by Gregory McNamee

How many Florida panthers are there in the wild?



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Out in the desert, where rivers seldom pose barriers but offer fine avenues of transit for animals of all kinds, pack rats are abundant. They are abundant because they offer tasty meals to numerous predators, from rattlesnakes to coyotes. Humans do their best to ward off such critters, of course, for which reason—and good reason it is—pack rats like to make their homes where humans do, to enjoy their protection. This is, by any human standard, not a good thing, and so humans now face the problem of keeping the pack rats at a distance. Some do so by means of poison, which, a recent story in the Arizona Daily Star rightly notes, has the unfortunate habit of sending death downstream to any predators that happen to make a meal of a distressed rodent. The article notes that there are numerous nonlethal, even humane ways of keeping pack rats away, though making them coyote- and rattlesnake-proof is another matter entirely.

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We have reported numerous times on the matter of horse slaughter in the United States, which, it seems, simply will not go away, and this despite the evident fact that the vast majority of Americans oppose it. That has not stopped livestock producers from seeking numerous loopholes and legal protections, and neither has it stopped politicians beholden to those producers from looking for ways around the law. Now, it seems, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) is affording the proponents of horse slaughter a little aid and comfort, almost certainly inadvertently but helpfully nonetheless. Writes James McWilliams in a recent number of the online magazine Pacific Standard, GAO figures inaccurately suggest that horse abuse—the logical result of banning horse slaughter, those proponents have argued—is rising to crisis proportions, which the facts do not bear out. We’ll let McWilliams tell the story, but his closing seems just right: “It’s all very sad logic upon which to rebuild an industry.”

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Granted that the governments of the world, that of Great Britain among them, are frying big fish these days, it is a passing strange thing that England has instigated a program of badger slaughter in an effort to curb bovine tuberculosis, a malady that badgers can indeed transmit. Reports the BBC, at least 5,000 badgers are slated to die in Somerset and Gloucestershire, where cattle are raised. Naturally, the killing will be outsourced, for this is the new Britain of private initiative. And how will the government know whether it has been successful? Apparently, it won’t, because the “pilot program” will not be evaluated by means of scientific data. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, the poet Randall Jarrell, stationed in England with the Eighth Air Force during the Second World War, noted, adding, “That’s what they tell the eggs.” Let’s ask the badgers what they think of the humaneness of the enterprise.