Thursday, December 27, 2012

Is Every Single Animal and Reptile Endangered?

Prairie Chicken

By Alan Caruba

If it sometimes seems to you that every single animal and reptile is endangered, you can thank that element of the environmental and animal rights movements that has spent millions to foster this absurd belief. Animals and reptiles, fish and birds, lizards and turtles, all are born in the wild and all are food for other species. Nature doesn’t pick favorites, but thanks to the Endangered Species Act (ESA), humans do.

I say “the wild”, but the wild is not some far off place, but rather, for example, it is the vast forested area along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Virginia and beyond. The “wild” has become our backyards as suburbs have become the home of choice for most Americans.

As often as not, those creatures are simply pawns in the environmental movement’s effort to close off vast portions of the nation’s landmass to access from the energy industries, the timber industry, agricultural interests, and any form of development from new housing to hospitals.

Enacted in 1973, the ESA has become the most pernicious piece of legislation foisted on a public that loves animals, but usually only in the abstract except for those who are pet owners who enjoy the companionship, mostly of dogs and cats. Other species may co-exist in beneficial ways, but they don’t adopt one another, nor do they intervene in the way the ESA does.

A couple of recent news stories illustrate how a noble human emotion, empathy, results in some outcomes that don’t reflect good judgment. Take, for instance, the Tampa Bay, Florida woman who ignored signs prohibiting contact with manatees. Videotaped climbing on several of them, she faces a stiff fine against touching them. Florida wants to protect these gentle vegetarians and to ensure they can continue their lives while avoiding dangers from boats whose propellers can cut or kill them. That just makes sense.

Contrast that with an article in New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper about Clinton Township residents who believe coyotes killed a deer. One family reported that is common to hear coyotes howling at night. Ah, Nature! But New Jersey?

Yes, New Jersey where its huge deer population thrives, often becoming road kill when a car crashes into them, endangering the drivers and passengers. A year ago the county in which I live had to authorize a deer kill in a reservation area, a watershed I have lived nearby my whole life. The deer were destroying it by eating the ground cover and any new trees. Where you find deer, you are likely to find clusters of Lyme disease since the ticks that are their parasites spread it to humans.

A large bear population requires New Jersey to have a hunting season for them. In recent years, this has been regularly challenged by those who have appointed themselves their guardians, but ask any Garden State resident that finds one in their back yard or on their porch and you will learn of the fear they generate. The state, like others, is home to Canada geese. Huge flocks of these birds befoul parks, golf courses, and other open areas they favor with their droppings. It was a geese collision that forced US Airways Flight 1549 to ditch in the Hudson River in 2009.

As a lifelong resident of New Jersey, I can assure you that there is no lack of raccoons, opossums, rabbits, and other wildlife. We have been told for decades that the growth of the suburbs is adversely affecting wildlife, but you would not know that if you lived here. They adapt! The bears break into garbage cans, eat the seeds in bird feeders. The coyotes will make off with a family pet for a tasty dinner. The deer eat expensive foliage and the crops that our farmers raise. It’s not called the Garden State for nothing.

This phenomenon is so widespread that Jim Sterba has authored “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds.”  The woods that Dorothy passed through to get to Oz was filled with “lions and tigers and bears, oh my”, but throughout suburban America, they also include cougars, coyotes, deer, and bears.

In general, the ESA has been a huge failure. Only a handful of species of the hundreds deemed “endangered” have been restored to a larger population. The real purpose of the ESA is not about protecting creatures. It is about thwarting all manner of development, but most especially, access to areas where vast amounts of oil, natural gas, and coal exist, waiting to be extracted. The most endangered species in America today are the hundreds of jobs (and revenue) that this represents.

An example of this was described by David Porter in a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, “Playing Chicken in Oil-Patch Politics.”

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced that it will formally consider listing the Lesser Prairie Chicken—whose habitat includes some of the nation’s major energy fields—as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.” Porter identified this as “a desperate ploy by the Obama administration to further its campaign against oil and gas drilling.” The chicken is a ground-nesting bird native to portions of Texas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

The effort to list the prairie chicken is similar to an earlier effort to list the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, overlapping the same area as the chicken. Fortunately it failed, but it drains revenue and time from those states that must invest both to resist such listings in the effort to protect access to the energy reserves beneath their ground.

By September 2011, the Associated Press reported that there were more than 700 pending cases to declare “endangered” everything from the golden-winged warbler, the American eel, and the tiny Texas kangaroo rat. Yes, a rat!

The U.S. Forest and Wildlife Service had “issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward potential new protections under the Endangered Species Act.”

It is time to end the Endangered Species Act as a very bad piece of legislation whose intent has nothing to do with protecting these creatures whose populations are exploding everywhere and everything to do with harming the economy of the nation. They don’t need protecting. They are surviving in spades!

© Alan Caruba, 2012

7 comments:

  1. Some animals should be endangered.

    I see no reason for lions, sharks, or any other creature dangerous to man to exist outside of zoos, unless it's below us on the food chain.

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  2. Where I live Mr. Caruba, I have possums, racoons, and the very large Norwegian rats. I also have deer coming into town following the UP rail lines as I am only 1 block from the lines, then you have the coyotes following the deer. I am 1 mile from the North Platte river, and in the years I have been hear, I have heard elk, and bobcat and cougar.
    I cannot tell you how many times I have caught possums on my porch, by trapping and also using a metal pipe rigged with line to noose them. Usually they are very small babies and do not know what I am yet so they are easy to catch. I release them clear out in the country which is just 1 mile from my home. I have had to destroy several through the years from having rabies, and our local game and parks, and local pd will not handle animal calls at all.
    But I was told by a game officer if I was caught trapping possums and releasing them I would be jailed or fined or both....go figure. There was one particular one had the dumb form of rabies, and i ended up calling up a sheriff deputy I knew, who took it and destroyed it at his home in the country as we did not need rabies around here with a bunch of stupid poeple who have kids who are stupid about wild animals.
    I have plenty of wildlife here like you have.
    Now we have a disease which comes from mites that are killing deer by the thousands because of the drought and the state did not release that many hunting tags for deer this year as too many deer were dying from this infliction the state said. I think that nature needs to be left alone to handle the critter population, maybe we need to issue something to control those in D.C?

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  3. They are part of the food chain, John, and in their case, you are the food.

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  4. John David Galt...I hope your comment was meant as a joke but I believe you were serious. I would like to say something not very nice to you but I will resist out of respect for Alan.

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  5. Some see *animals*, I see FOOD...

    I am originally from Louisiana and a good Cajun knows, if it's back faces heaven it's a good meal in the making...

    I can't go into details but I have *heard* that there were some Spec-Ops guys that got bored and killed themselves a tiger, they wanted tiger steaks apparently, and from all reports, they were really good eating too...

    So I heard... You know, through the *grapevine*..

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  6. It doesn't help that emails showing very stupid (sorry, it's the only word that fits) people petting deer, getting "kisses" from the deer and letting the deer into their homes. I have written about this repeatedly on my website and blogs and continue to do so. I have deer in my yard. They do not have names and I do not "pet" them or feed them (I do maintain habitat that is suitable for them--native plants and a couple of windbreaks.) I relocate foxes and raccoons that trap, as well as rattlesnakes and bull snakes when necessary. As long as those emotional "Bambi is just soooo adorable" emails keep getting sent out, this is going to be a tough battle.

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  7. In Europe, this has been going on for fifty years. Thrushes (hey, sorry, Google also offers me "blackbirds", I mean merels, lijsters) were supposed to get extinguished in a jiffy. Make a long story short, they weren't - but adapted instead. Big surprise.

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