While many have rightly denounced Obama's vicious and heartless attack on Social Security and Medicare, there's another, less advertised, but immoral cut hidden in his budget proposal: the total elimination of funding for volunteer groups that rescue desperate stranded marine mammals.
This cut could result in the gruesome death of many of these animals, such as the dolphins you might have seen last year struggling for breath after stranding on Cape Cod. The group involved in rescuing those dolphins, The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), is one of many such groups which depend on a small but crucial federal fund know as Prescott grants. More below.
As IFAW recently posted in an action alert:
Just as we feared, the proposed U.S. budget for fiscal year 2014 eliminates the only federal grant support for marine mammal stranding response.
The John H. Prescott Stranding Grant Program is a very small part of the overall NOAA budget ($4 million), but has a HUGE impact on the ability of the many small stranding response organizations around the coast of the U.S. to do their jobs.
IFAW Marine Mammal Rescue and Research is one of these teams of rescuers and researchers.
Our team of six biologists, our veterinarian and over 200 trained volunteers worked tirelessly to respond to live and dead stranded dolphins, whales, porpoises and seals.
For anyone who cares about nature around us, this cut is unconscionable. Full disclosure: I myself have rescued sick, stranded sea lions on the West Coast, such as
this one I helped rescue in 2012. This sea lion was brought to The Marine Mammal Center (TMMC) in Sausalito, where he was nursed back to health and returned to the ocean.
By the way, TMMC and other rescue groups on the West Coast are currently flooded with emaciated young sea lion pups who have stranded in unusually large numbers in southern California since January (well over 1,000 so far), causing all the rescue groups to be under severe stress caring for them all. See this call for donations with pictures of the some of the rescued pups.
And please, follow this link to the IFAW action alert appeal to Congress to save the Prescott grants.