Posted on 06/17/2010 11:58:26 AM PDT by HospiceNurse
Arizona is spending $1.25 million to build bridges for 250 rare red squirrels so they won't get hit by cars crossing the rural road. The expenditure is expected to save the lives of five squirrels a year.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Give me the $1.25 million and I’ll carry the stupid things across the street.
...or they could probably just spend a few thousand dollars on speed bumps.
OK, so they're endangered. How expensive could it be to trap about two dozen of them, breed them and in 5 years have 10K Mount Graham Red Squirrels?
I'm sure it would be a FRACTION of the $1.25 million.
Why not buy them a mansion with a lot of bird feeders?
That’s nuts!
This is criminal. The reality is that the total of one person’s taxes, possibly over a lifetime of work,,, will be devoted to saving one squirrel.
This is utterly criminal,,,
And why not trap a few and have them bred? It could be very inexpensive.
You can’t breed a mountain apparently. For all I can find out, they’re just red squirrels who live on Mount Graham.
What do you want to bet that the “Mount Graham red squirrels” are the same as any other squirrel but renamed that to make them extinct. That is the game they play.
It would be 2 people's taxes. The "rich" guy who pays his own taxes and the person he pays taxes for who doesn't have to pay any.
Message from the Tea Parties: “We are coming to take our government back!”
Are the coyotes who eat the squirrels too dumb to use these bridges as a trap?
The Mount Graham subspecies has been isolated from other subspecies of red squirrels since the end of the Pleistocene glacial periods. It is still rather unclear if the Mt. Graham red squirrel is distinct or not from red squirrels elsewhere. Studies on genetic data are in progress.
http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/graham/envir.html
No, but in a related story, the Arizona legislature has set aside $2MM to provide road kill for the equally rare Mount Graham Buzzards who rely on the dead squirrels for supper.
How about doing genetic studies on people to see if the particular subspecies is different. For example is my subspecies different from the presidents? Should my blood line be protected?
Why in the world do we look at squirrel different than human. A human is a human and a squirrel is a squirrel?
In Kentucky, they’d just kill ‘em and eat their brains.
About two years ago my wife was building a new bridge over a slough in Colusa County, California, and during the pre-construction conference at the site she was informed by a fish and game biologist that she would have to take steps to protect the “endangered” ‘Giant’ garter snake.
At the time, a garter snake happened to slither by the group, and she stepped over and picked it up, and asked is this a ‘Giant’ garter snake?
The biologist replied that they could only tell by counting the number of scales that encircled the head behind the plate. She began to count the scales while asking how many a ‘Giant’ garter snake had, and the biologist answered “I don’t know.”
She then tossed the snake and asked “how then do we know which snakes to protect, and how do we protect them?”
The puke didn’t have any answer.
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