Should you kill one species to save another?
We examine the debates surrounding compassionate conservation
Since last year, Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, has been among a group of people fighting a cull of Canada geese in Denver by biologists from the US Department of Agriculture. The city’s park officials say droppings from thousands of resident geese, which live around many of the most popular parks and lakes, are getting into waterways and spreading disease, and numbers need to be reduced.
“They round them up, put them in portable cages and onto a truck and take them somewhere and gas them,” Bekoff tells me. Last year, he says, they killed about 1,600 geese, this year it was going to be 4,000.
“But I was [recently] told that the killing has stopped at about 500, and I believe that the discussions we’ve been having with people at the highest level have played a role here,” he continues. “We are trying to get a commitment for next year that killing will be off the table, because there are so many easy, cheap alternative options, though the city refuses to agree to this. The geese are sentient beings, and I have invoked the principles of compassionate conservation to stop the killing.”
Do no harm
Compassionate conservation is a small, littleknown academic movement started by Bekoff and a number of conservation biologists, mainly in the UK and Australia. It has a set of tenets or principles, of which the main ones are ‘first, do no harm’, ‘every individual matters’ and ‘seek peaceful co-existence between humans and non-humans’. It claims to stand in stark contrast to traditional wildlife conservation, where the lives of individual animals are treated as being less important than the survival of populations or species.
“My take is that killing’s off the table,” Bekoff says. “Killing animals is not an option.”
Which is fine – unless you happen to be a conservation scientist trying to save the last few South Georgia pipits, as Tony Martin was, for instance, when he took on the job of ridding the British overseas territory in the South Atlantic of non-native rats and mice.
Or if you’re trying to prevent American grey squirrels from invading Anglesey, in Wales – and almost certainly sending the island’s native red squirrels into terminal decline – as Craig Shuttleworth, scientific advisor to the Red Squirrel Survival Trust, is. To protect Anglesey’s squirrels, Shuttleworth has a grey squirrel culling programme to create a buffer zone on the Welsh mainland around the Menai Strait. “If you don’t cull, it’s goodbye red squirrel,” he says.
Shuttleworth believes the compassionate conservation movement threatens his work. “They are offering non-intervention as a way forward, and a politician who is looking at resources might think they don’t need to do anything, because they can follow the mantra of ‘do no harm’ and everything will be fine,” he says. “It’s not fine.”
Toxic approach
Shuttleworth culls grey squirrels by trapping and shooting, but in many parts of the world – perhaps most notably, but not only, Australia and New Zealand – poison is used to tackle their introduced species, which include an array of mainly European species, such as foxes, domestic cats, stoats and weasels and (in New Zealand) possums. In New Zealand, 58 bird species have gone extinct thanks to the non-native invaders.
Matt Hayward is a conservation ecologist from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, with a particular interest in threatened species, and he says there is no alternative to using the controversial poison 1080 (teneighty) to kill feral cats and foxes in Australia in order to protect native mammals. “Unless we can get
large areas free of them, we will lose species such as bilbies, woylies and bettongs – any small mammal macropod from mouse-size up to a small wallaby,” he says. These are all endemic, so you lose them from Australia, and you lose them forever.
Hayward admits that the writhing of animals poisoned with 1080 “looks horrible” but insists there is no alternative. You could never control foxes and cats over the vast spaces of the Australian outback by any other method currently available.
Culture of killing
Alongside Bekoff, another leading light in the compassionate conservation movement is Arian Wallach. Originally from Israel, she moved to Australia to study dingos, and found herself shocked at the culture of killing in the country. “If you went up to anyone in the street, for the most part, they would generally imagine conservationists to be compassionate,” she says. “Most people wouldn’t know that people are going around killing squirrels to save the world.” So, what’s her answer? First of all, she rejects the idea that, in most situations, you have a binary situation where you either save this or that. “In those rare cases, where that is the case, I don’t have an obvious straightforward answer,” she adds. “But I would start by bringing the best minds together to find creative solutions.”
