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Category Archives: Fish & wildlife

Environmentalists Sue to Save Ferret

By | | Fish & wildlife, Follow up
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Three environmental groups filed a lawsuit yesterday challenging the Fish & Wildlife Service for its failure to recover the black-footed ferret, an animal the agency once called “the most endangered mammal in North America.” The three groups — WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and Rocky Mountain Wild — argue that the agency has not taken the steps needed to save the ferret in Wyoming.

Black-footed ferrets peer out of a burrow that was probably dug by prairie dogs. The ferrets rely on prairie dogs for both food and shelter. Fish & Wildlife Service photo by Kimberly Fraser.

As I noted in a recent policy brief (and as described in much more detail in this 1996 report), the ferret relies on prairie dogs for both food and shelter, but ranchers have convinced both the federal and state governments to poison prairie dogs by the tens of thousands. For the first decade after the Endangered Species Act was passed, the leading poisoner of prairie dogs was the Fish & Wildlife Service itself, whose aggressive anti-prairie dog campaigns had already eliminated the animal from 95 to 98 percent of its historic range. Continue reading →

The Morality of Protecting Endangered Species

By | | Fish & wildlife, Policy brief
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Since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, around 1,750 plants and animals in the United States have been listed as endangered (meaning in immediate danger of extinction) or threatened (meaning likely to become endangered soon). Of those, 48, or less than 3 percent, have been taken off the lists because they have recovered. That’s not an inspiring success story, particularly since some of those species recovered due to actions that have nothing to do with the Endangered Species Act.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

In addition to the 48 recovered species, another 10 listed species have been declared extinct. Two weeks ago, the Fish & Wildlife Service announced that it wants to declare another 23 species, including the ivory-billed woodpecker, to be extinct. Continue reading →

Wildlife Should Be Private Property

By | | Fish & wildlife
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Some who worry about the impact of humans on wildlife might find it reassuring that — according to a new study — humans make up just 0.01 percent of the biomass on earth. But most of that biomass is trees and other plants, which make up 82 percent of life on earth.

Those who wish to be more alarmist focus on the study’s finding that humans and their domestic livestock make up 96 percent of the biomass of mammals on earth. All mammalian wildlife make up the other four percent.

The study also found that humans have wiped out 83 percent of mammals, which leads some to say we are decimating wildlife. In fact, we decimated it millennia ago, whenever humans entered a new ecosystem, while today extinction rates for mammals at least have slowed. (Most of the high extinction rates you hear about are of insects.) Continue reading →

Time for Public Land Recreation Fees

By | | Fish & wildlife, Public lands
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NPR has an article about a serious problem that has an easy solution that no one wants to mention. The problem is that the number of hunters in the United States is declining, and since — under the Pittman-Robertson Act, a tax on guns and ammunition is one of the main source of conservation funding, money for conservation is also declining.

The article doesn’t mention some of the nuances of the problem. First, the real financial problem isn’t the declining number of hunters but the fact that America has a president who supports the Second Amendment. By comparison, when Obama was president and questioned widespread gun ownership, sales of guns and ammunition hit record levels, not because people were hunting but to safeguard and/or express their gun rights.

Second, the decline in hunters creates another problem at least as significant as the shortfall in revenues: a surplus of deer and other huntable wildlife. Deer in particular are overrunning much of the country. The animal most likely to kill you in rural areas is not a cougar or grizzly bear but a deer when you hit them with your car and they come flying through your windshield. Some areas also have too many elk and other huntable species. Continue reading →

Fixing the Endangered Species Act

By | | Fish & wildlife
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Vermont law professor Pat Parenteau frets that “the Endangered Species Act is in jeopardy.” Though the law is “wildly popular,” says Parenteau, “hostile forces” in Washington want to kill it.

He admits that few species have successfully recovered enough to be delisted, but says that the threats to those species remain real. He also claims that “at least 227 species,” including the “whooping crane, bald eagle, American crocodile, peregrine falcon, gray wolf, and humpback whale” would have gone extinct without the act.

The Antiplanner doesn’t think the ESA did anything to recover those species. The bald eagle and peregrine falcon recovered because of the ban on DDT which happened before the law was passed. The grey wolf was never in danger, and it was transplanted back into Yellowstone and the West by popular demand, not because of the ESA. The American crocodile was saved by the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, not the federal government. Pressure from anti-whaling groups protected the humpback whale, which was being hunted by people from other countries who weren’t under the jurisdiction of the Endangered Species Act.

