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WDCS commends Rep. Rahall and the House Natural Resources Committee for calling on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to assess the repeated failures of the Bush Administration to protect whales and dolphins, even when mandated to do so by U.S. law. The GAO said the National Marine Fisheries Service generally lacked a "comprehensive strategy" for assessing the effectiveness of its animal protection measures. Additionally, the report stated out of 30 marine mammal species deserving protection under federal guidelines, the agency failed to set up expert teams to provide protection for 14.
WDCS would like to say that we were shocked by the GAO report, but unfortunately that is not the case. The wholesale disregard for whale and dolphin protection by the Bush government, from its policies at the International Whaling Commission to its failure to follow through with mandated deadlines to develop mitigation programs to decrease deaths from fisheries entanglements has been evident to anyone in this field. We look forward to working with the incoming administration to address these issues.
Kate O’Connell from WDCS-North America said “The Bush Administration has been slow, even failed, to act to protect whales and dolphins, putting politics ahead of science. We call on the Obama Administration to ‘disentangle’ the process that Bush politicized, and to develop conservation and management guidelines for fisheries that take animal welfare concerns into consideration, thus affording whales and dolphins the protections that science shows they desperately need.”
WDCS has recently published a report, Shrouded by the Sea, which reveals the shocking truth behind the entanglement of whales, dolphins and porpoises in fishing nets. Estimates show that more than 300,000 of these animals are killed by fishing activities world-wide each year, and WDCS has been calling on the Bush Administration to take action, often to no avail, as evidenced by the results of the GAO report.
To read WDCS’ report: http://www.wdcs.org/submissions_bin/wdcs_bycatchreport_2008.pdf
Copy of GAO report: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0978.pdf
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