His goal is to safeguard the dwarf leopards living on his ranch in South Texas

Oct 18, 2012 13:39 GMT  ·  By

Most of the people who know and appreciate Josh Becket (i.e. famous baseball pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers) do so because this 32-year-old man is not just a 12-year major league veteran, but also a two-time World Series champion.

Sporting skills aside, it seems that Josh Becket will now get considerable amounts of attention from the media thanks to his going against a pipeline company that supposedly bulldozed quite a lot of acres of his ranch in South Texas.

Under normal circumstances, Josh Becket would not have been so bothered by the situation.

Still, Ecorazzi informs us that what lead him towards the decisions to file a lawsuit against the Eagle Ford Shale company was the fact that their bulldozers destroyed the natural habitat of the ocelots living in this part of the US.

For those unaware, ocelots (a.k.a. dwarf leopards) are a species of wild cats which strikingly resemble domestic ones in terms of size, but which look more like leopards and jaguars when it comes to the patterns on their fur.

Both the US Fish and Wildlife Service and an organization known as Environmental Defense are presently doing their best in convincing landowners to manage their ranches in such ways that this animal species is not left without the resources it needs to survive.

Therefore, it need not come as a surprise that Josh Becket bases his lawsuit on the fact that the actions carried out by said pipeline company go against the federal law.

Although the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher has yet to comment on this lawsuit, his lawyer told members of the press that, “They started bulldozing for 10 days. I think it is an arrogant move of a company that is relatively dismissing of federal law.”

In response to this lawsuit, the pipeline company argued that ocelots were nowhere to be found on Josh Beckett's 7,000 acre ranch, and that their actions did nothing to harm either this particular species, or local biodiversity in general.

The lawsuit was filed this past Tuesday in Laredo, Texas, US.