Wildlife conservation groups are
collaborating with a federal government agency to halt construction of the
southern border wall by fudging science to claim that unimpeded trans-border corridors
are essential to an “endangered species” with 99% of its population in Mexico.
Under the plan, large areas of Arizona and New Mexico would be prohibited from
erecting a border wall so that jaguars, which don’t even occupy the area, can
roam back and forth between the two countries. More than ¾ million acres in
Arizona and New Mexico would be designated as critical habitat for jaguars
under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), which specifically states that
critical habitat can only be designated for the United States.
Judicial Watch obtained records from Arizona’s Game and Fish
Department, local governments and one of the biologists fighting the effort to
designate the area a “critical habitat” for jaguars. It’s been a years-long
battle that started in 2012 when the Obama administration relaxed ESA
requirements to make designation of critical habitat easer for the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service (USFWS). This includes lowering scientific standards and
essentially caving in to leftist groups. The result, according to biologist and
attorney Dennis Parker, is more restrictions on private property, grazing, mineral
exploration and development not to mention national security. Furthermore, no
scientifically verifiable record of jaguar breeding exists in the area and only
lone, transient male jaguars are occasionally and peripherally occurring,
Parker said. In a document addressed to USFWS, Arizona’s Game and Fish
Department states that “habitat essential to the conservation of the jaguar
does not exist in either Arizona or New Mexico under any scientifically
credible definition of that term.”
One of the world’s leading big cat
experts, Dr.
Alan Rabinowitz, confirms that less than one
percent of the jaguar habitat in the world is in the United States and that
there’s nothing about the lands in the southwest U.S. that make them critical
to the continued survival of the jaguar as a species. The renowned wildlife
ecologist heads a nonprofit devoted to the conservation of 38 wild cat species
and their ecosystems. Jaguars are among them and two Arizona municipalities—the
city of Sierra Vista and Cochise County—that will be heavily impacted by the
proposed federal measure are citing
Rabinowitz’s work to halt the problematic jaguar
recovery plan. Rabinowitz refers to the federal plan as “little more than smoke
and mirrors” that uses assumption and speculation as fact to justify “defining
critical habitat in the Unites States for a species which simply does not live
in the United States and has not resided there as a population for at least
half a century.” Furthermore, Rabinowitz says the jaguar south of the border is
doing quite well and has genetic connectivity through designated landscape
corridors.
If USFWS makes its scientifically
flawed jaguar recovery plan an official agency policy it will cost American
taxpayers some $607 million in
the next five decades, records show. In a recent document to USFWS a coalition
of counties and cities in Arizona and New Mexico as well as the Pima Natural
Conservation District, remind the federal agency about the faulty science
behind the proposed jaguar recovery plan. The group refers to it as the
“radical departure from sound science, policy, Endangered Species Act
interpretation and the clear and present danger to national and citizen
security.” In this case, the ESA is being used to further a political agenda,
Parker insists, adding that the supposed need for unimpeded trans-border
corridors is based on opinion and value-laden beliefs rather than scientific
information as the ESA actually requires. “All this junk science will become
enshrined as science for the jaguar,” Parker said, adding that if USFWS adapts
the jaguar recovery play as a policy it will affect everything from interstate
highway travel to border security.
USFWS already determined years ago
that no jurisdiction in the United States contains the features essential for
the conservation of jaguars that required special management considerations and
protection from the agency. “Because there are no areas or features essential
to the conservation of the jaguar in the United States that meet the definition
of critical habitat, designation of critical habitat for the jaguar is not
beneficial,” the agency stated in a 2006 Federal Register notice. Nothing has
changed to make that assessment any less factual, biologists interviewed by Judicial
Watch affirm. They assure that land essential to the species is located south
of the International Border between the United States and Mexico.
Two of the groups colluding with the
feds to enact the jaguar recovery plan are the Center for Biological Diversity
and Defenders of Wildlife. The Center for Biological Diversity denounces
“large-scale construction of walls and other infrastructure that disrupt lives
and divide the landscape” along the southern border. Defenders of Wildlife is
currently pushing to introduce up to 250 jaguars to Arizona in response to the
construction of a border wall. The group is the force behind the government’s
jaguar recovery plan and asserts it’s critical to “maintain movement corridors”
between the U.S. and Mexico. To make its case, Defenders of Wildlife claims
that two male jaguars, dubbed Macho B and El Jefe, have recently wandered into
the mountains of southern Arizona and New Mexico. “Natural reappearances like
these lend new urgency for actions to re-establish a reproducing population of
jaguars that includes contiguous habitat in both the United States and Mexico,”
the group says.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/04/feds-wildlife-groups-use-bogus-endangered-species-science-block-border-fence/
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