuring original content and interviews about animals and animal issues.

Learn more about how to listen and participate here.