Who Does Our Govt Care About More Us(voters) Or Animals and Fish?

Great Debates
1

Man, this is getting ridiculous. Humans thanks to the dumb stupid officials that are elected our becoming food for sharks. I mean we can’t let our sharks starve lets feed’em humans since there are alot of them.

What kind of stupid nonsense is this? Since when does human life come secondary to animals. Remember God gave us reign over the animals not vice-a-versa. And even if you don’t believe in God, whatever happened to survival of the fittest?

Yet we our letting are govt protect animals at the expense of human lives. This is stupid. Tell you the truth I could care less if every dang shark was hunted down and killed I don’t like them anyway(I used to surf). And who cares if they are not around anymore? I never see’em except in an aquarium anyways. I certainly don’t want to see one if me and my family are swimming in the ocean.

If these animal whacos love animals so much more than they do humans why don’t they sacrafice themselves as shark bait when the rest of us enjoy the ocean that we rule over.

Then another absudity I heard about was four firemen were killed putting out a forest fire because helicopters were forbidden to scoop out water due to some salmon might get caught in it? WTH(What the Hell) SALMON??? Aren’t these the same crappy fish they make croquet(s) out of and feed you in elementary school? I mean COME ON TREE HUGGERS YOU DON’T NEED TO GET A LIFE YOU NEED TO GET A BRAIN!!!

Same way with the mountains lions that kill humans in theire backyards because of stupid anti hunting regulations to protect the poor little mountain lions. I’m sorry they don’t have a home anymore but since humans take priority over animals so I think people should be able to shoot the stupid cats if they come in your backyard after all they are a predator and you shoot predators.

This stuff is just getting ridiculous.

2

I disagree.

3

The easy, non-inflammatory answer (and believe me, it’s difficult not get inflammatory over the OP), is that the US Government only cares about its voters. If no-one really cared, they wouldn’t bother enacting legislation to protect wildlife. But, the people who do care happen to be voters as well. Are you implying their voice should not be heard?

4

  1. What the fuck are you talking about?

  2. Sharks rarely attack human beings. They almost never attack humans that are not separated from a group.

  3. Only a few species of sharks will even bother to try attacking people, ever: bull sharks, tiger sharks, and great white sharks. There are several hundred species out there, and the great majority of them are harmless to humans.

  4. Most shark bites result from a case of mistaken identity. Despite their popular culture image as fearsome, vengeful predators, sharks don’t like to take unnecessary risks. They like prey that they can take easily, and sometimes mistake humans for seals or fish. When they find out that they messed up, they usually move on.

  5. Most shark bites are not fatal. In fact, among the six people injured in Florida this past weekend, not one received a life-threatening injury.

  6. Sharks perform a valuable scavenging and predation function in the ocean’s ecosystem.

  7. The reason you’ve seen so much attention paid to the recent shark incidents in the Bahamas and Florida is precisely because they are anamolous.

  8. One does not have to “love animals more than humans” to believe in wildlife protection. This is not a topic that requires an excluded middle.

  9. Ever notice how people who like to spout off phrases that they don’t understand like, for example, “survival of the fittest,” sing a much different tune when some humans suddenly occupy a different place on the food web?

  10. I’d like a cite for the fireman story, please.

5

I think the point that Wildest Bill is missing is that many of the “tree huggers” are voters. When government passes legislation to protect wildlife, it is doing so not out of the goodness of its (nonexistent) heart, but because a contingent of the voters want that legislation passed. And just because it’s a position WB obviously disagrees with doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be passed – after all, he’s not the only voter out there…

6

WB: Humans thanks to the dumb stupid officials that are elected [are] becoming food for sharks.

Thank you for your post and your expression of concern about this matter. Would you be kind enough to provide a cite from a source of factual evidence describing the particular incident(s) that inspired your remarks?

