Boy, am I in trouble.
These keep turning up in my mousetraps.
Posted on 07/05/2004 3:43:18 PM PDT by Issaquahking
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By Mead Gruver
The Associated Press
CHUGWATER, Wyo. -- Amy and Steve LeSatz want to be able to teach their clients the finer points of riding and roping in their own arena but can't because of a mouse that may never have existed.
The only decent site on their property for building an arena in southeastern Wyoming lies within 300 feet of Chugwater Creek. Building there is far too expensive because of the Endangered Species Act restrictions intended to protect the Preble's mouse.
"The mouse that doesn't exist," Amy LeSatz noted dryly.
After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners on the western fringe of the Great Plains as much as $100 million by some estimates, new research suggests the Preble's mouse never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to one of its cousins, the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, which is considered common enough not to need protection.
The new research could lead to loss of the Preble's "threatened" status and removal from Endangered Species Act protection. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to decide that question in December.
Far from closing the book on the Preble's mouse, the research by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has opened a new volume of questions -- including what to do about landowners who have been affected, whether the Bear Lodge mouse also needs protection and whether the Endangered Species Act itself needs changes.
Meadow jumping mice live near streams, and nearly 31,000 acres along streams in Colorado and Wyoming have been designated critical mouse habitat. That includes large parts of the Colorado Front Range, which over the past several years has been rapidly developed.
Front Range developers and local governments have had to set aside a lot of land to protect the mouse, though if protections are lifted, that does not mean all that land can be developed.
But developers would like to see restrictions ended for future development. In one Colorado Springs, Colo., subdivision, for example, the restrictions include a requirement that cats be kept on leashes. In rural areas, ranchers cannot clear weeds out of their irrigation canals, which reduces the amount of water that gets to their hay fields. On top of that, the mouse also has blocked the construction of reservoirs amid an ongoing drought in the Rocky Mountains.
"The bottom line is, it has been a wonderful tool for environmental groups to try to stop things," said Kent Holsinger, attorney for Coloradans for Water Conservation and Development, which has asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the mouse from federal protection.
Indeed, environmental groups are now calling for Endangered Species Act protection for the Bear Lodge mouse. They say that subspecies suffers from the same habitat degradation.
The Preble's mouse was established as a distinct subspecies by a study 50 years ago that was cited in the 1998 decision to declare it threatened. The man who did the 1954 study, Philip Krutzsch, now a professor emeritus with the University of Arizona, had examined the skulls of three mice and the skins of 11 others. It was an acceptable level of scrutiny at the time but "an extremely weak inference by today's standards," said Rob Roy Ramey II, curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and project leader on the new DNA research that overturns Krutzsch's conclusion.
Ramey and his colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA, the cell's genetic code, from several of the 12 subspecies of meadow jumping mice. They also repeated Krutzsch's skeleton measurements, using more specimens and more accurate tools.
Despite being reversed, Krutzsch endorses the new research and its conclusion: "It clearly defines what is true biologically."
But, inadequate as it may have been, Krutzsch's old study was the best science that had been done up until the listing of the Preble's mouse. The Endangered Species Act only requires that species protection be based on the best available science -- not the best possible science.
Ramey's DNA study seems likely to usurp Krutzsch's as the best science to date. But environmental groups are not willing to surrender.
They point out that Ramey's study has not been peer-reviewed. They also highlight criticism from Ramey's scientific peers that he did not compare the nuclear DNA of the mice subspecies.
The LeSatzes, meanwhile, say the Preble's mouse has nearly caused them to give up. But they hope they will at last be able to build their riding arena if the regulations are lifted.
"A tiny little mouse comes in and changes your whole perspective," Amy LeSatz said. "I've had more of an education in endangered species than I've ever wanted."
Calling some of "the usual suspects" who care about America and the environment - with the right view.
Kinda reminds us of "GLOBAL WARMING SCAREMONGERING", huh.
Let it come out of the FWS budget, unamended.
Oooh...I smell lawsuits a-comin'.
I'm usually one of the suspicious ones, but rarely a suspect! (grin) Happy post 4th day to ya Mr. King of the Issaquah nation!!!
There'd better be. I'd bet William Perry Pendley of the Mountain States Legal Foundation is already on it.
Boy, am I in trouble.
These keep turning up in my mousetraps.
Bureaucratic reply: (gallic shrug of the shoulders)"So?"
The solution to this type of enviro-communism is to make DemonRATS an endangered species on November 2nd!
Creating de facto government nature preserves on private property without paying compensation is outright theft. The ESA is nothing more than a tool to impose fascism on America - government control of private property.
The Endangered Species Act should be named "The Hitler Decree." Here's why -
In Point 17 of the 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party, written by Adolf Hitler on February 25th, 1920, is found:
“We demand a land reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to confiscate from the owners without compensation any land needed for the common purpose.”
Hitler also shared with the German left of his day the slogan: "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz" (Common use before private use).
>>Kinda reminds us of "GLOBAL WARMING SCAREMONGERING", huh.
Maybe the lefty extremists will make a disaster movie
showing the end of the world as we know it due to
George Bush's destruction of the Preble's mouse?
When you think of opportunities for advancement of envirowhacks, consider that they are pretty much limited. Discovery of a new species is the basis for a great leap up the ladder.
Bio types tend to be either splitters or lumpers. The splitters find arcane morphic distinctions to declare a spilt in the genus and thus a new species.
DNA research has ridden to the rescue and will be the bane of splitters. The lumpers, even those of us who are rank amatuers, will now prevail on sound scientific basis rather than percieved morphological differences.
If you live in California, you'd better have a permit before you trap mice if you want to be in compliance with the law.
I was leafing through a Reader's Digest in the checkout line today and I read a really funny joke, summarized as follows:
A man gets lost in the woods and kills and eats a bald eagle. He gets caught by the law and is brought to court, makes his case that it was either eat the eagle or starve to death, and is let off by the judge.
Just as he is about to leave, the judge asks him what the bald eagle tasted like. His answer?
"Well, it was sort of a cross between spotted owl and whooping crane."
LOL
RD does have some good ones...
Who started all this crap!?
Well, here is the timeline. With about 5 minutes of research one can connect the dots as to who, when, why, and how. FYI.
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