For their study in Washington state, government biologists nailed pieces of carpet soaked with catnip onto trees, hoping a lynx would rub up against them and leave some fur — evidence of the lynx's existence in this particular area. Sure enough, when biologists sent carpet samples to a lab, they came back positive for hairs from a Canada lynx.

That may sound like good evidence that there were Canada lynx in the area, but actually, the regulators went to a zoo, got hair samples from captive lynx, and sent those hairs to the lab to be tested.

The biologists only admitted rigging the test when they were caught. The cheating didn't surprise Jim Beers, a biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife for 30 years.

He told me that biologists at Fish and Wildlife were on a campaign to keep people out of wooded areas. "The agencies today," he said, "are staffed with environmental radical activists." And the activist-bureaucrats don't want people living in the woods.

Once caught with their hands in the cage, the biologists announced that they were not trying to cheat, they were just "testing" the lab to make sure it could detect lynx hair by sending a "control" sample. Beers said: "That's the same as you telling me that you caught them walking out of the bank with money and they said, 'Oh, we were just seeing if the system works here.'"

# posted by Squach : 8:06 PM   |