Photo: Canadian lynx. US Fish & Wildlife Service digital library.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recently released a review of the status of lynx, which were listed as “Threatened” on the Endangered Species list in 2000. Now, in the new world of Trump’s fact-free, anti-science, war-on-wildlife administration, the FWS recommends removing lynx from Endangered Species Act protections completely, writing: “Considering the available information, we found no reliable information that the current distribution and abundance of resident lynx in the contiguous United States are substantially reduced from historical conditions.”
The agency does not even attempt to provide the public with an estimated current population number of how many lynx there are because the agency has no idea. The key phrase here is “considering the available information,” and the shocking truth is that the Fish and Wildlife Service has no idea how many lynx there are for one simple reason; the agency no longer monitors lynx populations!
What the agency, if it was being truthful, should have written in their report is: “Because we no longer monitor the population of lynx we have no evidence of how many lynx there are and therefore also have no evidence that lynx numbers are declining or increasing or doing anything at all. Also, because we have decided to ignore all of the historical records of lynx presence, we have no evidence of any change from historic…