⚠️HELP FIND WHO MUTILATED A MANATEE: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is investigating who carved the word “Trump” on a Florida manatee. USFWS is looking for any information: cal Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation hotline at 888-404-3922. https://t.co/FXQ2l3fYTj pic.twitter.com/jI9kL1BNe5
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 11, 2021
Most animals are generally pretty apolitical. They don’t vote, they don’t storm the Capitol, and, unlike Roger Stone, they certainly don’t get tattoos of political figures on their backs. Not on porpoise (meant to do it), anyway. But a manatee, famously the most apolitical of all the sea creatures, has been found off the coast of Florida with, for some reason or another, Donald Trump’s name etched in the algae on its back.
Now, if you’re anything like me, the second thing you thought when you heard about this was that it might be difficult to etch a word onto a manatee’s back. The first, of course, was “what kind of asshole does this?” But manatees live underwater and — this is just a guess — they’re probably averse to having words etched onto their backs. But Florida manatees, apparently, are very easy going. So easy going that they’re afforded special protection under the 1972 U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, the 1973 U.S. Endangered Species Act, and the 1978 Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act. They move very slowly, don’t seem to mind all that much if some stranger is scraping political statements onto their backs, and generally just want to float around eating water lettuce and, on special occasions, the water hyacinth blossom. They’re generally regarded as very nice creatures, if maybe a little fat and gassy. As an interesting aside, manatees use their gas to regulate their buoyancy. When they want to float on the surface, they hold it in. When they want to dive… well, they release it like some kind of farting submarine. One can only hope that the etcher was caught in a cloud of manatee fart bubbles as he did his dirty work.
If, say, you or I were to scrape the word Trump into a Florida manatee’s back and you or I were to get caught, you or I could get a fine of up to $100,000. And, in a funny bit of irony, President Trump signed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act in 2019, which makes anyone intentionally engaging in acts of cruelty to animals open to being charged with a federal crime and seven years in prison. So if this guy (or girl, I suppose) gets caught, he could spend seven years behind bars for scraping the name of the person who effectively made scraping the name illegal. One can only hope!
“The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is investigating the harassment of a manatee…reported to federal authorities over the weekend discovered w/ words “Trump” scraped in its back …discovered in Blue Hole on the Homosassa River” (via @CitrusChronicle )
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Insurrectioning wildlife? pic.twitter.com/PvzI3pZ5Xn— 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐨𝐩𝐞 (@exavierpope) January 11, 2021
The vandalized manatee was discovered on January 10, 2021, in north Florida’s Homosassa River. “Manatees aren’t billboards, and people shouldn’t be messing with these sensitive and imperiled animals for any reason,” said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), in a news release. “However, this political graffiti was put on this manatee, it’s a crime to interfere with these creatures, which are protected under multiple federal laws.”
The Center for Biological Diversity is offering $5,000 for information that leads to an arrest in the case. They’ve teamed up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to find the person responsible. You know the person and want $5,000? Call the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation hotline at (888) 404-3922 and rat this manatee vandal out.
