DOGE’s Screwworm Legacy May Be Tons Of Euthanized Cats And Dogs

from the evil-idiots dept

Of all the things I thought the Trump administration would cause to enter the public lexicon, I certainly did not have screwworms on my list. If you somehow haven’t heard of this, screwworms are actually a fly that lays its eggs by burrowing into the flesh of other animals. Those animals are mostly cattle, sometimes household pets, and even occasionally humans. It’s a horrific experience and can lead to death in a few weeks. We used to have an international monitoring program in Mexico through USAID designed to stop the problem at the source before it ever gets to America, but Elon Musk’s DOGE did away with that program, citing it as unnecessary. Well, now screwworms are back in Texas and surrounding states, and they put at risk $2 billion in potential damage to the Texas economy alone. It’s bad enough that this particular administration has decided to pull drones from patrolling the southern border for scary illegal brown people to instead hunt for evidence of screwworm infection in domestic cattle.

But if you don’t think all of that is bad enough of a look for what DOGE and the administration did to cause this, what if we had thousands of dead puppies and kittens in the news instead?

Adoptions are on hold for thousands of dogs and cats in Texas, potentially putting the animals at risk of being euthanized, because of efforts to stop the spread of the New World screwworm, an insect that has crossed the border from Mexico into the United States for the first time in 60 years.

“It’s thrown a wrench into things, for small rescues as well as the bigger shelters,” said Mia Bendixsen, executive director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network, which promotes animal welfare laws.

The screwworm can lay eggs that hatch into flesh-eating larvae in wounds or mucous on any mammal, and of the dozens of infections in southern Texas and southeastern New Mexico, several have been in dogs. Forty-four states have restricted the movements of pets from infested areas, creating a hardship for shelters from Texas that typically send thousands of animals to other states each year.

There are several factors at work here, combining to risk the live of thousands of good boys and girls at these shelters. The screwworm issue is one of them. Another is that Texas is notorious for having low spay and neuter rates for pets and, specifically, working animals. Dogs in particular tend to be left in their natural state because ranchers somehow think that spaying or neutering them will decrease their drive to work.

Whether that’s actually true or not I can’t really say, but the fact is that sentiment was around long before this year and it’s the screwworms that are causing a major uptick in unadopted animals in Texas. And the euthanizing of thousands of animals would be just one of many consequences of us choosing actively to let screwworms become an American problem again.

Restrictions on animal transports followed efforts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to keep the New World screwworm fly from crossing the border with Mexico.

Those efforts include construction of a $750 million fly factory in southern Texas for breeding billions of sterile males set to open in April 2027. The U.S. had largely eradicated the fly by the early 1970s by breeding sterile males and releasing them from planes to mate with females, who laid eggs that wouldn’t hatch.

Smaller facilities in Texas and southern Mexico have been dispersing sterile flies bred in Panama, and another is planned for Arizona.

When it comes to this particular issue, it’s obvious that there were no taxpayer cost savings due to DOGE’s fuckery. If anything, it seems like we’ll be spending more money to remediate the problem than we did keeping it from becoming one.

And when you layer on the dead bodies of thousands of cats and dogs on top of it all, well, it’s quite a legacy for Musk and his DOGE bros to leave behind.

Filed Under: doge, elon musk, screwworm, texas