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Member/Volunteer Speaks Out In the Tortoise Issues
Gopher Tortoise "Incidental Take"
Just as ornithologist James Tanner mourned the clear-cut of the south’s bottomland forests for near-silencing the Ivory-billed woodpecker, tomorrow’s ecologists (and hopefully all decent human beings) will grieve at what development has wrought on Florida’s chief upland tenant, the gopher tortoise. A shy animal, who eats weeds and prototypically digs his burrow in longleaf pine-turkey oak sandhill, he faces a fierce foe in the unapologetic greed which has gripped nearly all his Florida range. My county---Orange---is among the worst: cir. 8000 tortoises buried alive in a span of twelve years. If steps are not taken to secure his survival, huge planned metropolises and business hubs could locally extinct Gopherus polyphemus in a relatively short time. This would not be just sad, but, humanely and genetically speaking, unforgivable.
Tortoises are not clods of dirt, but feeling animals; and Florida’s Chapter 828 animal cruelty statutes seem clearly meant to shield all animals, not just ones builders won’t profit by bulldozing. "Selective humaneness" can’t be the intent behind 828.12:
"A person who commits an act to any animal which results in the cruel death
or excessive or repeated infliction of unnecessary pain or suffering…is guilty of a
felony of the third degree."
A high-road principle encoded in law to reflect a society’s will can’t just apply when it’s convenient---or cheap---but consistently, across the board. It’s either "wrong" or it’s "right" to bury animals alive. Either it’s the stuff of nightmare, sadists and bad seeds (as I believe) or it’s a perfectly fine act for adults of all stripes to commit on any animal, at any time, anywhere. If indeed we’ve arrived at the latter as our prevailing ethos, we’re beyond help---but I don’t think we have: our anti-cruelty statutes and the Endangered Species Act embody our express wish to protect---and respect---life less rapacious than our own. These laws were enacted precisely because human “economic forces” are, and always have been, poised to exploit the native landscape and its dwellers, and it is part of our shared conscience and foresight to place curbs on how brutal that exploitation can be. If not for Theo Roosevelt’s wildlife refuges, plume hunters would surely have wiped out roseate spoonbills and snowy egrets. It is not until now that land development has posed such a threat to indigenous tortoises, and we cannot continue to ignore the bulldozer scrapings on the burrow apron. Man must, if cognizant of the mind and heart given him, admit his errors and by all means not repeat them anew with each era.
The Orlando Sentinel’s recent quote by patriot Thomas Paine, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right…" hits dead center on the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) "Take" rule in effect since 1991, which allows developers to pave over limitless numbers of tortoises for a fee to FWC (the tortoise, meanwhile, is an imperiled species taboo to the rest of us to molest).
What is patently wrong by common decency standards has been sold us as "right"---as if usage (80,000 buried tortoises and counting); seamlessness of method (below-ground animal suffering is neither seen nor heard); and mitigation (a false panacea which neither offsets the loss nor accounts for Take’s cruel method) make it so. Yet one can’t whitewash the image of a tortoise, blocked from egress in its burrow, slowly starving and/or asphyxiating over six months’ time: It is what it is---and it’s cruel to knowingly inflict such suffering.
In his scathing indictment of Take in The Miami Herald, Carl Hiassen revealed that “Orange County Public Schools got permission to kill 110 tortoises on the future site of a high school in exchange for preserving 12 acres”---highlighting the grotesquely lopsided trade-off mitigation is and the lesson such heartless official action teaches kids.
The 923 tortoise kill permits issued in Volusia and on tap to be executed despite the species uplisting to Threatened is BEYOND bizarre. Take’s cessation should be retroactively applied and these permits rescinded or converted to relocation permits. Also, it should be incumbent upon counties---starting now---to exact real conservation (whether on- or offsite) from applicants seeking approval to build on enormous tortoise-occupied tracts. This local reliance on FWC’s piecemeal permitting to "fix" irresponsible land use decisions must stop.
Tortoise relocation done properly works. Take shames our state and mocks our benevolent intent, voiced over time, to defend animals from cruelty and extinction. To me, it seems our founding fathers believed that the people’s natural sense of justice should shape law and policy, not oligarchies or faceless business cliques.
Our wildlife agency was born not to serve the building industry, but to conserve wildlife. Although FWC has up-listed the tortoise’s status, and, to its credit, is drafting a management plan that would eliminate the Take option except in rare circumstances, the interim carnage that will ensue if a Take moratorium, as suggested by this newspaper,r is not called, could wreak an insupportable toll on both tortoise numbers, and on our collective humane psyche. Citizens who care should urge FWC along this high road NOW rather than later (commissioners@MyFWC.com) . The permit to bury animals alive should be put to bed forever for the barbarity it is---heralding a kinder, gentler Florida for us all.
Rebecca Eagan
(Pastel Artist; & Public Representative, FWC Tortoise Stakeholder Steering Committee)
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