Wildlife (Mis)Management Myths Prevail

This Too Shall Pass (Or Will It?): What Animal Advocates Should Know!

One of my favorite lines from the Bible does not, according to those who actually read the Bible, occur in it. The line is “This too shall pass,” and, Biblical or not, I have often thought about it, and the concept has given me strength. But three recent events (and many others like them) challenge the notion.

First, a reporter for an Ohio newspaper called me to discuss cormorants. Fine; since I saw my first double-crested cormorant in 1958, I have been intensely fascinated by, and defensive of, this most maligned and misunderstood species, and learned all I could about it. But…he had talked to a wildlife management “expert marksman” who had shot many cormorants during culls at Lake Erie, and as “a scientist,” his word meant so much more than mine. As well, the reporter could not get his head around the fact that our “duty” to “control” nature is neither a given nor necessarily effective—the view being that, since nothing much is natural, we should be out there deciding on behalf of nature who should live, who should die, and what the environment should really look like. I’ve heard it all before.

And then there was the decision, referred to in my last blog, to reinstall, albeit on a limited “test” basis, the spring bear hunt here in Ontario to reduce the number of complaints. But I had just read, among other such documents, a New Jersey study that clearly showed two things: as the number of bears “harvested” increases, so do complaints about bears, AND, non-lethal bear management has the opposite effect (sometimes dramatically so). Ontario data show the same thing, but facts don’t matter… As I said in my blog, our provincial prime minister, Kathleen Wynne, is embracing cruelty to bear cubs in the interest of earning votes. I suspect that the number of spring bear hunt proponents who have read the same studies and reports that I have read hovers around zero.

And then there was yet another hideously patronizing article, this one in The New York Times, telling us that we may not like it, but look, folks: since we’ve removed deer predators, deer numbers have to be controlled. They don’t mention how much more “game” we kill (or, in their language, “harvest”) than the predators we supposedly replace. Oh, we who don’t like it no doubt mean well, but we are just naïve Bambi-lovers who are unable to appreciate cold facts.

I've heard all of this so many times, regarding so many species, with but minor variations.

Here is some information for the animals' side to think about. But before I go on, one thing I strongly, strongly, strongly urge of everyone fighting to protect wildlife: challenge EVERY single premise. Take nothing as factual without first doing your own deep research. NEVER, please, mistake wildlife managers for scientists, or wildlife management for science. Be clear, concise, and factual. We have truth on our side, which is a good foundation to build upon.

The basic idea driving this continent-wide trend toward culling, again with allowances for regional- or species-specific variations, goes something like this:

Humanity has eliminated the "controls," such as predators, that in pre-Columbian (hereafter "primal") North America, kept the species "in check."

Humanity has enhanced carrying capacity (the amount of food available to the species in question) of the environment beyond what existed in primal times, thus leading to a population "explosion" that is "out of control," or has led to "hyper-abundance."

Because of the first two situations, the people who support culling blame the species in question for harming “the environment” (forgetting that those species ARE the environment, or part of it), impacting agriculture, and putting human safety at risk. Culling “controls” the population, restoring a balance toward normalcy – a concept that is either not defined, vaguely defined, or given a very specific number (there should be "X" number of deer [or whatever species is targeted] per hectare, based on what the habitat can withstand).

In reality, though "X," when identified at all, is the number (derived through computer models whose accuracy depends on the amount and quality of data entered) at or below which complaints to politicians cease to be made. We often hear dire predictions, like those of deer starving—and yet starvation in deer is largely a function of snow conditions, and happens in populations whether hunted or not. If you look at the deer targeted, you’ll see that they are typically healthy. We begin to understand that wildlife management is driven by politics, not science.

For some species, such as wolves or cormorants, "X" is often very close to zero. Literally, it can be a number that renders the species in question threatened or endangered, if not extirpated or even extinct, but of course that won't be admitted... It will always be a figure above zero, at least for native species.

