The saguaro cactus is unique to the Sonoran Desert, which covers 120,000 square miles of Arizona, California and the northern Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora. In that 120,000 square miles of desert there are most likely more than 1,200,000 cacti, assuming only ten plants per square mile.
Lately, it seems a few people with more money than sense want one in their yard, and they are buying them from providers who may have possibly dug up a few in the American Sonoran desert.
So now comes along the United States National Park service, which wants to insert microchips into the saguaro cactus in Arizona's and California's portion of the Sonoran desert.
Why?
Last year, 17 saguaros were dug up and stashed for transportation. The culprits were later caught. In other cases, three to five plants have been taken at a time, with the thieves escaping.Lord save us all... a few dozen plants were stolen last year!
The chips are cheap, but the detector wands are not. And how much time, money and manpower will it take to inject chips into all the United States precious saguaro?
Then... we will have National Park Service "agents" spreading out across America, swooping down on any nursery that sells cactus, waving their wands about to see if an implanted microchip will twitter.
How many agents? How many wands? How much manpower devoted to tracking down a few stolen cactus?
So they find one... then what? Arrest everybody in the nursery? Arrest anybody buying a cactus? Jail the nursery manager? What laws will these people have broken, and who made those laws up?
We have gone totally nuts when we allow a few misguided disciples of Gaia from the United States Park Service to spend our tax dollars on insanely stupid stunts like this.
We have a lot more things to worry about than a few stolen cactus.
Enough is enough.
Really.
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