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> dug up eight saguaros from federal land in daylight, then sold them for $2,000 apiece, two of them he shipped to Austria. Saguaros are amazingly heavy (peopl

• Grishnakh 11y ago
  As for those arms, here's another fun fact: Saguaros with arms are much more desirable and valuable than ones without them. So if you have a saguaro in your yard and it has no arms (or not enough), it's pretty easy to make it grow one: just get an axe and whack it really hard! It'll grow an arm where you chopped it with the axe. (However, it'll take a while to grow: these cacti are very slow growing.) Full-grown saguaros are thousands of pounds heavy, and can exceed 10,000 pounds for really old and large ones. For the ones shipped, I imagine they got smaller, younger ones. I'm not sure how you'd ship a mature one intercontinentally without it dying. And honestly, digging them up from Federal land isn't that bad; there was an incident a few years ago in Arizona where the government happily destroyed thousands of such cacti, simply because they were in the way of some power line. You'd think they could have sold them, and let the cactus sellers come take them and transplant them: there's a huge demand for them in the developed areas, but they're very expensive due to the limited supply since wild ones (on Federal and state land) are off-limits. But nope, they just got some machine in there and ground them all up. A lot of people were pissed about that.