Trump’s gang risks furious backlash by messing with beloved Key Deer

The Trump administration’s callous dismissal of the imperiled Florida Keys mole skink failed to rouse the masses. Just an obscure little brown lizard on the fast track to extinction.

The Department of Interior decided in October that the Keys mole skink was unworthy of federal protection, which was hardly surprising, given that Republicans regard America’s register of endangered species as Mother Nature’s version of fake news. Aside from protests from wildlife biologists there wasn’t much public outcry. Sadly, the save-the-skink club has but a sparse membership.

But now Donald Trump’s fauna-loathing henchmen are going after one of Florida’s most beloved critters. Last week, the Miami Herald reported that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reconsidering the endangered status of the Florida Key deer.

This is too much. They’re going after Bambi. Even the most apathetic among us won’t abide a cabal of right-wing zealots sabotaging the special protections afforded the diminutive Key deer. This time, it won’t just be a few khaki-clad wildlife nerds who’ll be protesting. Every damn fifth grader in the state will be howling in outrage.

An unhappy truism regarding wildlife preservation is that — at least outside the scientific community — cute counts. No doubt we should all be concerned about the disappearing Key mole skink, an oddly engineered, elongated creature with a reddish tail and legs that look as if they were borrowed from another species. But Key deer, barely 30 inches tall, not much bigger than my mutt Jasper, are downright adorable. Mess with the Florida Key deer’s endangered status, and surely there’ll be hell to pay.

The question (which, according to the Herald, the Fish and Wildlife flunkies won’t answer) is why on earth (what’s left of it) would the Trump gang even consider delisting the Key deer, which has been on the endangered list — and for good reason — for the last half-century. It’s hardly like threats to the animal’s survival has subsided. After a brutal outbreak of deer-killing screw flies in 2016, followed by Hurricane Irma pounding across their southern Keys haunts last year, the deer population has been reduced to less than 1,000. Meanwhile, developers have been steadily encroaching on their habitat. And rising sea levels threaten to wipe out their fresh water sources. (Oops. The feds can’t plan for something the president calls a hoax.)

How could these factors lead the Fish and Wildlife honchos to conjure up a sunny outlook for the Key deer?

Perhaps, because the Trump administration has been hell-bent on undoing federal wildlife protections, which are regarded as impediments to oil, mining, gas and timber production. This is the president, mind you, who described the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska as “one of the great oil spots.”

Trump not only opened the Alaska refuge to oil drillers, he signed legislation last year that ended protections for bears, wolves, foxes and other carnivores that inhabit the region. (At the behest of hunting outfits, who don’t like the competition.) The new law also allows hunters to shoot the animals from helicopters. And in a particularly savage turn in federal wildlife management, hunters are now allowed to slaughter hibernating bears and their cubs, and wolf cubs in their dens.

Meanwhile, Trumpsters have denied endangered status to the Canada lynx, the Pacific walrus, the black-backed woodpecker, the yellow-billed cuckoo, the lesser prairie chicken and bunch of snails and reptiles. Just last month, Trump opened up the previously protected habitat of the endangered sage grouse to oil exploration.

Trump yanked the Yellowstone grizzly bears off the endangered species list. Last month, despite a protest letter from former Interior Department officials whose collective service spanned eight previous presidential administrations, Trump rescinded Obama-era protections for migratory birds.

It’s as if Trump, the first president in 130 years to inhabit the White House without a pet (unless you consider the vice president his personal lapdog), and the father of two biggame trophy hunters, has no more empathy for animals than he does for non-Norwegian immigrants.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, the Interior Department has gone after two other iconic creatures struggling for survival. The manatee has been delisted and the feds are considering whether to remove Florida panthers, all 200 of them, from an endangered status.

I can’t think of two animals more cherished by Floridians more than the manatees and the panthers. Except, maybe, the Florida Key deer.

Why the Trump administration would risk our collective wrath by delisting those tiny creatures is utterly unfathomable. But who knows? Maybe someone thinks that the lush National Key Deer Refuge down on Big Pine Key would make a dandy site for a new golf course.