Bush to Trim Some Pork, or Should I say "Endangered Species Meat"

Well those "treehuggers" are at it again, first they want to savethe Earth, now the animals? Well apparently the Bush administration won't have that,and to make an attempt at assuring the treehuggers won't get all "environmental"on them, they tried to bring it in under the radar as TheSalon reported in the article "Insidethe Secretive Plan to Gut the Endangered Species Act" 

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to extraordinaryefforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the public. All copies of theworking document were given a number corresponding to a person, so that leakedcopies could be traced to that individual. An e-mail sent in March from anassistant regional director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff,asking for comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored theconcern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale [Hall, directorof the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this stuff leaking out tostir up discontent based on speculation."

It seems to me that weather you are a proponent of NaturalSelection or IntelligentDesign  this issue would be a major concern. With NaturalSelection, nature should choose "what goes and what stays", not abulldozer or large corporation, and if you are on the side of IntelligentDesign...well God would be handling the "choosing".

Naturally there are always two sides to everything, and there areextremes...the extremes might be "don't step on the ant"on one side and "if God didn't want us to eat the animals, Godwouldn't have made them taste so good" Obviously Bush thinks theytaste REALLY Good. Under the Bush administration, 57 species have been grantedendangered status....not bad right?, I mean that's a lot of species. Well hisFather felt 234 was a good number, Reagan 253 and Clinton 521

How they came up with Endangered Species Eligibility is beyond me:

One change would significantly limit the number of species eligible forendangered status. Currently, if a species is likely to become extinct in"the foreseeable future" -- a species-specific timeframe that canstretch up to 300 years -- it's a candidate for act protections. However, the new rules scale back that timeline to mean either 20 years or 10 generations (the agency can choose which timeline). For certain species with long lifespans, such as killer whales, grizzly bears or wolves, two decades isn't evenone generation. So even if they might be in danger of extinction, they would notmake the endangered species list because they'd be unlikely to die out in twodecades.

If you think about those timeframes, the new rule would be a bit on theextreme side, the news would have a new segment "What Went ExtinctToday" (I wonder what the Vegas bet line would be for something like that).Maybe we should take Bush's Red Crayon® away from him, he doesn't use it verywell.

Comments

[Chris Huston]

I always preferred the phrase, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat."

[Roger]

I always think it is so cute when people have knee-jerk reactions to issues they don't understand. I think this is why there is very rarely productive discourse on the matter because it is much easier to just toss around some BUZZ words, a couple of misleading headlines and some oh-so-clever insults. Perhaps you should check with what some of "your own" think about redoing the ESA (that Clinton clumsily changed and therefore weakened). Nah...facts aren't fun! Clever headlines are fun!! Yeah!!