Front Page Of The Los Angeles Times: Okay To Kill Condors Now. As Well As Bald Eagles, Golden Eagles, and Whooping Cranes; Some Of These Species Will Be Extinct By 2100; The Condor Will Be The First To Go; Whooping Cranes Next; Slicers And Dicers -- Not One Redeeming Feature

Updates

May 15, 2013: The Wyoming Trib weighs in also.


May 14, 2013:  Carpe Diem has a great post on this, as well as video.

Original Post

The LA Times is reporting:

Federal wildlife officials took the unprecedented step Friday of telling private companies that they will not be prosecuted for inadvertently harassing or even killing endangered California condors.

In a decision swiftly condemned by conservationists and wildlife advocates, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said operators of Terra-Gen Power's wind farm in the Tehachapi Mountains will not be prosecuted if their turbines accidentally kill a condor during the expected 30-year life span of the project.

California condors were brought back from the brink of extinction a quarter-century ago and still cling precariously to survival. Federal law prohibits the harassment or killing of endangered species for any reason.

Fish and Wildlife also made an exception for the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch Co., saying that the government will not prosecute if construction of the company's controversial 5,553-acre development of luxury homes, hotels and golf courses violates the harassment ban in the endangered species law. The exception will last for 50 years. The project is expected to consume 8% of the critical condor habitat in the Tehachapis, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles.

Cue up Connie Francis. 

I don't have a dog in this fight. I will be gone by 2100. I have the same feeling about slicers and dicers that J. Robert Oppenheimer would have had. Or perhaps Ronald Reagan.

By the way, prosecuting slicers and dicers would have never worked anyway, for two reasons. First, no on could prove how a condor was killed in the first place, even if they found the carcass, which would have been very unlikely. Second, there will be so many dead birds the Fish and Wildlife Department would not have been able to keep up with all the carnage.