Need that ivory fix? Thankfully, President George W. Bush is looking out for the big game hunter in all of us. Last month, administration officials proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act that would legalize the killing and importation of a quota of endangered animals and their products. Safari clubs and circus owners nationwide are overjoyed.
This isn’t new legislation-the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is simply turning away from 30 years of precedent to a new interpretation of the act as it currently stands. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials claim that the profits generated from the sale of endangered animals and their byproducts would be used to fund protection programs of the remaining animals. The administration claims these “enhancement activities,” as they call them, will ensure these animals don’t fall into extinction. However, conservationists and other rational Americans remain unconvinced. Like Bush’s fabled tax cuts that were supposed to magically produce more tax revenue, this proposal will also fail under the weight of its own absurdity.
Endangered animals have enjoyed protection worldwide since 1973, when Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law. Though the act explicitly prohibits only the removal of domestic animals from the wild, foreign species have enjoyed de facto protection until now. The administration wants this protection lifted, to allow a specific number of animals from each species to be exploited. “It’s a very dangerous precedent to decide that wildlife exploitation is in the best interest of wildlife,” notes Adam Roberts of the Animal Welfare Institute.
Undeterred by setting a dangerous precedent, Bush is putting the desires of already wealthy businessmen over the environment. Money used to fund conservation efforts in the country the harvested animals inhabited previously will ostensibly create a twisted self-sustaining industry for these men.
In the past, according to the proposal, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granted “permits for otherwise prohibited activities when the purpose of the permit is scientific or when there is a clear link between the proposed activity and the enhancement of propagation or survival of the affected species.” A “clear link” is exactly what we’re missing here-the link between killing animals for profit and the propagation of endangered species.
Poaching and black-market activity are inevitable for exotic animals-even while under protection of the Endangered Species Act-but this illegal trafficking will skyrocket when even a few of these animals are allowed to be killed. No amount of “enhancement activities” will save the elephants once the ivory trade legally resumes “on a small scale.”