Continue reading →

Protecting Prairie Dogs

By | | Fish & wildlife
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A Utah district court has ruled that the Endangered Species Act has exceeded Congress’ authority to regulate private landowners. In a case involving the Utah prairie dog, which was listed as a threatened species in 1973, the court said that since prairie dogs were involved in interstate commerce, the federal government had no Constitutional authority to regulate them.

Ironically, the main threat to the Utah prairie dog before it was listed was none other than the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which had the dual job of protecting endangered species and endangered pestiferous species. For decades, the Fish & Wildlife Service had poisoned prairie dogs throughout the West, saying they were bad for farmers and ranchers.

This poisoning continued even after the agency declared the black-footed ferret to be “the most endangered mammal in North America.” As it happens, black-footed ferrets get 99 percent of their food by eating prairie dogs, as well as make their homes in former prairie dog dens, but this didn’t stop the agency from poisoning prairie dogs.

Continue reading →

We Have the Technology

By | | Fish & wildlife
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A recent issue of the New York Times Magazine suggests that the technology for recreating species that have gone extinct in the last few thousand years will soon be available if it is not already. Scientists have already attempted to clone an extinct European wild goat known as a bucardo, and while the results were not successful they were clearly moving in the right direction.


Passenger pigeons in their native habitat, an Iowa woodland, from a diorama in the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. The background to this diorama was painted by Charles Waldo Love. The Flickr photo is by Jessica Lamirand; click image for a larger view.

Species that have been extinct for millions of years, such as dinosaurs, are beyond our reach. But the Times argues that recovery of such species as the passenger pigeon, which once numbered in the billions, and the woolly mammoth should both be possible in the very near future.

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Protecting Rhinos

By | | Fish & wildlife
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Black rhinos have reportedly been extirpated from Mozambique, and the loss is partly blamed on park rangers who were hired to protect them but who earned more money helping poachers. Supposedly, “conservationists are trying anything and everything to put a stop to” such poaching, including using “surveillance drones and hidden sensors, to monitor . . . human activity in reserves.”

Black rhinos in Kenya. Flickr photo by Gary MacFadyen.

Maybe, however, they haven’t tried everything. Rhinos are a difficult case because so few are left, but in general, African wildlife is doing best in countries with secure property rights. Unfortunately, Mozambique is not one of those countries. Someone may think they own land, but the country has few of the institutions needed for them to prove it. If you can’t prove you own land, think how hard it must be to prove you own wildlife.

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The Wildlife Service (Extermination Service, That Is)

By | | Fish & wildlife
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A little-known agency in the Department of Agriculture is an out-of-control destroyer of wildlife, reports investigative journalist Tom Knudson in a lengthy series of articles in the Sacramento Bee. The agency, which calls itself the Wildlife Service, kills hundreds of thousands of animals each year. Thousands of non-target animals, ranging from endangered species to people’s pets, are killed by mistake, and in at least some cases the agency’s response is to shoot, shovel, and shut up.

The sad fact is that this has been going on for many years. Back in 1995, the Antiplanner wrote an in-depth audit of this agency, which was then known as “Animal Damage Control.” Prior to about 1985, this program was part of the Fish & Wildlife Service, but Congress moved it to Agriculture under the not-entirely wrong notion that FWS didn’t really have its heart in indiscriminately killing wildlife.
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The so-called Wildlife Service provides an excellent example of why the left should re-examine its notion that “government is good.” This program was created a century ago, yet there was little reason then and less now for the federal government to be involved in wildlife control. At least a few species have come close to extinction thanks to this program, and it should be shut down immediately. Congratulations to Knudson and the Bee for publishing these articles.

Planning Fish to Extinction

By | | Fish & wildlife, Planning Disasters
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Soon after (and possibly even before) Columbus sailed to the New World, Portuguese and Basque fishing boats were catching cod in the Grand Banks, the shallow seas around Newfoundland. By the 1960s, fishers were removing as many as 800,000 tons of cod from the Grand Banks each year. But in 1992, this seemingly inexhaustable fishery collapsed, forcing Canada to declare a moratorium to allow the fish to recover. No such recovery has taken place, and cod remain nearly non-existent in the area.

Part of the problem was that the Canadian government allowed the use of bottom trawlers that scraped the sea floor and destroyed the habitat vital for young cod. But a new book, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future, places even more of the blame on the goverment planners in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The Atlantic Dawn, the world’s largest fishing trawler, can catch enough fish on one voyage to produce 18 million meals.

Continue reading →