There are other factors in play:

Lethal culling, as opposed to non-lethal conflict resolution and thoughtful, compassion-based management, has a huge psychological appeal. Not everyone has the same values or thinks the same way, and a percentage of the population has no, or very selective, empathy toward other species (or other humans, for that matter), and to them, "punishment" is important—and killing appeals to their need to demonstrate dominance and control. It is not necessarily that they are looking for an excuse to kill, but rather, killing fulfills an atavistic need to dominate and to punish: a characteristic that I believe was selected for through evolution, but is no longer valid. We have “won.” The world of other species is shriveling in the wake of our technologically driven power.

It is also true that the majority of people NOT bothered by the presence of an animal species tend to keep quiet about it. How often do you write to your elected representative to say something like, "Hey, I just saw a cardinal at my feeder, a chipmunk in the garden, and a cottontail in the front yard, and I want you to know that I enjoyed them very much and am very glad that they are there?" I mean, why would you? Decision and policy makers almost exclusively hear from the whiners and complainers.

Another factor is fear. I am currently dealing with communities in British Columbia where the "bogeyman" is the Mule Deer (not the White-tailed Deer, which also occurs there, but is far less likely to hang around people than are Mule Deer... but no matter...they've killed them, too). The fear is based on a few actions by defensive deer – most notoriously a doe whose fawn was beset by a cat, a group of human bystanders, and finally a distant dog, which was the final straw for her, and she attacked the poor dog. From that, the concern has become that a child will be seriously hurt or killed.

There have been countless thousands, tens of thousands, of interactions between children and deer... millions, if we count kids in petting zoos featuring deer... including Mule Deer... and, so far, the number of such incidents appears to stand at... zero. It does not matter; ignorance rules.

Zoonotic disease is always a popular bogeyman with wildlife managers. No matter that studies show that the presence of White-tailed Deer in the east may LOWER the probability of transmission of Lyme Disease to people and pets (that's right... the opposite of what you are told by wildlife managers); the fear is enough to warrant the killing. It is a well-known fact that people tend to be very poor at risk-assessment, and so it is easy to convince them to be disproportionately afraid... or to take unnecessary risks, for that matter... or to fear economic damage, ecological damage, or whatever. It is not that all such concerns are totally invalid; it is just that they must never be assumed to be valid, or as valid as presented.

Remember, too, that hunting is generally in decline. Wildlife managers are fighting to promote lethal animal control, especially in the United States, where special taxes on guns and ammo go toward paying for wildlife managers.

It is increasingly understood that hunting just for "sport" is no longer as socially acceptable as it once was; thus, a social need has to be served, and scapegoating animals fulfills this need. This is less true in Canada, where culling is more likely to be done at government expense, but there are exceptions—like the newly reinstated spring bear hunt in Ontario, as purely a political move as anything I've ever seen. The government had a good "Bear Smart" programme, but simply didn't want to fund it.

Regarding deer, the idea that they are more common now than in primal times (not that it should matter; we can never return to primal conditions) is based on outdated assumptions about the primal population size of first nations people. It is now understood that there were far more people here than was originally assumed, and thus, if you extrapolate from the newer figure, it means far more deer.

The elimination of deer predators such as wolves and eastern cougars is factual, but how do we measure that against the impact of the human predator, the enhanced mortality from automobiles, fence entanglements, hunting and poaching, the eastern range expansion of coyotes (evolving within our lifetimes into a larger subspecies to better fill the ecological niche left vacant by the elimination of the wolf), and various other anthropogenic impacts such as pollution or climate change? Certainly, what we can glean from earliest accounts suggests that there could well have been far more deer in primal North America, although such accounts are scarce, and many historical records that are presented as reflecting primal conditions do not do so, given the incredible rapidity with which disease reduced first nations citizens immediately after European contact.

Similarly, the enhanced carrying capacity from what is sometimes called the "agricultural subsidy" (there is far more nutriment per acre in, say, a corn field than in a primal forest) does not take into account the other factor that determines carrying capacity: shelter. Vast acreage of a high-nutriment crop does little good without places for the deer to hang out, breed, and gather for winter.

But also be sure to challenge the impact deer or other bogeymen species make to a community, the ways in which those impacts can be resolved, and the cost-effectiveness of such resolutions. Physical removal of deer stimulates compensatory morality: a rebound effect whereby, with less competition for resources, more deer are born and more deer survive... ideal for ammunition and trap manufacturers and the employment of wildlife managers, because the "problems" are never resolved.

