By Carl Hiaasen
02/06/2025 | Angels in Distress 

 

When “Development” Becomes Destruction

If your kids asked to bury a small animal alive, you’d be horrified. You’d tell them it’s cruel, unacceptable — something no decent person would do. Most children already know that’s wrong.

Unfortunately, the adults in charge of Florida’s land policies don’t.

Since 1991, the state has allowed grown-ups — developers, corporations, even school districts — to bury more than 74,000 gopher tortoises alive simply because their burrows stood in the way of subdivisions, highways, golf courses, and supermarkets.

Officials prefer the word “entomb” rather than “bury.” But the result is the same: suffocation, slow and silent, over days or weeks. These ancient creatures, around for 60 million years, have faced decades of sanctioned slaughter under the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s weak label: “species of special concern.”

 

The Hypocrisy of Protection

A child can’t legally keep a tortoise as a pet, but a company can get a permit to kill hundreds of them.

The gopher tortoise isn’t just another reptile — it’s an ecosystem engineer, digging burrows that shelter more than 300 other species, including rabbits, burrowing owls, and the endangered indigo snake.

Unfortunately, their dry hammocks, dunes, and pine scrub habitats are also prime real estate, and that makes them expendable. Florida calls this “incidental taking.” Let’s be clear — it means smothering them to death.

The Business of Killing

Developers looking to build on tortoise land must pay into a habitat fund or set aside a token plot of land. It’s a bureaucratic ritual called “mitigation.”

Here’s how it works in practice:

• Tuscano Golf Course (Sarasota): Permission to kill 260 tortoises in exchange for preserving 138 acres.

• Young Land Group (Duval County): 190 tortoises destroyed for $169,442 toward 29 acres of habitat.

• Orange County Public Schools: 110 tortoises killed for a new high school, offset by 12 acres of “preserved” land.

• Vikings LLC (Marion County): 470 tortoises cleared for a 542-home golf community.

• Wal-Mart (Palm Beach County): Five tortoises buried in return for a meager 1.49 acres.

In a single project near Tampa Bay, 2,573 acres of tortoise habitat will be destroyed, while only 168 acres are set aside — a 93% loss of their home territory.

This is called mitigation. Most Floridians call it a scam.

“Saving” Them to Death

Even when officials talk about relocation, the reality is grim. Studies show that most relocated tortoises die — often from respiratory disease or stress. Moving them is not saving them; it’s just a slower death with a better press release.

Four years ago, state staff proposed classifying the tortoise as a “threatened species.” Nothing happened. The permits kept coming.

Some counties — Lee, Collier, Martin, and Hillsborough — finally said enough and passed stricter local laws. Meanwhile, the state continues to “study” the issue, moving at the pace of, well… a tortoise.

The Slow March Toward Change

On June 7, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is set to hold a public meeting in West Palm Beach to discuss the fate of the gopher tortoise.

If commissioners vote to reclassify it as threatened, it would finally trigger a long-overdue management plan. But even that process, predictably, is as slow and lumbering as the tortoise itself.

Officials insist they’re “working with developers” to address what they blandly call “the entombment issue.” In truth, it’s a public relations nightmare wrapped in moral failure.

A Lesson from the Innocent

There’s nothing “incidental” about burying an animal alive.

Ask your kids.
They’ll tell you it’s wrong — no debate, no paperwork, no mitigation required.