Should they kill the horses of Sable Island?

The world's most deadly species wants to strike again.

Originally published 09/24/14 http://www.bornfreeusa.org/weblog_canada.php?p=4445&more=1

Sable Island—essentially a giant sand bank that rises above the gray waves of the North Atlantic, some 300 km (187 miles) off the shore from Halifax, Nova Scotia—is about 42 km (27 miles) long, but only about 1.3 km (just over half a mile) wide. It has one full time human resident and very few visitors, but is home to about 6,000 Ipswich sparrows, and is the host to the world’s largest assembly of whelping gray seals. These seals give birth to tens of thousands of pups each winter, and are found lulling on the long beaches at other times.

This lonely outpost is also home to a seasonal breeding colony of roseate terns, which are listed as a “species of least concern” worldwide, but the Canadian population is “endangered” under the federal Species at Risk Act. The island is home to a small resident population of harbor seals, and provides a rest stop haven for many migratory birds. It is famous for having fog an average of about 125 days per year and for being surrounded by dangerous waters that have led to 350 shipwrecks and counting. The highest point is about 28 meters (92 feet) above sea level. On November 2, 1991, the “Perfect Storm” scored a direct hit on the island, with the highest wave ever recorded for the region: 30 meters (98 feet). The island is ever changing in its shape, in response to the powerful forces of sea and wind. No one knows what will happen to Sable Island as global climate changes cause sea levels to rise and storms to increase in frequency.

And then there are the horses: about 150 to maybe 400 of them. They have roamed the island for many generations, descended from animals deliberately put there in the 19th Century. An ever-so-romantic myth claims that they reached the island after escaping one or more shipwrecks. Either way, they are there because of human actions.

The Ipswich sparrow, once considered a distinct species, is now regarded to be a subspecies of the widespread Savannah sparrow. There may be some insects who have achieved subspecies status as well, breeding there for such a long time in isolation from their mainland counterparts that the forces of evolution have slightly changed their appearance. More than 190 plant species have been found there.

But, it is not a “pristine” environment. Sable Island has been impacted by humans for centuries. People have released cattle, horses, goats, and rabbits on the island, but most died off. This is a harsh place. The horses survived.

Recently, Sable Island was added to Canada’s National Parks System. You may think that’s a good thing, but it’s not necessarily so. Parks Canada, the agency in charge of National Parks, is committed to maintaining “ecological integrity,” which is described as the environmental conditions that are “characteristic of its natural region and likely to persist, including abiotic components and the composition and abundance of native species and biological communities, rates of change and supporting processes.”

But, they don’t mean it. Parks Canada staff just can’t leave it all alone, arrogantly assuming that they know better what is good for nature than nature does itself. For years, they have shot nesting double-crested cormorants, a native species on Middle Island: a small, uninhabited island in southern Lake Erie that is now part of Point Pelee National Park. They also cull native deer, elk, and raccoons, and allow the hunting of the “invasive” moose in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland.

The only thing that might save the gray seals is budgetary constraints. The government wants to kill the seals, but it seems unlikely that it will be willing to spend the amount of money it would take to do it properly (as outlined in a report on the proposed project a few years ago). To cull 100,000 to 120,000 seals per year, they’d have to build special incinerators, and all of the fuel, equipment, and supplies would have to be accommodated at a cost in the tens of millions, with no guarantee that it would lead to increased numbers of commercial fish stocks—and the possibility that it would have a counterproductive effect. However, the seals aren’t safe yet. The fight to protect members of a species that is clearly part of this harsh environment may yet be under attack by the very agency mandated to protect it.

And then, there are the fabled horses. A biologist from Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador, who reportedly “specializes in the study of unique ecosystems” (I would argue that all ecosystems are unique), wants all of the horses removed. And, those of us who don’t agree… Well, we are “not very well informed.”

This biologist is reflecting a view I once held myself: that humans are not part of nature, and that an animal species that is where it is as a result of human action does not belong. But, really, there is no part of the planet, from pole to pole and into the ocean depths, that has not been at least a little altered as a result of human action. Like it or not, we are part of the ecosphere—and, at the species level, an enormous part. Our role is hugely destructive. One of the things we managed to destroy was an evolving, distinct race of walrus that once lived on Sable Island. As Brenna McLeod and her Halifax colleagues put it, “Our data suggest that the Maritimes walrus was a morphologically and genetically distinctive group that was on a different evolutionary path from other walrus found in the north Atlantic.”