That’s the way the wildlife managers and supportive industries like it to be. We don’t have to.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

My Last Middle Island Blog, Yes, But Just For Now A Tale of Just Two Innocent Creatures

Published 06/06/13 Born Free USA

My last two blogs dealt with the days spent in a boat anchored just offshore of Middle Island, in the southern end of Lake Erie, the very southernmost land still in Canada, mere yards from where the country ends and the United States begins. I was there with my colleague, Liz White, to monitor and record Parks Canada's deadly assault on nesting double-crested cormorants. Staff armed with small calibre rifles and accompanied by spotters would walk up and down the island's length, usually hidden from our view by thick vegetation, shooting the nesting cormorants, and in the process causing havoc among the great blue herons, black-crowned night-herons, Canada geese and herring and ring-billed gulls also trying to make nests, lay eggs and raise babies on the otherwise uninhabited island. Great egrets were there, too, but the shooting has driven them completely away, even though they are noted for "nest site tenacity", the quality of staying with their nest even under duress.

One Parks Canada staffer would stay aboard the boat that brought the crew over from the mainland, an hour and a half trip. The shooters were trying to kill the cormorants with head shots, aiming carefully at a small, moving target. Birds who had their beaks clipped by bullets or were otherwise wounded by in ways that allowed them to fly, would flee to die or recover as best they could. But if the bullet brought them down to the ground they would tend to make their way to shore, and often into the water. There they would be pursued by the powered boat, diving to get away until, too tired and waterlogged to again dive, they awaited the blast of a 12 gauge shotgun; "euthanasia". Even then some found the energy to dive at the gun's flash, and sometimes it took two or three shots to render the birds dead.

These are nesting birds, bound by an instinctive imperative to maintain a presence at the nest. Except under intense duress one or both parents are always at the nest while there are eggs or young chicks. Cormorants swim and eat fish, but their plumage is not like that of loons, grebes or ducks; it is not entirely waterproof. Therefore they are limited in how long they could stay in the water.

And that was the plight of the two birds we saw on shore that the shooters and spotters had somehow missed reporting. What to do? We had neither the practical means nor the legal right to rescue them. To leave them meant that they would die slowly. Cormorants need to be able to fly to survive and these birds clearly would never fly again. The first was sluggish, perhaps bleeding internally, the second was more alert, but with an obviously shattered wing.

And so we called them in, on the boat's radio. On each occasion the power boat came as close to shore as was safe. With the gunmen on the island, and the boat looming nearer, the birds did what instinct directed, and took to the water. There, in spite of their respective wounds, each was able to swim hundreds of yards, gently chased by the Park's Canada boat, the intent presumably being to tire them. Cormorants can, when shot at with a shotgun, dive at the sight of the flash and be mostly or totally under the water by the time the shotgun pellets arrive. But I suspect, as well, the Parks Canada staff wanted to get the bird away from us and our cameras. Before the booming shots were fired the boat would position itself between us and the wounded bird, and I can't help but think this was intentional.

The wounded birds never had a chance. Their reward for not hurting any of our kind while simply fulfilling natural functions that have evolved through three billion years of life on earth, was to be first wounded, and then relentlessly, inescapably hunted down by the vast power we humans command with our internal combustion engines and high-powered firearms, and killed.

My emotions were mixed. I didn't want to aid the culling or see these birds killed, but on the other hand it would be cruel to let them suffer; we had to report them. But perhaps the most profound emotion of all was a sense of deep shame for my kind, mixed with admiration for the cormorants and anger at Parks Canada. The cormorants do nothing but ask their small share of a world we continually crowd out, and we deny them even that.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

Middle Island Mismanagement, Parks Canada Shows How Not to Conserve the Natural Environment

Published 05/23/13 Born Free USA

This is not the place to go into details, but in April and May I found myself on four occasions living in the 21st century, benefitting from GPS navigation, cellphones and my new digital camera, while viewing the bloody results of early 19th century thinking.

