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
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" and shared on dozens
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