*Since when does human life come secondary to animals. Remember God gave us reign over the animals not vice-a-versa. And even if you don’t believe in God, whatever happened to survival of the fittest? *

Recall that many believers in God do not infer from that that humans have a God-given right to do whatever they like to other animals. Recall also that many non-believers in God do not apply a simplistic pseudo-Darwinian model of interspecies competition to…aw, hell, you don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you? Try again: “Many animals, Bill! Many animals living in land and sea and air! Human beings like other animals! Human beings want protect ourselves and protect other animals too! Human beings take risks to protect other animals! Sometimes risks too big! Other animals not know we want protect them! Some animals predators—whoops, word too big, I mean, big and fierce! Attack human beings for food! Bad, bad, human beings very sad! Must make our risks smaller! But still human beings trying find ways to protect ourselves and other animals too!”

Then another absudity I heard about was four firemen were killed putting out a forest fire because helicopters were forbidden to scoop out water due to some salmon might get caught in it?

Thank you for your post and your expression of concern about this matter. Would you be kind enough to provide a cite from a source of factual evidence describing the particular incident(s) that inspired your remarks?

Same way with the mountains lions that kill humans in theire backyards because of stupid anti hunting regulations to protect the poor little mountain lions.

Thank you for your post and your expression of concern about this matter. Would you be kind enough to provide a cite from a source of factual evidence describing the particular incident(s) that inspired your remarks?

*This stuff is just getting ridiculous. *

Amen, though perhaps not in the sense you mean.

7

No. You shoot predators. I realize that predators aren’t really all that interested in me–unless I do something stupid–and leave them be.

Total assaults on me by predators: ~50…all by over-zealous housecats with “soft paws” (claws retracted).

[sub]also, you have any statistics on that? Or even a good anecdote? Something?[/sub]

8
  1. Resolved: The practice of deliberately driving species into extinction is a good thing.
  2. Resolved: The extinction of species due to human activity is, a good thind, or, at least, not a cause for concern.
  3. Resolved: Human activity that affects the environment to such an extent that non-human species are driven to extinction constitutes the responsible stewardship of the world that the Creator expects of His people.

Please select one or more of the above, and defend or attack it (them).

9

No She didn’t.
Those four firefighters who were killed in Washington died because they were doing their jobs in a dangerous situation. That they were perhaps undertrained might have been a factor as well, but ask any professional firefighter about flareups sometime. There was no possibility of dumping water on them, salmon issues notwithstanding.

Bill, where are you hearing that salmon protection efforts caused their deaths? As a Washington resident, and with firefighters in my family, I find it extremely offensive that anyone would minimize the deaths of those brave people with such a crassly incorrect politically motivated spin.

10

Inane reply - Since many of our elected officials were, in another life, laywers, I s’pose the bigoted would make the case, that the elected officials are merely taking care of their own.

Seriously though, the “government,” that body of elected and appointed officials simply isn’t the homogenous group you appear to think it is. Nor are the issues as static as you appear to think they are. And as PLD has pointed out, the most likely reason you even heard anything about the six shark attacks this weekend is that such a rash of them is highly anomalous.

11

Actually shark attacks have increase by a huge percentage in Florida after such restraining laws of getting one shark per boat in effect in Florida.

Let me look for cites to support the rest. Andros in no way do I discount the lives of the those fire people (3 men and 1 woman I believe). I value the efforts of firemen very much and that is why I was so outraged on such stupidity by our govt protecting salmon instead of giving fireman all the tools available to help them with their job.

12

Since Bill, as usual, has not managed to come up with any cites or links, I found a Fox News story on the forest fire. It indicates that indeed, concern about using water from rivers that were home to protected species exacerbated delays in dispatching a helicopter “water drop”, and that those delays were partly responsible for the firefighters’ deaths.

However, Bill’s idea that this involved some kind of deliberate governmental policy of valuing the protection of endangered fish over the lives of firefighters appears to be typical Wildest Bull. Apparently it was simply a procedural screwup: as a USFS fire chief commented, standard procedure would have required that “firefighters would have used the Chewuch water to fight the fire and addressed any environmental violations or restrictions after the fire was extinguished. […] ‘We get the water where we can get it and ask questions later,’ [fire chief] Bosworth said.”

13

Thanks kimstu for the link.

