The fear that someone, somewhere might be having fun in our natural environment and therefore must be stopped.
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a name that in and of itself is practically an oxymoron, is filing a lawsuit to stop people swimming with Manatees in Crystal River, Florida.
Fox News: Lawsuit aims to ban swimming with manatees in Florida
There are already plenty of protections for Manatees in the Crystal River, including a roped-off no-entry area reserved just for them.
There's also a lack of any real data concerning problems with swimmer-manatee interactions as currently held. If anything, such interactions help the manatees by making people want to save and conserve them.
Manatees are in far greater danger from boat propellers than human swimmers and this lawsuit seems more to generate headlines and increase federal bureaucratic overreach than anything else.
The current rules seem to have worked as in 2007 it was recommended that the manatees be no longer considered endangered as their population is doing quite well there. Also a fair chunk of money from the tours go to manatee conservation, so cutting that off would reduce funding for their protection, which would likely lead to a demand for more federal funding and federal bureaucrats to administer that funding (hmmm....).
Having actually snorkeled in Crystal River with Manatees I can attest to the care of the tour operators to comply with the rules concerning swimming with Manatees.
5 comments:
If the group is actually made up of public employees, and since they have used that 'fact' as part of their name, that could in essence mean it is the government suing the public on this issue. Government employees, in almost every state and definitely, cannot sue the public while doing so as representing the government. They will lose flat out, I am guessing, on that alone if someone is wise enough to pursue them that way.
Then, they should all be fired for misrepresenting the government in a law suit.
Agree with Glenn... NOT the first time that's happened in Florida...
This is why people like me pull their hair out. There are many, many evils being done to animals that are far worse than just swimming with them. So how about we focus on things like tying sows down forever so they are always available for nursing or battery cages OK?
GlennB - Yep, its like those friendly suits by green groups suing the EPA to force them to do the things the EPA wants to do but can't politically. They seem to be spinning it to claim that they are suing as representatives of the government employees to force the government to enforce every minute bit of government regulation.
Old NFO- yep if you check out PEER's website they do this stuff all over.
PH: That would imply a loss of bureaucratic and regulatory control, and they can't have that.
Post a Comment