How Project 2025 Will Put Animals at Risk
As the dystopian vision of Project 2025 moves into the spotlight, more Americans are beginning to realize that the future envisioned by this plan, titled ‘Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership The Conservative Promise,’ will bring about widespread suffering. The pain felt by its policies will be directed to humans, but animals and nature will also be at the mercy of this MAGA fantasy world.
The Project 2025 Mandate will reshape the construction of the American government, giving more power to the executive branch, thereby allowing a president (Donald Trump) authority to wipe out regulations that inhibit the greed of his billionaire friends. Scientists and experts at the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) nurture many of these rules, regulations, and policies. Since its inception by President Nixon in 1970, corporations and industries have been in battle with the EPA, whose mission is to protect human health and the environment.
On page 524 of the Mandate, a MAGA administration will roll back President Biden’s orders to reduce the use of fossil fuels and throw open access to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), trumpeting oil and gas leasing and development.
The delicate but abundant array of wildlife who roam these lands and fill the waters will suffer through habitat destruction, oil spills, noise pollution, contamination, disruption of migratory patterns, increased human presence and climate change.[i]
Human invasion of this wilderness will destroy an abundance of animals, such as polar bears, walruses, whales, Arctic foxes, and migratory birds.
Alaskan animals and wildlife are specifically targeted by the authors of the Mandate who plan to revoke National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service rules banning bear baiting. Hunters will applaud this move allowing them to lure bears with dog food, donuts, or bacon grease. Not only will an increased number of bears die at the hands of humans, but people who accidentally traipse through a baited trap could come face to face with a bear protecting his food source.[KS1]
Historically, the BLM has grievously erred in its management of horses and burros, using helicopters for roundups, separating foals from mothers, and causing thousands of horse injuries and deaths. The captured animals are imprisoned in overcrowded corrals where a small percentage are adopted while the majority are trucked across the border into Mexico for slaughter.
In March 2022, the Biden Administration added $16 million to the federal wild horse program. The funding is earmarked for a “robust fertility vaccine control program” to reduce the overpopulation of horses and burros thereby eliminating horse removals from the wild.[ii]
Under Project 2025’s Mandate, America’s wild horses and burros will be managed to death. After proclaiming that wild horses disturb property owners and “turn the sod into concrete,” their solution on page 529 is for “Congress to enact laws permitting the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to dispose humanely of these animals.”
On page 534, the Mandate lists how it plans to destroy the Endangered Species Act by specifically delisting the grizzly bear and the gray wolf as protected species and entrusting their management to state agencies that have historically made disastrous decisions regarding their welfare.
Further endangering habitat and animal species will be the abolishment of the Biological Resources Division of the US Geological Survey. Since 1994, this agency has gathered and analyzed biological information that scientifically determines how industry, and the natural world can co-exist. Without this oversight, animal and plant species are at the mercy of corporations and industry, where profits greatly outweigh living organisms.
Throughout its 900 pages, Project 2025 never prioritizes animals. Its only concern is that humans can go to war exploiting land, air, sea, and water without consequences. A polar bear loping across a sea of ice may seem a world away from our everyday lives, but the blame for their demise at the irresponsible hands of those who care only about the financial bottom line, will be ours to share should the voters allow Project 2025 to win in November.
[i] The Wilderness Society, Arctic Animals at Risk: Which Animals are Most Threatened by Oil Development? https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/arctic-animals-risk-which-animals-are-most-threatened-oil-development#:~:text=Whales%3A%20Arctic%20waters%20host%20thousands,booms%20used%20to%20find%20oil.
[ii] American Wildhorse Conservation (March 29, 2022), American Wild Horse Campaign Urges Administration to Fund Humane Fertility Control Vaccines Instead of Cruel Roundups for Protection of America’s Wild Horse & Burro Herds, https://americanwildhorse.org/media/biden-allocates-additional-16m-towards-federal-wild-horse-program
[KS1]I suggest deleting as it is hard to easily explain and not as relevant as all the other shit the Mandate will do