A license to kill tortoises (Perverse Florida policy allows endangered species to be buried alive)

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/05/07/State/A_license_to_kill_tor.shtml

Workers buried the 30-pound gopher tortoise on a Lee County construction site, its shell crushed by a backhoe. Two weeks later, despite a spinal injury, the determined tortoise dug its way out. The remarkable resurrection led a wildlife expert to nickname the 16-inch-long tortoise "Phoenix." It was the largest gopher tortoise ever found in the wild. It died last week.

For 16 years, Florida officials have allowed developers to bury tortoises alive and pave over their burrows, in exchange for paying money into a fund to buy land for tortoises elsewhere. Because of their low metabolic rate, tortoises can take months to suffocate under convenience store parking lots, shopping centers and new subdivisions.

By this year, the state's pay-to-pave program had issued permits to bury more than 94, 000 tortoises. Now the species is in sharp decline, and tortoise experts blame the permitting program. "It's a massive loss of tortoises, " said George Heinrich of Heinrich Ecological Services in St. Petersburg and a former co-chairman of the Gopher Tortoise Council, a group of biologists concerned about the animal's future.

State wildlife officials have decided to end the program by July 31, prompting a rush by developers to beat the deadline. Up to a dozen applications a week have been sent in for the last permits to kill tortoises, according to Rick McCann, who runs the permit program for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "There's still an amount of insecurity and unsureness that people have, so they want to get permitted now, " McCann said. "We're well ahead of last year's pace."

If there are, they must be on the endangered species list. But by all means, let's help them out by having bigger and bigger families, demand more and bigger homes, more shops, more cars. Let's create as much filth and trash and pollution that what's left won't be fit to live in, anyway. Then we can pave over all the remaining habitat it will take to accomodate our ever-increasing billions and what it takes to support them. We are the ones creating the market.

than let people who care about them come in and move them. And your comments about what's ultimately driving this are spot-on.

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kick

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It'd certainly do numbers for local politics if we thinned the population a bit. Otherwise they lay their eggs in tract homes and stripmalls and eventually there are too many for the area to support and the population collapses. Sure, we could just shoot them with contraceptive darts, but what's the fun in that?

IRS agents

The hard part would be to keep small-town politicians from shooting them, since they count on developers for their sustenance.

to give them better reflexes and nastier dispositions. They might have a fighting chance then.