You know who wouldn’t like the Trump wall? Jaguars, bison and other animals that need an open-borders lifestyle.
Trump has proposed sealing off the U.S.-Mexico frontier with a “great” expansion of the current wall, which spans about 650 miles of the United States’ 2,000-mile southern front and is already harming animals. Bison along that border have been spotted climbing over barbed-wire fencing to get to food and water. And according to a 2011 study, 16 species in California have had as much as 75 percent of their range blocked.
“Completing a barrier that’s impregnable for animals would be a really major problem,” said Jesse Lasky, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University and author of that study. The move could affect more than 111 endangered species and 108 migratory birds, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provisional report. The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the proposed wall’s potential effect on wildlife.
Two recent studies have shed light on the often-overlooked effects walls have on wildlife. The fences can “curtail animals’ mobility, fragment populations and cause direct mortality,” according to an article published last month in Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law. Authors of another study, released earlier this year in the journal PLoS Biology, write that barriers “represent a major threat to wildlife.”
The latter study focused on Slovenia, which has for about a year been fencing its border with Croatia in an attempt to block an influx of refugees that the government fears could morph into an outright “humanitarian catastrophe.” So far, 111 miles of barbed- and razor-wire fencing have been erected along about one-third of the frontier. A slew of mangled animal carcasses — especially deer — have been found in, on or around the “temporary technical obstacles.”
Source: Border walls are bad for wildlife – The Washington Post