There is no way that we can take anything at all that we are told by government agencies, educational institutions (which we realize are just another kind of government agency: government-run tax-funded “public” schools), mainstream or alternative media, or most of what passes for “science” these days.

Which means that we are often making important decisions for our family’s and congregations’ and other fellowships’ futures (safety, health, and prosperity) based on false or no data.

It is a great danger. Especially because it is easy to fall into the trap of believing some or even most of it. Especially in areas where we don’t have personal or family expertise.

Let us share an interesting story to make the point.

Yesterday, coming out to my house, I saw the usual parade and observers of deer: mule deer to be specific. The four fawns, now having lost their spots as they mature. The dozen or more does. Several bucks. Including the 6×6 handsome one who loves living in our yard. They responded as usual to the roar of my Ram 2500 Cummins Diesel: they lifted their heads from whatever they were eating and watched me as I rolled past them: sometimes as close as six or eight feet away. And then returned to grazing. We keep areas of our yard (about 2 acres) tall in grass and the broad-leafed browse the deer actually eat. And so we find their nests here and there. At least two of this year’s fawns were almost certainly born on our property.

And we live in the center of a 250+ house subdivision, about four miles from the center of a (human) city of 70,000, in the foothills of the Black Hills themselves. Our parcel is one of the larger ones.

Our community is filled with wildlife and pets. We estimate as many as 250-300 deer. Several hundred turkeys (wild, Merriam turkeys). Tens of thousands of small rodents: field mice and squirrels and voles and chipmunks and more – despite the best efforts of our cats and neighbors’ cats and dogs. And the two or three mountain lions (catamounts or cougars) that have this as part of their hunting range. As well as the occasional moose, and more common but still rare elk and coyote.

A few years back, someone saw a prairie dog and triggered a powerful (and successful) defensive effort to keep that particularly obnoxious breed of rodent out of our area. Since we are high enough in the Black Hills 4400 feet at latitude (44 degrees north, further north than Pyongyang, North Korea and about even with Madrid, Spain), we don’t have mosquitos and we don’t have rattlesnakes (but do have other snakes: Saint Patrick has a street named for him here, but he never visited here).

Why the story? Because of this next story. A few years ago, a client of some of us here at TPOL was sued because they were trying to start and operate a badly-needed gravel and sand pit in southwestern Colorado. A very wealthy trust baby (bizarrely enough, his fortune came from construction) took them to court. One of the claims made was that mining of sand and gravel in the mountains would destroy the habitat. That literally, the human presence, traffic, noise, dust, and other actions would year by year chase the deer and the elk out of the area, creating a huge “dead zone” in which the larger species of wildlife could not, and would not, exist or even pass through the area during annual migrations.

To demonstrate this, the opponents hired a professor from a local college. Specifically, a “wildlife pyschology” professor. She provided maps showing the growing deadzone, year after year.

Although this took us by surprise, we were able to get the judge to reject this nonsense. We had three pieces of evidence:

First, a gravel pit in an adjacent county which has operated for more than 50 years. Among other things, we showed the judge a photo of a row of dump trucks hauling material in the gravel pit stopped because a herd of a dozen or more elk were blocking the haul road – only a few hundred feet from the noisy and “dusty” crushing and screening plant.

Second, a picture of a juvenile white heron standing on the very top of a stockpile of washed gravel coming off a crushing screening and washing plant producing he material at 150 tons/hour. (That is a lot of rock – and noise and humans all over the place.) According to the college prof, even birds would flee from the noise, dust, and human presence. Why was the bird there? There were worms and insects in the washwater and in the sand and gravel: the heron knew when opportunity for having its meal delivered directly to it was a great deal!

Third, our own neighborhood (as described in the story) proved that not only would deer (and elk and antelope and turkeys) mate and give birth (well, lay eggs) in areas with a major presence of humans, but they thrived in it.

Of course, none of this is news – pre-Woke Walt Disney produced a film back in the 1950s tracing the success of coyotes surviving and thriving in then smog-choked Los Angeles. Those prairie dogs we kept out of our neighborhood infest thousands of acres of sururbia and small towns across the West: they jump up on picnic tables and steal food, they get into dumpsters behind fast food places and supermarkets, and they spread plague and other diseases.

But to listen to this government-employed and -funded “wildlife psychologist” you’d think we humans are busy wiping out our Bambis and other critters.

To put it bluntly, she lied. And they lied.

We won the court case, but the County still denied the permit – more on that in a future commentary.

Why do they lie? Partially it is because a century of propaganda – on wildlife, forest fires, now global warming and solid waste and water pollution – has corrupted them. People will believe anything. Except, maybe, the truth.

And that is what governments want: because when you are fed on lies, you and I are easier to control.