>>The law itself is self-defeating — protect the seal by letting it die!!!
We have something like that around here in the San Joaquin Valley. The Valley Oak. A beautiful giant oak species. Trouble is, if you have one on your property the gooks in the government thinks they own it. You are subject to a raft of regulations about what you can do and how you can do and where and when you can do....
They pretend this is to protect the oak, but everyone knows that it’s to grab power over private land. If someone wanted to “Protect” an oak tree, they would have laws that encouraged people to want to have them on their property. The way it is now, EVERYONE cuts them down when they’re very young before government screws take ownership.
I read about someone in California who had a large shade tree in their yard, and their neighbor wanted to put up solar panels to “go green”. The shade tree was keeping the sun off the neighbor’s solar panels, so the government said the tree would have to go. Then they discovered it was a “protected” tree species. So we have the law demanding trees be cut down for the sake of greenness, and a frustrated solar neighbor in the nice cool shade. I don’t know how that came out.