Cool! I didn't know that. I don't like WC tortoises. Now, I have captured many reptilian of Utah over the last few years and some I have kept forever. I have no problem with that, because we are careful to not take any endangered species. And we treat them the best we can. BUT when they take WC torts out of the wild. They are almost whipping out there natural range. Also they treat the torts VERY poorly, they are all put into boxes where they are literally climbing on top of each other! I have 0 problem with taking animals out of there natural habitat. As long as you are RESPECTFUL of the animal. These people clearly are not. Oh well, if I had known that I would have bought another one. But I'm NOT giving my beautiful torts up now. NO WAY
You've been misinformed by animal rights groups about how wild caught tortoises are transported and treated. There is a commonly shown picture of a bunch of tortoises being transported in the way you describe, and they lead the reader to believe that this is how its done, when in fact that was an illegal shipment that was caught while they were trying to smuggle them. In fact, russians are packed individually in large padded and insulated shipping containers. It is in the sellers best interest to make sure they arrive in as good of condition as possible, so they take care to do it right.
They are also not over harvesting according to the data that we've got. The russian tortoise has a HUGE range, and we really aren't bringing in all that many.
Without bringing in some WC some of the time, we could have no CB tortoises at all. I think everyone will agree that we need to care for them properly and we should not be taking too many from the wild, but this picture is not as bad as you think it is.