Secular Café: Conservation and the Desert Tortoise

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Conservation and the Desert Tortoise Oct 2nd 2012, 11:45 An interesting and slightly humorous blog post on the desert tortoise situation in Nevada, and the bizarre approach of local governments to tortoise population issues. From the blog Quote: Sixty desert tortoises, each equipped with a radio transmitter and trailing a small antenna, were released Sept. 21 at the southern end of the Nevada National Security Site, 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Researchers plan to track the critters over the next year as part of a $100,000 study ultimately aimed at increasing the animal’s numbers in the wild. Of course, that phrase “in the wild” is vital in reconciling the notion of a “threatened” species with the fact that there are so many desert tortoises in Clark County that government agents have taken to euthanizing them. Researchers admit that — more than two decades after they first labeled the species “threatened” — they still have no “baseline” population figure, no idea how many “wild” Mojave Desert tortoises there used to be, how many there are, or how many there ought to be. So when will they be able to tell us whether we have enough new tortoises, bred in their joyously cattle-free “conservation center,” to de-list the species and allow humans in these parts to get back to developing our land as we see fit? Or is the tortoise merely a cat’s paw, its unmeasurable and thus endless ongoing “preservation” intended precisely to make sure neither large-scale development nor ranching can ever resume? Government biologists assume tortoise numbers “in the wild” are on the decline, based on their theory that the primary threats are “habitat destruction” and disease — even though population densities reveal the favored habitat of the tortoise is arguably the suburban golf course, and the main cause of disease in the animals seems to consist of being rounded up and placed in overcrowded government pens. As of a few years ago, officials had rounded up more than 10,000 of the little reptiles, right here in the Vegas Valley, turning them over to the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, a research and recovery facility the San Diego Zoo operates at the southwestern edge of the Las Vegas Valley under a partnership with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Of those, Marci Henson of the county’s Desert Conservation Program estimated about 2 percent of the poor little “threatened” reptiles get “euthanized” after developing respiratory problems. (“Run, little tortoises, run!” as former County Commissioner Don Schlesinger once put it.) Ignoring the urban populations in order to call the tortoise “threatened” is like saying pigeons and house cats are “threatened” in Las Vegas because they seem to prosper best only in the urban and suburban environments created by mankind (which is “unnatural” and thus “doesn’t count,”) while faring less well amongst the coyotes of the deep desert. ETA: http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=1589

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