And as far as your comment about wildest bull. Of course the govt plan for this incident to result in deaths but it did. Poor planning. But what makes no damn sense is why the law was passed in the first place. I mean when there is a fire it is killing more endagered species and trees than a few unlucky salmon that might be taken while they were scooping water. Now that is bull.

14

WB: But what makes no damn sense is why the law was passed in the first place.

What law, Bill? I thought I just explained that apparently according to USFS standard procedure, there is no law or regulation that requires firefighters to get special permission before using water from a river with protected fish species as an emergency firefighting measure. Apparently somebody mistakenly thought there was, triggering the request for permission that got hung up due to not being able to find authorized personnel because they were in a meeting, etc. etc., which caused the delays that lead to the deaths. Two words, Bill: Tragic Mistake.

15

Devil’s Advocate here, leaping to the defense.

Smallpox. (I know, smallpox is a virus, and there’s a debate whether or not virii can be considered “living”, and therefore whether they can be driven into extinction, but…)

I move that the eradication of smallpox is a good thing. The virus caused a disease that had a high death rate and didn’t seem to benefit anyone or anything.

16

I think you may be mischaracterizing what happened, Kimstu, as a “procedural screwup” (but just a small bit). It seems from the article that there is a policy in place that says that they have to ask permission:

Any procedural screwup seems to have been in the issue of why the team that grants permission waited so long to do so.
Bosworth seems to be misinformed about his own policy, or at least the implications of his policy, as do others at USFS:

But it does seem the policy is one that requires an exemption:

[hijack]
Hey, Wildest Bill, where do you live? You are just all over the map when it comes to your brain, my friend. I want to come visit to see if you are really for real. :slight_smile:
[/hijack]

17

::::sigh:::: Cite, please? Also, percentages are meaningless without some numbers behind them. An increase from 5 to 15 per year would be a 200% increase. It still isn’t many.

And, as stated, most shark attacks are not fatal, or even disfiguring. According to the Shark Attack Information File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, there were a total of 79 unprovoked shark attacks on humans world worldwide in 2000. The year before there were 58 unprovoked attacks, and the yearly average from 1990-1998 was 54.

Of those 79 attacks, ten were fatal: Three in Australia, two in Tanzania, and one each in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Japan, New Caldedonia and the United States. One unprovoked shark-related fatality in the U.S., Bill. One.

51 of the 79 attacks occurred in the United States. 34 of those occurred in Florida. The one fatality also occurred in Florida. One out of 34 gives us a 2.9% fatality rate for Florida. One out of 51 gives us a 1.9% fatality rate for the United States.

From 1959 to 1990, the United States has had a total of 12 unprovoked shark-related fatalities, for an average of 0.4 per year. By comparison, in that same period, 1,505 people, or an average of 47 per year, died from lightning strikes. Looks like we need to worry more about building giant lightning rods than about hunting down sharks.

Similarly, there were, in 1996, more than 13,000 chainsaw injuries reported. The total number of shark-related injuries? 18.

People are disproportionately and irrationally afraid of sharks. Even if you spend every single day in the water, your chances of being bitten or killed by a shark are so remote as to be statistically ignorable. Have the number of attacks worldwide been increasing? Yes, for simple and obvious reasons. More and more people are spending more and more time in the water–surfing, snorkeling, diving, jet-skiing, boat racing, water skiing, etc. An increase in attacks is inevitable, given that fact. But 10 fatalities per year hardly sounds like an epidemic.

18

Kimstu,

Did you read the whole article? Unless I just missed something there is a law or rule that prevents the firefighters from taking the water without permission.

19

Sure sounds to me like the dispatch fucked up.

20

Well, the fire chief is on record as saying that when they’re actually fighting fires, standard procedure is not to bother getting permission before using water if it is needed. Necros may be right that the fire chief is misinformed about his own program’s policy, and there does seem to be some contradiction there. But either way, “procedural screwup” or “tragic mistake” seems to be a much more accurate way of accounting for the situation than alleging that the government cares more about fish than about human beings.