Wildlife strategies based on politics, not science
In B.C. and around world, government manipulates data, Chris Genovali says.
Raincoast Conservation Foundation scientists and associates from the U.S. and Sweden have published a devastating critique of wildlife management in North America and beyond. The international team, led by Dr. Chris Darimont, exposes the faulty underpinnings of how wildlife is managed by many governments across the political spectrum and around the world.
Reporting in an open access paper in the journal Conservation Biology, researchers from Raincoast, the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University reviewed the scientific literature for cases in which independent scientists scrutinized government reporting of wildlife population sizes, trends and associated policy.
Case studies revealed governments justifying politically preferred policies by exaggerating — without empirical confirmation — the size and resilience of carnivore populations. Such contempt of the public trust fosters what the authors term, ‘political populations’ — those with imaginary attributes contrived to serve political interests.
One case was close to home. The province of British Columbia had long declared the trophy hunting of grizzly bears was sustainable and based on sound science. In the course of a five-year legal battle led by Ecojustice and Raincoast, that assertion was challenged when the B.C. Supreme Court compelled the government to release grizzly hunting data. Using the data on hunter kills, peer-reviewed research by Raincoast and collaborators detected persistent failure by provincial managers to keep grizzly kills below government-set thresholds. After publicly dismissing the concerns, the previous government then announced an expansion of the hunt in some areas, and continued to emphasize the province’s “huge and growing population.” Although this debate persisted for another couple of years, grizzly hunting is now banned in B.C.
The researchers also identified political populations of wolves — perhaps the most politically charged of all wildlife — in the U.S. and Europe. In Sweden, where a strong hunting lobby exists, the country’s Environmental Protection Agency contracted academics to model the consequences of wolf hunting to inform hunting decisions. The agency subsequently removed sections of the report that suggested the wolf population might be smaller than previously thought, while maintaining a potentially inflated official population estimate.
On Vancouver Island the political populations syndrome has emerged as provincial managers are now proposing an extension of wolf killing season on the Island, which they admit is based on flimsy evidence. In fact, the stated rationale for extending the Island’s wolf trapping season is centred on anecdotal sightings and observations of an “increased wolf population and a lack of ungulates (primarily deer).” Anecdotes and guesswork, however, are not scientific data.
In B.C., hunters and trappers kill more than 1,200 wolves annually. Yet, the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development concedes “much of the information the province’s wildlife managers obtain regarding wolf populations is anecdotal, with a reliance on public sightings and observations.”
The province’s assumptions are not in accord with what we know about wolf ecology, and U.S. Forest Service research in a similar system in Southeast Alaska suggests a better explanation is that deer are declining because of pervasive clearcut logging. Given the reduction of their primary prey, Island wolf populations are likely declining or will soon.
Instead of considering the full ecological context, the government relies on seat-of-the-pants management rooted in the political populations approach, which is undoubtedly influenced by a special interest hunting lobby that views wolves as competitors for ungulates.
The authors of the Conservation Biology paper hope their findings will lead to widespread reform. “In a post-truth world, qualified scientists at arm’s length now have the opportunity and responsibility to scrutinize government wildlife policies and the data underlying them,” states Chris Darimont, associate professor at UVIC and science director at Raincoast.
Dr. Paul Paquet, co-author and senior scientist at Raincoast, identifies options to address when governments ignore scholarly criticism, stating that, “Scientists concerned for the future of large carnivores can also exercise their rights to speak directly to the public about potential government malfeasance, which often deceptively shapes public opinions about predators like wolves and bears.”