The Cow Analogy

If stocking rainbow trout has to be assessed at every location in the state to see if 1 of 80+ "decision species" might be negatively affected by those trout, what on earth do groups like the Center for Biological Diversity think about cows?

Drive down any freeway in California and you'll see cows, cows, and more cows. Last time I checked, cows are non-native and do plenty of damage to native critters. Are farmers going to have to conduct pre-stocking assessments for cows in the future, to make sure those cows are ok to "stock"?

The Human Analogy

At Los Vaqueros reservoir, they are raising the dam. Why? Because people need water to drink and water crops and hose off their cars. OK great.

Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the water district raising the dam has to provide mitigation for native species affected by the dam raising. You know what they are going to do? They're going to build little ponds in those no-nothing creeks that feed the lake.

I get it, an eye for an eye. See exhibit B of the Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program, page 11.

https://www.communicationsmgr.com/projects/losvaqueros/docs/Exhibit%20B%20total.pdf

Under the law, building those ponds make it OK for us humans to raise the dam and flood out amphibian habitat. I'm cool with that, frogs are neat little dudes and running them to extinction sucks.

But, if they want to stock rainbow trout in Los Vaqueros (the ONLY fish native to California that they ever stocked there I might add) the DFG has been forced by the CBD (so far) under CEQA to not stock because the trout might mess up native critters. You know my thoughts on this already.

But now let's say some enterprising anglers proposed that they build more ponds as "mitigation" for the trout stocking, do you think that would fly? Would that make it OK to stock trout? I mean shoot, the dam raising project is going to completely ruin frog habitat by flooding it, and the trout's impact is not nearly that.

Answer - of course not. Because thirsty humans are a fine excuse to flood frog habitat but humans who want to fish aren't.