The redknee is one of the few spiders with a trade history long enough to leave a paper trail. Wild-caught animals left Mexico in large numbers from the 1970s, and in 1994 the entire genus Brachypelma was placed on Appendix II of CITES, so that exports require permits. Captive breeding now supplies most of the market.
The naming was wrong for much of that period. A revision published in 2017 by Mendoza and Francke separated the populations, restricting Brachypelma smithi to the Guerrero region and assigning the widely traded Colima and Michoacán animals to Brachypelma hamorii. Most spiders in collections and in older literature therefore carry a name that belongs to a different species.
The practical effects are small for keepers and large for conservation. Range maps, permit records and any assessment of collecting pressure were built on a single name that turned out to cover at least two distinct species with different distributions.