In putting conservation into practice, we often cause great suffering to animals. Marc Bekoff argues that we need a new ethical perspective
BLACK-footed ferrets were once widespread across the Great Plains and the inter-mountain west of North America. Then decades of habitat loss and disease pushed them to the brink of extinction. In the mid-1980s, with only 18 individuals left in the wild, the entire population was taken into captivity to establish a captive breeding programme. Reintroductions into the wild began in 1991, and the population is now around 750.
Some consider the black-footed ferret recovery programme to be a conservation success story. But that success has come at a heavy price. Captive-bred ferrets need to be taught to hunt before they can be released into the wild. This is done by feeding them golden hamsters and black-tailed prairie dogs. In 2008 and 2009, captive ferrets were fed 7300 golden hamsters, 5100 of them offered alive, plus 2466 black-tailed prairie dogs, 1480 offered alive, according to figures supplied by the programme. The hamsters are bred solely to be practice prey.
Some defend the use of hamsters and prairie dogs as prey on the grounds that they are not endangered, and are therefore disposable and replaceable. I disagree. Like humans, these sentient rodents have neural structures that are important in processing emotions. Surely they endure pain and suffering as the ferrets hone their killing skills on them.
Ethics suggest this project be more carefully evaluated. In view of its inhumane training protocol, I would argue for its termination. There are behavioural studies in which animals are made to interact with inanimate objects. Something similar could have been tried to train the ferrets.
The use of prey species to hone the hunting skills of predators is just one of the issues that will be discussed next week at a long-overdue meeting in Oxford, UK. Called Compassionate Conservation, the meeting will bring together two disciplines that are often perceived as mutually exclusive: animal welfare and conservation.
Among the questions on the table will be: Should we kill for the sake of conservation? Can conservation biologists do good science, saving species and ecosystems while also being compassionate? Can people who value individual lives work with those who are willing to sacrifice lives for the good of a species or an ecosystem? What role should animal sentience play in such decisions?
These are very practical issues. For example, we often move animals from one place to another to “restore” ecosystems, and in doing so harm individuals. Wolves have been reintroduced into Yellowstone national park and Canadian lynx to Colorado in the full knowledge that some of them will die “for the good of their species”. Other animals have died too: in one area of Yellowstone more than 90 per cent of coyotes have been killed as a result of the reintroduction of wolves.
Compassionate conservation mandates that individual lives matter and would argue against these reintroductions. It also warrants against playing the numbers game – arguing, for example that the deaths of thousands of hamsters is a price worth paying for the survival of a few black-footed ferrets. Likewise, we should provide care for all oiled birds even if they do not belong to an endangered species, and factor compassion into decisions about whether to exterminate alien species when they compete with native ones.
The guiding principles of compassionate conservation are: do no intentional harm; respect all life; treat all individuals with respect and dignity; and tread lightly when stepping into the lives of animals.
This is not an easy sell. Many researchers believe allowing subjective feelings for animals to influence their decisions – even if driven by ethics – invariably taints their science. Compassion, sentimentality and anthropomorphism have no place in conservation, the argument goes.
Not all conservation biologists agree. Renowned field biologist George Schaller, interviewed by New Scientist (7 April 2007, p 46), summarised years of ground-breaking research on behavioural ecology and conservation thus: “Without emotion you have a dead study. How can you possibly sit for months and look at something you don’t particularly like, that you see simply as an object? You’re dealing with individual beings who have their own feelings, desires and fears. To understand them is very difficult and you cannot do it unless you try to have some emotional contact and intuition. Some scientists will say they are wholly objective, but I think that’s impossible.”
It’s not radical to ask difficult questions about our interactions with animals. In fact, it is in the best traditions of science to factor ethics into our practices. Human activities that cause intentional suffering and death in the name of conservation demand careful scrutiny.
However, I accept that we need to come to practical solutions with which everyone is satisfied. The question then becomes, what ethical trade-offs need to be considered, and which are negotiable and which not? I would argue that we need to focus on solutions that advocate the well-being of individual animals and not allow them to be harmed or killed for the good of their own or other species.
Compassionate conservation is no longer an oxymoron. Ethics must be firmly implanted in conservation biology, even if doing so moves us outside our comfort zones and causes some projects to be put on hold or abandoned.
