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November 15, 2005
600 Animals of a Species = "Enough"
According to the NY Times, the US Department of the Interior has announced its intention to remove the grizzly bears (brown bears) that live around Yellowstone National Park from Endangered Species protection.
Their stated reasoning is that that population has increased from ~250 to ~600 bears over the past 30 years, and apparently 600 animals is enough.
A spokesman for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Hugh Vickery, said ... that a comprehensive management plan has been completed that says how the species would be managed. "It guarantees that the species will not decline," he said. "It is designed to keep the species population increasing, or at least so that it would never become threatened again."
It's a sad and discomforting realization that we're managing the world's wildlife the same way we would manage a store's inventory. This can't be right.
Posted by Craig in Society / Politics