Before Charles Darwin, before the basic tenets of evolution and ecology came together, human policy tended to treat the natural world as an entity to be controlled, exploited and defeated by us. We were godly beings apart from nature, hubristic in our right to do as we pleased. Forests felled, species wiped out, native peoples shoved aside and profits made from “resources” evaluated by the amount of money we could earn by their exploitation, destroying what annoyed us.

Our ancestors tended to classify animal species as “good” or “bad” based on their immediate economic value or esthetic interest. “Game” species were good, thus species who ate game species were “bad.” Species who ate species who hurt our economic value could be good; their predators therefore were bad.

We had yet to understand the dynamic interactions between predators and prey. Hawks, owls and fish-eating species were, like wolves and foxes and snakes, bad, unless some economic value could be squeezed from them. Foxes were good, for example, if their skins could be sold, bad if they ate a grouse or raided the hen house. Rabbits were good if properly cooked, bad if munching in the vegetable garden.

Slowly things changed as scientists and naturalists came to realize that predators, all species, played roles in the ecological whole, and that “good” and “bad” were highly subjective designations based on simplistic and short-sighted value systems and quite lacking in scientific objectivity. To at least some degree public policy began shifting in reflection of growing understanding about naturally evolved predator-prey relationships.

Too often wildlife management agencies remain mired in early 19th century thinking. To a major degree this reflects political responses to concerns of a public where ignorance of nature is rampant. We also have immense capacity to resent other beings, and while political correctness is slowly curbing overt bias against humans who are different, animals are seen as ours to hate and abuse on whatever pretext. And few North American species seem to trigger more irrational prejudice than the double-crested cormorant.

In the United States, wildlife management agencies still kill large numbers of these native birds out of concern that cormorants eat too many fish. Study after study essentially indicates otherwise, and here in Ontario, at least, we’ve managed to get that particular argument off the table, simply because it is incorrect.

Indeed, as our boat left the mainland on southern Lake Erie’s northern shore for the hour and a quarter trip to Middle Island, I noted how one saw cormorants here or there, sometimes in flocks, but until we reached their island nursery, most water was empty of them. But we passed mile after mile of buoys and markers indicating a vast network of fishing nets whose consumption of fish dwarfs what the cormorants consume.

But cormorant excrement is high in nutriments that, in concentration, kill vegetation. While none of the trees on Middle Island is anything but common, several species are at the northern end of their range, thus rare in Ontario, where the mainland has been largely denuded of native forests. The great egret, the world’s commonest heron, is also fairly near the limit of its range and so one of the rationales for killing cormorants is to protect the trees for the egrets to nest in.

But Parks Canada managed to chase off the egrets. Nesting birds are vulnerable and even egrets, known for their nest tenacity, couldn’t take the pressure. We saw one on the first day of culling and a pair on the last day, but all were driven away as the gunmen made their way up the length of the island, shooting cormorants off their nests.

In a review of the first five years of culling, Parks Canada claimed that great blue herons were not especially bothered by the fusillades, not leaving their nests for more than 12 minutes. We knew that was utter nonsense, but to prove it when not allowed on the island is difficult. The island is off-limits to all but Parks Canada and their gunners, and after much negotiation involving Parks Canada and the Ontario Provincial Police, we were only allowed to anchor in one location with a limited view of the island.

But our position did provide a good view of one specific great blue heron nest whose owners tried to incubate, but wound up standing beside, or leaving, the nest for literally hours on end. Other great blue herons had to stand on the sand spit that extends off one end of Middle Island, a waste of their time/energy budget that could not help but compromise egg and brood survivability.

Given all the real conservation problems and challenges the world increasingly faces, it seems such a shame to see so much money go into such a cruel and needless exercise as shooting thousands of cormorants off their nests. The cormorants are native; if they kill off some or all of the trees it in no way results in anything other than an offense to the esthetics of some people who want to preserve the trees because they don’t realize or care that the cormorants belong. They say they want to preserve the “Carolinian” species, but there is nothing non-Carolinian about a cormorant colony in the middle of Lake Erie!

