The plan has been years in the making, with its latest announcement issued on July 3, a day typically used to bury unpopular news before the Independence Day holiday. Nevertheless it made headlines. Barred owls are no less special for being common, and to kill them for the sake of spotted owls—if it even works, which is by no means assured—is something that few people welcome.
With the killing comes controversy. Were those animals merely biological automatons, as conventional science once held, it might not be so objectionable—but scientific research on animal intelligence has buttressed arguments for considering the well-being of individuals as well as species in our moral equations. Yet while some people argue that the killing is unethical, others counter that it’s unfortunate but necessary, the harms outweighed by the good of the species and ecosystems being protected.
It’s a profound, polarizing, and extremely complicated dilemma. In Meet the Neighbors, my recent book on animal personhood and nature, the subject of conservation killing arises but is not central; the topic was so massive that it deserved a book all its own—and that book is Hugh Warwick’s The Cull of the Wild, published earlier this year.
“When we humans have unleashed a new species on an unsuspecting fauna, when we have transformed ecosystems so that previous balances become undone, how do we fix the problem?” Warwick asks. “Should we fix the problem? Should we play god, or should nature be left to take its own course?” An ecologist, conservationist, and animal lover as well as a writer, Warwick talks to dozens of people from all perspectives, encouraging readers to challenge their own biases and find common ground. “We deserve an honest conversation,” he writes, though there are no easy answers. (...)
Some of the best-known examples of conservation culling involve eradicating rats on islands that host seabird colonies. And whatever misgivings I feel, I can see the case for it. The before-and-after is so strikingly different. These enormous colonies are delivering nutrients to the surrounding waters; nearshore ecosystems flourish because of them, and the killing is of a limited duration. It’s feasible to kill all the rats on the island. It’s not going to go on forever.
But sometimes the rationale for protecting species can seem very fuzzy. You write about the killing of grey squirrels to protect red squirrels in western Europe. Nobody’s saying that red squirrels are going to go extinct. They’re being replaced by grey squirrels in part of their range. It seems to me like the killing is a matter of aesthetic preference. It’s not about ecosystem function or whether there will be a forest at all—yet the justification is often portrayed as ironclad. I feel uncomfortable with that.
The main issue we’ve got in the United Kingdom is that we will eventually have the extinction of red squirrels in this country. The issue isn’t direct competition between the two species. Rather, grey squirrels carry the squirrel pox virus to which they’re immune but the red squirrels die horribly.
You can very easily drift into an almost ecofascist narrative that only the natives can be here, which is clearly nonsense. The main thing is that you’ve got one species, which is the interloper, which kills the other species by carrying this virus. And we as a society are making a choice as to whether we want to retain or give up on the native species.
I’m certainly not suggesting that people continue controlling grey squirrels forever. I write about Craig Shuttleworth, who kills grey squirrels on the island of Anglesey but says there’s no point doing what is essentially harvesting, where you go out every year and wait for more grey squirrels to be born and kill those. The only reason he did what he did and killed 7,000 grey squirrels with a truncheon is because it could be done as an act of eradication. Before writing the book, I hadn’t really thought through the difference between “control” and “eradication.” Now I see control as a really dirty word. It just means that something is going to go on and on.
In the various checklists—requirements to meet or before killing is done—I’ve collected in The Cull of the Wild, that is one of the central tenets. If you want to start killing, it has to result in the eradication of that species in that area. Otherwise you end up controlling. It becomes a different sort of thing. That seems to be one of the most important differences that wildlife managers often forget.
As I say that, I realize that what goes on with deer in the U.K. is always going to be control. We’re never going to get rid of all the deer. But in that instance we’re replacing the predators who used to be there. We’re trying to maintain a balance that used to exist and is now out of kilter.
I think people who make the argument for killing are sometimes a bit disingenuous in invoking examples of true eradication on islands to support what are really control programs on mainlands—and that standard of not killing indefinitely is often not met.
You might have a situation where you’re not going to get all the raccoons—or whatever species it may be—off an island, but if you don’t do the work of control during bird breeding season then the birds will stop breeding there, and you’ll have altered that ecosystem enormously.
There is an argument for letting nature take its course. Other species will come along and fill the vacant niches. But that’s a little bit like being at the Louvre and seeing art on fire and going, “Yeah, but we’ll get more art. That’s fine.” And I think there is something to be said for protecting what you’ve got, especially when the reason the fire has started is because we lit it.
