As for those arms, here&#x27;s another fun fact:<p>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&#x27;s pretty easy to make it grow one: just get an axe and whack it really hard!  It&#x27;ll grow an arm where you chopped it with the axe.  (However, it&#x27;ll take a while to grow: these cacti are <i>very</i> slow growing.)<p>Full-grown saguaros are thousands of pounds heavy, and can exceed 10,000 pounds for really old and large ones.<p>For the ones shipped, I imagine they got smaller, younger ones.  I&#x27;m not sure how you&#x27;d ship a mature one intercontinentally without it dying.<p>And honestly, digging them up from Federal land isn&#x27;t that bad; there was an incident a few years ago in Arizona where the government happily destroyed <i>thousands</i> of such cacti, simply because they were in the way of some power line.  You&#x27;d think they could have sold them, and let the cactus sellers come take them and transplant them: there&#x27;s a huge demand for them in the developed areas, but they&#x27;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.