After the last shot was fired the birds could settle down and try, as they have done for so many millions of years before we came along, to raise their families. They are not good birds, not bad birds, just birds who belong in nesting colonies on islands in Lake Erie.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

The Species I Fear the Most, Or How I Spent the Past Few Days

Published 05/10/13 Born Free USA

OK. I’ll fill in the details in a later blog, but I here I want to talk about just getting back from Middle Island, a tiny 46-acre island in Lake Erie. I was anchored offshore, meters from the U.S. border, the most southern place one could be and still be in Canada. I was there with colleague Liz White to monitor gunmen as they shot hundreds of double-crested cormorants off their nests.

This was the sixth year the gunmen had done this, disrupting a large, mixed colony of nesting waterbirds: cormorants, night-herons, great blue herons, herring and ring-billed gulls and Canada geese. We had done this the previous Monday, as well; we’ll do it once or twice more this season. There had been egrets nesting there, too, but while we saw one the previous Monday, they seem to have been chased off by the gunfire. This is a national park. Protecting the egrets was part of the goal. I’ll explain all, in a later blog, meanwhile see this. If it sounds brutally insane, yep, I’d say so!

As we drove back we added to the list of road-kills we could identify along the highway: one wild turkey, one American kestrel, several red-winged blackbirds, a couple of opossums, numerous raccoons, a few cottontails and skunks and many undetermined. And then the trucks. One of the problems with being in this business is that you see so much more than others see. What to others is just an anonymous tractor-trailer we know carries 10,000 pheasants jammed close together in tiny crates, no food or water, no protection from the noise and confusion of the highway, or the cold slipstream.

Pheasants? Yes. Chickens are a species of pheasant, but of course we degrade the term “chicken” to mean something not worth worrying about.

We passed trucks in which you could glimpse pigs, so many in miserable discomfort en route to slaughter. At lunchtime we stopped at one of the highway’s pull-offs, called “En Route,” where restaurants sold cooked body parts of similar animals, now at least beyond suffering. Pulled pork? Wings? No thanks.

At home my mailbox contained the long-awaited copy of “Handbook of Mammals of the World, Volume III,” which describes all non-human primate species in the world, with up-to-date data on their population status. My e-mail contained concerns about one primate species, the long-tailed macaque of Southeast Asia and various islands and archipelagos of that region. Some 240,000 live macaques had been exported for “medical, scientific, commercial and breeding purposes from 2004 until July 2010,” according to the book, and according to my e-mail updates, some 100,000 more had been shot as part of a cull.

They, fellow primates, are denied life because they are a nuisance. The ones removed appear to be from the core population; no one knows how many there are, but they have, according to the book, been officially recognized as the first “widespread and rapidly declining” primate species. I can do no better than the quote in my e-mail from an anonymous writer:

“Where to begin? ... Not only do I weep for the inhumane experience the long-tailed macaques experienced before their souls left our planet, I disparage for the plight of our humanity. ... Violence and killing seem to be a strong strain within our collective DNA. ... We do far more damage around this spinning orb that is our home than all the other living species (combined), than proportionally to what these tinier primate cousins of ours are doing to inconvenience the humans in Malaysia. ...

“Every human who knows about this story should feel shame for the fellow humans who perpetrate these heinous encroachments upon others’ habitats and then rationalized their murdering of those effected by the encroachment. ... It’s not too dissimilar to what 'white' Europeans did to the indigenous peoples of the Americas."

And then, remembering that my colleagues and I are working hard to stop the brutal culling of mule deer in central British Columbia, because there are “too many,” I read the news article about 6,000 coyotes killed in Utah’s bounty program, in the hope that there will be more mule deer! They want more deer for the hunters to kill — the human hunters who don’t need to — so the coyotes are slaughtered in absurdly high numbers.

This brutality extends toward our own species. I also read about the horrific case of three young women held captive, raped and abused, in Cleveland, while the story of the terrorist bombing in the Boston Marathon lingered. Isolated incidents involving a few deranged individuals, of course, but also waiting for me was more news from the civil war in Syria, and lest we get all self-righteous, news of a book just out about the detention, also for a decade, of prisoners in Guantanamo never having found guilty of anything other than being of the wrong religion and in the wrong place at the wrong time, held without trial.

What is it about us? Why are so many of us so heartless?

