But today I'm going to look at the US government's approach to a small thing: an owl. Namely, the Barred Owl, which has through hard work, saving and investment (in-nestment?), managed to extend its range even in this recession. The owl is a great neighbor to humankind and a boon to our parks and forests, spending most of its time hunting and destroying rodents that carry bubonic plague fleas. It is a beautiful predator with a haunting, tourist-attracting call. So naturally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (a bureau of the DOI) has started a million-dollar program to... terminate the owls and their owlets without mercy.
Yes, your taxes are even now paying for empty-eyed Department of the Interior owlinators to go from nest to nest with 12-gauge shotguns and copies of Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds, with the Barred Owl picture highlighted like Sarah Connor's name in an LA phone book. Night vision scopes, thermal imaging, and Predator drones (well, in this case, anti-predator drones) give the owls little chance. The first stage of the plan is to blast about 9,000 owls and their families into small bloody pieces of fluffy down, but the program is open-ended. Listen, and understand: The Department of the Interior is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until those owls are dead!
If you don't care about small things like owls, care about this: the Department of the Interior will spend about 12.4 billion in FY 2013. The Department of Agriculture will spend about $154 billion dollars in FY 2013. This money goes into programs to raise your grocery bill by paying farmers not to grow food, to raise your gasoline prices by forcing refineries to water it down with alcohol, to raise the price of housing with subsidized subprime loans (because that has worked so well for our economy), to subsidize uneconomic logging, and finally, to put 15 percent of the US population on food stamps. And these are just two smallish departments among many.
All of that money could simply be left in the real economy instead. In our pockets, for us to decide what to subsidize. Healthy food would be cheaper, gasoline would be cheaper, housing would be cheaper. The products that we chose to buy would produce millions of jobs, so that most people wouldn't have to be on Food Stamps.
And there would be 9,000 more live owls in the forest. An owl is a small thing to a bureaucracy, but still important to some people.
I would love to know what justification they have for perpetrating another heinous act by the cancer that is humanity.