You're clearly not a Farmer in central California which King Hussein and the Socialist Left are bankrupting to prevent a 2" fish from going extinct... so you're not watching your property dry up and borrowing against all hope and everything that GENERATIONS of your family have worked for over a century... nor are you one of the tens of thousands of individuals who depended upon those farms for their livelihood...
What you ARE, is an ignorant child... who doesn't even know what freedom is and thus has no idea what she may or may not have lost with regard to it.
The Smelt you are refering to is not even close to being extinct, the lefty environuts did the "scientific study" by sampling the amount being sucked into the pumps, they sampled at the pumps, no samples taken in other parts of the river, so the study is skewed, you see, billions of the smelt fingerlings float right on by the pumps, the pumps do not drain the river and leave a dry riverbed on the other side of the pumps, billions of gallons of water still makes it to the Ocean, carrying billions of smelt, how do these idiots think after thirty years the smelt has survived with those massive pumps operating, if they were in danger they would be no smelt today. Thats the problem with FOX news, they report the story but did only a tiny bit of research if any, they leave the skewed data sample part out or they dont know about it.
They did the same thing when they built the bridge on the delta that connects Benica to Martinez, to show how the hammering on the bed of the river would destroy fish they put fish in a cage and jack hammered next to the cage, ignoring the fact that the fish instinctively will avoid such and awful racket.
Huh... I don't think Fox stood on the proposition that the Smelt is going extinct... why would they? They're merely reporting what the Envir-cranks are using as their reational for destroying one of the largest sources of food production in the US.
I for one do not give a red rats ass about the smelt... if it goes extinct... that's perfectly fine with me. But, as you've said, even a smelt possesses the instinct to survive sufficient to avoid running healdlong into big, dark, clanging mechanisms...
I recall a couple of decade ago when the same Enviro-cranks were clambering on about the destruction of sea-life due to the building of oil rigs in the Gulf. They claimed that the rigs would force sea-life away from the drilling area and cripple the ecology... blah blah blah...
Turns out that the sea-life doens't really give a damn what gets set on the floor of the gulf... and that given the Gulf O'Mexico is pretty much a huge underwater desert, bottom wise; that where ever or whatever you set on the bottom; sea-life will cling to and around it; which it further turns out developes an entirely NEW ecology which actually fosters an increase in that sea-life.
Let's be honest here... it is impossible to underestimate these Eco-diots...