Millions of dollars have been spent conserving the Devils Hole Pupfish. The construction of the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility alone, which opened in 2013, was estimated to cost $4.5 million. Conservation efforts from January 2006 to May 2007 were $750,000. Some have argued that the economic costs of conserving the pupfish are too high, and thus the ethical solution to maximize human happiness would be to let the species go extinct. The legal case over the rights to extract groundwater concluded that the Cappaert family, who invested $7 million into opening a ranch in the area, could no longer withdraw the same amount of water. The Cappaert family's attorney decried that the Supreme Court had chosen the interests of a fish over people, and a newspaper editor from nearby Pahrump threatened to dump a pesticide into Devils Hole to kill them all. In response to bumper stickers that read "Save the Pupfish" distributed by the Desert Fishes Council, Nye County Commissioner Robert Rudd produced bumper stickers that said "Kill the Pupfish". The Cappaert family ended up selling the ranch in the late 1970s.