Cactus thieves have long targeted the park: one of the most ____ ____ happened in 2007, when a landscaper named Joseph Tillman ____ up 17 saguaros with a friend. The pair were ____ by a ranger while trying to load the ____ into a pickup truck, and Tillman was given eight months in prison, one of the harshest ____ ever for a cactus ____. “We are now able to ____ a stolen plant directly back to a hole,” said O’Neil. Since the chips have been installed and the program ____ ____, there have been no ____ cases of saguaro theft in the park. “It is a very effective ____,” said O’Neil. “We want people to be ____ that if you steal a cactus from us, we will find you.” “This was stolen because it is ____ by collectors,” said Byrd, holding one of the cacti in her hand. The living rock is extremely slow-growing ____ ____ cactus standards: the ____, black specimen she held was about the size of a tennis ball. “The plants were just ____ out of the ground and stuffed into garbage bags.” Authorities suspect the plants were stolen from nearby ____ lands, including Big Bend national park and Big Bend Ranch state park. “Cactus theft is a huge issue in the Trans Pecos,” said Little, referring to the ____ desert in west Texas where Sul Ross is located. “We have whole ____ lines of cacti that have been ____ out by ____.” One of the major challenges for conservationists is that the most endangered cacti are the most ____ ____ ____. In the summer of 2018, while studying ____ acuna cacti at an air force training area in south-western Arizona, he arrived one day to discover his ____ research ____ had been entirely ____. “All the cacti were gone and the ground was full of ____ where the plants had been obviously ____ up,” Not everyone has ____ ____ hope. Gene Joseph, a longtime Tucson nursery owner, believes the best way to ____ illegal trade is simply doing the slow, steady work of raising new cacti ____ ____.“When nurseries are producing rare plants from ____, the pressure to steal from the wild goes down,” he explained. That’s about as long as it takes to raise a child, so ____, he gets ____. “Sometimes it is hard to ____ ____, but I can’t keep them forever,” he said. Joseph’s facility is ____ of acres of shade houses and greenhouses. With two golden retrievers at his heels, he methodically ____ to thousands of plants each day. After his watering rounds are done, he puts on his reading glasses to ____ off tiny seeds from cactus fruit so he can grow more plants, carefully ____ the flowers by hand. Due to international trade protections, the ____ cacti cannot be sold and must rather be ____ away for ____ to responsible ____ or other not-for-profit greenhouses. It has been like trying to adopt out a very large ____ of stray puppies. Some have gone to ____ collectors, others to ____.

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