Recently a California Appellate Court made a decision that may have a dramatic impact on agriculture and development in the Lompoc Valley, and everywhere else in the state. To make this decision the court bent the commonly understood definition of a fish to include the humble bumblebee.
In today’s world school children are being taught that they can refer to their gender by any number of pronouns. Apparently, the scientific reference to gender in all species isn’t enough for the current generation.
Our world is complicated enough without all this extra baggage, but apparently the current groupthink has taken hold in the California justice system. Now they and a government bureaucracy driven by fringe environmental groups have muddled the definition of a fish to include flying insects.
In a case, Almond Alliance of California v. Fish and Game Commission, last week a California Appellate Court ruled that a bumblebee is a fish!
Since you won’t see this widely broadcast anywhere else, Fox News reported that the judges explained that “although the term fish is colloquially and commonly understood to refer to aquatic species,” the “law, as it is written, makes the legal definition of fish … not so limited.”
The court explained the Endangered Species Act has given classification authority to the Fish and Game Commission to determine what is and is not an endangered species.
While that’s true, mere humans occupying cubicles in a government agency shouldn’t be empowered to expand the definition of an aquatic species to include flying insects just to help environmentalists impose more property use restrictions.
The legal dictionary defines an aquatic species as “fish, crustaceans, mollusks, or any other organisms, excluding aquatic plants and algae, living in either fresh or marine waters; and “any of numerous cold-blooded strictly aquatic craniate vertebrates.”
Miriam Webster defines a bumblebee as “any of numerous large robust hairy social bees;” bees are air-breathing and fly, and they don’t swim or have gills, which is a fact that seems to have escaped the great government minds in our state.
As a matter of note, the only flying fish I ever saw were in the ocean off Santa Catalina Island; they didn’t flap their wings to fly, rather the sped through the water, rose and glided several yards and then dropped back into the water. Bumblebees flap their wings vigorously to fly.
The Appellate Court opinion includes this discussion: “Before 1969, the law defined fish as wild fish, mollusks, or crustaceans, including any part, spawn, or ova thereof.” That same year, the legislature amended a section that defined fish to add invertebrates and amphibia. This section was changed only once, in 2015, when the state legislature modified the definition to read “fish means a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”
My friends we are in troubled waters here; it’s a sad day when laws originally designed to protect birds and bunnies are now being stretched, bent, spindled, and mutilated to facilitate a process to deny property owners the right to farm, ranch and develop their property.
The way I figure it, no government bureaucrat has the right to twist the definition of a fish to fit the humble bumblebee; the bees would likely be offended if they could speak for themselves.
— Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident since 1975, is retired from the aerospace industry. He has been following Lompoc politics since 1992, and after serving for 23 years appointed to various Lompoc commissions, retired from public service. The opinions expressed are his own.
