The U.S. Marine Corps plans to spend $50 million moving some 1,100 turtles from its training base at Twentynine Palms, Calif., or about $45,454 each.
The program includes a 30-year assessment of their efforts to monitor the desert tortoises that are listed as threatened under federal law.
According to Marine Corps Times, the tortoises live on a section of the base that is to be used for training.
The newspaper noted that the cost is half the price if an F-35B vertical takeoff jet.
The service said it is trying to do the right thing. Its plan calls for housing juvenile turtles until they are big enough to make the trip to safer ground.
But there are critics who fear that the turtles will turn around and return to their native ground and protective burrows to hide from others that want to eat them, including coyotes, dogs, and badgers.
The Los Angeles Times explained:
Tortoise translocation has a dismal track record. The stress from handling by humans and then adapting to unfamiliar terrain renders the reptiles vulnerable to lethal threats, including predation by dogs, ravens and coyotes; respiratory disease; dehydration; and being hit by vehicles.
It also disrupts complex tortoise social networks and genetic lines linked for thousands of years by Mojave Desert kingdoms of trails, arroyos and hibernation burrows fringed with creosote. Those habitats are being irreversibly fragmented and destroyed by off-road vehicles, urban encroachment and development of utility corridors and massive green-energy facilities.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
