Conservation, to most people, means protecting a species and its habitat, and this is what happened in the initial stages of crocodile conservation in the Northern Territory. By the early 1980s, however, unforeseen problems began to develop. Crocodiles began turning up in areas where they hadn't been seen for many years, and the human population was not prepared. Attacks on humans by crocodiles suddenly became more common, and fatalities ensued. Predictably, the tide of public opinion turned against the crocodiles, and soon calls for their extermination were being heard. Conventional wisdom about conservation was therefore turned on its head in a bold attempt to provide the human population with incentives to keep crocodiles around.

The most important steps were taken first: to educate people about the dangers posed by crocodiles, and to remove problem crocodiles from areas where the risk to human life was judged to be highest. However, the health of the crocodile population was dependent principally upon the amount and quality of crocodile habitat and nesting areas available, much of it under the control of private and traditional landowners. In a move which initially caused much skepticism and criticism, a program was established to harvest eggs from crocodile nests, pay the landowners for each egg collected, raise the hatchlings under artificial conditions, and sell the juveniles to crocodile farms to establish a crocodile leather and meat industry. Removing eggs from the natural habitat and producing crocodile leather did not strike many as a sensible conservation strategy, yet remarkably it has been incredibly successful and perhaps the most important component of saltwater crocodile conservation in the long term. Money from the crocodile eggs was returned to the landowners to give them incentive to retain important crocodile habitat, and the leather industry was allowed to develop to provide incentives to continue the crocodile egg harvests.

Careful monitoring of nesting habitats has been taking place, yet no detectable effect of the egg harvest has yet to be found after nearly 15 years, primarily because of the high natural mortality on saltwater crocodile eggs, which was being emulated by the harvest program. In effect, the harvest was judged to be sustainable in the long term. This "sustainable use" policy was not pioneered in Australia -- it was first applied to the American alligator populations in the United States -- yet in recent years it has proven to be instrumental in the conservation management of a number of crocodilian species around the world. Now the IUCN / SSC Crocodile Specialist Group finds itself in the rather ironic position of encouraging people to save crocodiles and alligators by purchasing legally produced crocodile leather products. It may sound counter-intuitive, but in fact in many areas it has proven to be the only realistic means of helping to conserve creatures that few will otherwise tolerate.