But sometimes it seems like the fire, so to speak, isn’t really a fire. For example, in the northeastern U.S. there is a panic about spotted lanternflies. People are encouraged to go out and squash as many flies as they can—which isn’t going to make a difference, and the narrative of lanternflies wreaking havoc on trees is speculative and now looks to be overblown. And in my book I talk about an ecologist who defied conventional wisdom on supposedly invasive feral donkeys and showed that they can actually play vital ecological roles. (...)
You also write about non-native ruddy ducks and native white-headed ducks in western Europe. It’s not like one species is replacing the other. They have very similar ecological niches and are interbreeding. Same thing with spotted owls and barred owls in the western U.S.
This is what the animals are choosing for themselves, right? And the offspring are successful. Killing ruddy ducks really does feel like an aesthetic preference—not in the sense of aesthetic as visual, but in the sense of wanting things a certain way—rather than ecosystem function or what’s objectively good or bad.
We’re moving on to the issue of purity. It gets quite nasty quite quickly. How pure is pure.
Another example is the Scottish wildcat, one of the most endangered feline carnivores in the world. The biggest threat they face is through breeding with feral cats. The result there is you get a hybrid cat. And yes, they’re doing what they do naturally.
If you have enough wildcats, females do not go near domestic premises. They do not go seeking out feral mates. There’s none of that crossover. It’s a choice they’re only making because there’s no other choice. Do we want to have wildcats? I suggest wildcats are a good thing. Not only are they aesthetically very pleasing; they add an element of wild to the countryside. They’re the size of a big tabby cat, but they’ve got attitude, and they’re very different from a domestic or feral cat.
Do we then go to the trouble of trying to protect those? What’s interesting there is how you’re defining what is truly the original character—and thereby is a really sorry tale of conflicts between morphological and the genetic appreciations of these cats. There’s an argument that the genetic type specimen used to measure Scottish wildcats might already have been a hybrid, which would lead to pure-bred wildcats being killed because they didn’t match the hybrid.
That argument is important. And the owls—we’ve created a situation where two owls are together who didn’t used to be. Can we relax into accepting this? I think you just need to be pragmatic about these things. There’s no point fighting against something which is inevitable. You’ve got to be sensible about it. The wildcat situation, I think, is salvageable. Your owls are destined for a mixup, and let’s embrace that. (...)
How can we get to a place where killing is truly a last resort?
The problem, as I said earlier, is that in many instances there’s a real serious time factor. And conservation is so far down the list of social priorities that by the time they’re given the resources to do something, it’s already too late. There’s a temptation to point a finger at those conservationists—but they’re working within a system which is fighting against them the entire time. They’re in a field of study that has so little respect yet is so staggeringly important.
As Patrick Galbraith wrote in a review of my book recently, “We are a brilliant and terrible species who messed it up a long time ago. And that means we have to do things we don’t want to.”
But the cost is never borne by us, right? This is what I keep coming back to. We talk about how we’ve done something terrible and need to take responsibility for it now—but ultimately the cost is being heaped entirely on the poor animals being killed. That just seems wrong.
It does. But if you don’t have any killing at all, you cannot then avoid your responsibility for the death that occurs because you decided not to kill. That’s what it comes down to, time and time again: the potential for life that’s gone because we wouldn’t step up to remove the principal cause for a population’s destruction.
by Brandon Kiem, Nature | Read more:
Image: LaVonna Moore/Shutterstock[ed. It's a nuanced argument. But when you start killing predators just to increase the number of moose or caribou or elk or whatever just so sport hunters can harvest more of them, then I suggest you've crossed over the line - the artificial control thing. There's also the concept of fair chase. There are alternative ways to reduce invasive species or to help struggling populations - increased bag limits, seasons, bounties, access, and the like. So, shooting wolves from airplanes and helicopters (an old practice in the 50's and 60's) eventually came to be viewed as barbaric. Not anymore, apparently. And drugging and killing denning bears is just plain evil. What's only lightly touched upon in this article are the interest groups and politics involved. For example, see also: Alaska’s misguided bear control continues; and Alaska’s game management goals for Mulchatna caribou are unrealistic (ADN).]