In the case of feral cats and foxes, she argues that the solution is already there in the shape of dingos, which prey on the smaller introduced carnivores. Not only that, indiscriminate poisoning kills the dingos, she argues, leading to an increase in the animals they want to control. Hayward says dingos don’t control the smaller predators because there are too many of them and they breed too quickly.
But Wallach takes it further. In line with a small but seemingly growing trend, she describes herself as not a “nativist” – someone who draws a line between wildlife, for example, that evolved on the Australian continent and that which arrived with humans. “I’m not in the business of causing eradications,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to do it to an Australian fox, any more than I would want to do it to an Australian koala.”
Morals and metrics
One of the key features of compassionate conservation is the idea of sentience – that animals have feelings and emotions and are therefore individuals in their own right. While this may seem uncontroversial, it does open up a ‘Pandora’s box’ of dilemmas. Where do we draw the line, people ask? If a cat is a ‘being’, what about a slug?
Wallach largely rejects this line of thinking. “I take a view that we have ethical obligations to trees and butterflies and flies and whatever,” she says. But, if pushed, she argues that science has demonstrated mental, emotional and social complexity in
“Had we not removed the rats from South Georgia, entire bird species would have become extinct.”
all mammals and birds and, for example, cephalopods. We are discovering more about reptiles and fish, too.
“It would be harder for me to make the case for blowflies than it would for elephants, but at the moment, the interests of individual elephants don’t really count in conservation, anyway,” she says. “They are still just metrics – their population size and the ecological effects they have are all that matters.”
But it’s more complex, more subtle than that, she argues. It’s easier for us to maintain a “smaller moral world” where all we care about are, for example, people who are genetically related to us. “I would say we should embrace our ethical vulnerabilities, allow our moral terrain to become more complex,” Wallach says.
Can’t save them all
Tony Martin is alarmed by what he calls the “sad naiveté” of the compassionate conservationists. “I’m sure these people mean well, but they presumably aren’t aware of the inhumane cruelty implicit in their policies,” he says. “Had we not removed the rats and mice from South Georgia, millions of young birds would have been eaten alive, and entire bird species would have been rendered extinct.
“By virtue of any power it might have to influence decision-makers, I fear that a donothing philosophy could potentially be very damaging to the natural world.”
Both Martin and Shuttleworth also make important points around the level of scrutiny and care that goes into any culling programme. For the eradication of rats and mice on South Georgia, Martin considered trapping and euthanasia as well as kill-traps, but both were deemed impractical because of the size and topography of the island.
You’d need thousands of people to set and check the traps – even then, you would never catch every single animal. “We also looked at the possibility of contraceptive drugs and other means of killing rodents, but none had a hope of working in those circumstances,” Martin says. Anything but killing 100 per cent of invasive rodents would have been a failure, he points out.
“Most of those who really care about the nature would, I trust, consider that compassionate conservation is best served by correcting the mistake, removing the predators and thereby saving the animals that called the island home long before humans arrived to mess things up.”
Alternative solutions
So, does the killing for conservation have to go on forever? Not necessarily. Some scientists, for example, are experimenting with so-called gene drives that would render a population of, say, rats infertile or only able to give birth to offspring of one sex.
Bekoff sees this as an acceptable solution. “If someone said to me, ‘We’ve got to stop you from making more Marcs, and we can kill you or sterilise you or do something else nonlethal’, then that’s the choice I would make.”
Back in the real world, a low-tech version of this has been proposed for Denver’s Canada geese – if you oil their eggs, so they don’t hatch, you eliminate or reduce the problem.
We live in a world in which terrible abuses of human rights, let alone animal rights, take place on a daily basis. Can we really afford to start worrying about the suffering inflicted on cats, rats, foxes, and so on, in order to protect vulnerable species? Or should we look at it another way – can we afford not to?
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