Why is the term “do-gooder” seen as derogatory?

We are to accept that brutal side of our nature in the interest of ... what?

We’re rapidly, recklessly destroying so much, including our planet’s ability to sustain us, and our own ability to survive. We are capable of better. We are the most brutal of species, and never more so than when we reach out to others, our own and other species, to maim and kill.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

Unbelievable! A Land Conservancy and Conservationist Who Value Nature

The Extraordinarily Unusual Really Should Be The Norm

My colleagues who have formed an organization to protect a native species of bird from being shot in large numbers while nesting were shocked to read that a “land conservancy” agrees with us. So does a conservationist.

You may think you misread that paragraph. What organization set up to protect land would want to slaughter nesting birds? Who would do that in the name of conservation?

Well, if the bird is the double-crested cormorant, the default position of “conservation” agencies is all too often that they just don’t belong and their numbers must be “controlled” to prevent the natural consequences of their very existence.

Double-crested cormorants are native. They have been here all along, but they have been so demonized, ironically because they were once endangered, that reason and logic do not prevail here in eastern North America.

I think the problem is, paradoxically, that the cormorant is vulnerable to persecution, and was therefore twice eliminated from large swaths of North America. The first time, of which there is very little evidence, but it does exist, was during a period of uncontrollably aggressive wildlife slaughter through the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, when unregulated slaughter of wildlife saw the reduction or extinction of a variety of species in eastern North America.

And, long before recovering from that loss, the cormorant suffered again when, as it was attempting to re-establish itself in eastern North America, there were large declines as a result of the use of DDT after World War II. Although the exact mechanics of how it happened are a matter of debate, several top-of-the-food-chain, fish-eating species went into decline coincident to the spread of DDT, and rebounded when use of the pesticide was reduced or eliminated.

But the core belief among many hunting and fishing organizations is that the cormorant is an “invasive” species that competes with them for desirable “game” fish. Ironically many of those “game” fish are themselves, unlike the cormorant, totally alien to the waters where they were put to provide “sport” for recreational anglers.

Study after study has shown that the cormorants mostly have little or no negative impact on “desirable” species of “game” or “commercial” fish. That message has yet to permeate in the United States, where wildlife management agencies bow to the anglers’ lobbies and slaughter tens of thousands of double-crested cormorants. But in Canada we have had a little better luck. While less-educated fishing interests still rant and rave against cormorants, at least the federal and provincial wildlife management agencies have pretty much abandoned that argument, knowing it’s bogus.

But they have glommed on to another argument: Cormorants, they claim, destroy habitat. If you think about it (which cormorant detractors avoid doing) suggesting that a cormorant colony destroys vegetation is like saying a herd of bison, or African antelopes, tramples and consumes grassland. It’s true, but also part of an ecological realty that dates back millions of years and leads to no permanent loss. There is nothing less “natural” about a colony of birds than there is about trees on islands and headlands they inhabit.

But that is not understood, or at least not acknowledged, by either federal or provincial government agencies in eastern Canada, especially in the Great Lakes region. That is what is so delightfully astounding about the news out of Kingston, Ontario.

Let me explain that most lake islands that could host cormorant colonies, don’t. But when cormorants do appear the change in vegetation, as a result of the cormorants’ presence, can be rapid and dramatic.

Snake Island is only two-tenths of a hectare in size, and Salmon Island is only half that , both donated to the Land Conservancy for Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington, near the east end of Lake Ontario.

The islands were donated to the conservancy, and guess what? They are going to be left natural! That means cormorants, or any other native birds, other animals or plants, are expected to be protected there, to do as they’ve always done as part of the natural processes by which species have existed and evolved for literally billions of years before humans appointed themselves as tin gods dictating what the environment “should” look like, in deference to the hook-and-bullet fraternity.

And three cheers and hat’s off to Mary Alice Snetsinger, a conservation biologist who recognizes that the donors wanted the islands to remain natural, and to Vickie Schmolka, president of the conservancy, who is quoted as saying, “Overall, the land conservancy’s approach is to preserve land and let nature take its course.”

Barry Kent MacKay
BornFree USA
Zoocheck Canada