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Farm Bureau calling for Endangered Species Act reform
Minnesota Farm Bureau says the Endangered Species Act is broken.
Associate director of public policy Amber Hanson tells Brownfield while it’s important to protect the animals that need it, the Act can unfairly impact farmers and ranchers.
“Because our land is the land that attracts these animals. Obviously it’s undeveloped prime habitat. However, once a species is listed as either threatened or endangered, it’s so hard to be able to use our land without impacting (the animals) and being in violation of the Endangered Species Act.”
She says a balance needs to be found.
“Protecting these species while being able to protect our livestock and use our land.”
Farm Bureau recently conducted a poll on the Endangered Species Act and Hanson says it showed broad support for reform.
“It’s good to see because this is one of those issues where most people living their daily lives don’t think about it. But for farmers and ranchers, if you’re opening up your land and want to be able to help these species, but then are punished for doing so essentially. Attention needs to be given to it, and I’m glad that there’s a broader show of support for doing so.”
American Farm Bureau president Bob Stallman issued a statement saying, “The Endangered Species Act can and must be modernized to protect endangered species and respect private property rights.”
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About time a group with some influence challenges these special-interest pandering bureaucrats! The extreme environmentalists and animal rights groups are downright sociopathic in their attacks on farmers and other animal enterprises. The ESA has gone way overboard, and it’s time someone with influence brought them back into check.
Another sore spot is what the ESA (thanks to the anti-aviculture special interest influence) is doing to parrotkeepers in the U.S. The ESA keeps adding parrot species (which are NOT indigeneous to the U.S.) to the list of animals that cannot be sold across state lines without a permit and license. Not only does that not do ANYTHING to help them in the wild, but if they are already fairly rare in domestic aviculture, they will get even less common if people have to go through the USFWS to get licensed and permitted in order to purchase and keep them. The WBCA and CITES laws were passed to stop importation of wild-caught parrots, and that has worked. But the double-whammy against aviculture when the ESA keeps adding more parrot species to their endangered list requiring cross-state sales permitting (under the pretext that domestic and wild are the same gene pool–that’s rubbish) is totally unreasonable. The ESA originally was meant to deal with indigenous U.S. species that were endangered, but they contorted and re-defined the law to include species in this country that had wild populations in other countries. There is NO release to the wild, for the most part, except in other countries where some species are raised in captivity with limited interaction with people (e.g., Loro Parque) and then gradually released to the wild. You CANNOT release domestic parrots that do not have survival skills into the wild, PLUS there are some diseases that some domestic parrots have developed (originally from imported stock, but passed on to domestically raised generations in some cases) that would decimate the wild parrot population.
It’s time to rein in these “alphabet” agencies (ESA, EPA, etc.) and their control-freak special-interest-bought bureaucrats who quake and cave every time a special-interest stable of attorneys threatens to sue. Yet these same bureaucrats have no problem destroying individual’s lives in the name of regulations!
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The animals were all here first. You’re the freak to think you own land and can impact animals with impunity.
You’re part of the vermin scum that desecrates the animals and the earth. Fortunately you won’t be here much longer. No humans will be on the earth in 100 years. All humans have done is use, torture, obliterate, destroy and desecrate. It’s enough. Let the animals have their earth back.
AMEN! The ESA bureaucrats are trampling all over private ownership as they dance to the jig of the extreme environmentalists and animal rights-led groups. They just listed two more parrot species as endangered and therefore requiring permits to acquire across state lines. These species are from South America, and what happens in aviculture insofar as captive breeding HELPS the populations of some of these species, and certainly the ESA’s rulings have NO IMPACT on these species in the wild. This is strictly a “special interest” catering to those groups who do not want parrots domestically bred or kept as pets. If some of these rarer species that are being listed are made prohibitively hard to acquire and breed in the U.S., they will no longer be conserved, but in time go extinct. That doesn’t help the wild ones–in fact, that makes it more likely that more wild ones will be poached into other countries. The U.S. has very strict importation rules (via WBCA), so very few would come into this country. Time to revamp the ESA (as well as EPA, etc.) to STOP the overreach and special interest pandering!