“What ever happened to survival of the fittest?”
Remember the (I think “spotted”) owl that shut down the entire timber industry in the northwest? It’s being run into extinction by a more competitive owl. So, we lost an entire industry and still didn’t save the owls.
Further, Spotted Owls roost where ever they please, and not exclusively in old growth timber. Many a paid protestor made a killing on the whole fake issue.
They tried to use the sea-going marbled murrelet to do the same thing to the commercial sockeye salmon fishery on the US side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Guys wound up using an expensive 10 inch mesh on the top 10 feet of their driftnets, allowing most of the sockeye to pass through as an “unintended” consequence just to protect birds that had almost no interaction with drift nets unless the net was set directly on the birds resulting in both bird death and $4000 driftnet loss as the riptides the birds frequented had only bait fish and were in shallow water.