We sure put a stop to that! But, the horses of Sable Island are also “on a different evolutionary path” from all other horses. And, if they were to be left alone—assuming that Sable Island lasts long enough—they would become a form distinct from any other horse. Whichever agency is responsible for them being there—and that can only be human activity—did so a very long time ago. There is no indication that the horses are endangering anything. And, even if they were to clumsily step on every roseate tern nest there is, remember: world-wide, the species is regarded to be “of least concern” in terms of its conservation status. The horses of Sable Island will be unique as they evolve into an endemic form under harsh conditions that favor survival of those best equipped to live there.

All species who live there, or anywhere, arrived at one time in their distant past history, raising the question: when do we agree that they belong? Government policies show a bias that reflects the ease by which we do so much killing. If a species is considered “game,” like the pheasant or the brown trout, it is considered “naturalized”—but, if not, like the starling or the pigeon, it is considered “invasive” and does not belong. And so, we indulge in the two things we are so good at: determining the fate of the world’s species, and killing.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck

Shifting Baseline Syndrome and White Geese

How Questionable Wildlife Management Devours Tax Dollars

In Canada, we have a federal government infamously downloading or cutting off a myriad of valid environmental research programs—inconvenient facts being an impediment to what’s really important to the right-wing ideologues now in power—while ignoring one area of waste that is quite disposable, but oh, ever so convenient if you don’t mind a total, absurdly wasteful sham.

The Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) has come out with its latest “Population Status of Migratory Birds in Canada” and is now vilifying a species that is, I’d guess, unknown to 99 percent plus of federal politicians, or other Canadians. The Ross’s goose is nearly identical to a somewhat better known species (although I suspect still unfamiliar to most Canadians): the snow goose. These are both white geese with black wing tips. The snow goose actually comes in two color patterns, called morphs. A minority are dark brownish-grey with white heads and light blue-grey wing patches, and are known colloquially as “blue geese.” They were once thought to be a separate species. The Ross’s shows this “blue” version only very rarely. Otherwise, the Ross’s resembles the snow but is smaller, with a much shorter, stubbier beak with a kind of blue-grey, warty-looking patch around the nostrils. Even the geese can get confused and hybrids occur.

The snow geese are also divided into “lesser snow geese” which breed in the central to western Arctic, and the wee bit larger “greater snow geese” of the eastern Arctic. The tendency is to “lump” them all as “white geese” for the sake of “management.”

The snow goose was already thoroughly vilified by employment of something called the “shifting baseline syndrome.” That phrase was coined by fishery biologist Daniel Pauly, who used it in 1995 in reference to fish management (another tax-funded wildlife management disaster; remember the northern cod?) but applicable to a wide range of wildlife management policies. “Essentially,” Pauly wrote, “this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes.”

Around the same time, I said the same thing, only about waterfowl biologists with regard to snow geese. A tight group of (mostly) men raised shrill alarm that the white goose population had increased startlingly—there being so many that they were damaging the environment by pulling out plants by the roots, thus altering salt levels in the soil of coastal areas, to the detriment of numerous other Arctic and subarctic species. The northern ecosystem was, they said, “in peril.”

In 1998, I visited the primary research site, near Churchill, Manitoba, in company with Dr. Vernon Thomas, Department of Zoology at the University of Guelph. True, there were mud-flats where geese had eaten the vegetation, but the subarctic ecosystem seemed in no way imperiled, and the desert-like conditions suggested by the lurid prose were restricted and rarely bigger than, say, a football field. We viewed the area from the air, and then landed, and on the ground found rhizomes under even the most barren patches of soil criss-crossed with goose footprints. The region is under something called “isostatic rebound,” whereby the ground is not-so-slowly rising, adding more land as Hudson Bay retreats, in a state of continued, natural change.

I found that the original 1997 report, used to justify a massive increase in hunters’ ability to kill large numbers of “lesser” snow geese, contained a glaring error by giving an incorrect publication date for a life history study that clearly showed something that was being ignored by these waterfowl “biologists,” as surely as the fishery biologists referenced by Dr. Pauly ignored historical data about the size of fisheries (with disastrous results).

There is nothing “scientific” about ignoring data that don’t fit your theory, and this cluster of waterfowl managers wanted us all to believe that the Arctic ecosystem was in peril, only to be relieved by culling (or “harvesting”) vastly more snow geese. Goose numbers were presented as being higher than ever. Classically displaying the avian version of the shifting base syndrome, they had assumed that the conditions they had seen on their first visits to the north as young men, when the white geese were at or close to all-time lowest numbers, were the “norm;” thus, the changes they had seen as white goose numbers increased were seen as abnormal. And, as has been said of a suite of other species, the change was attributed to anthropogenic (human-caused) changes—in this case, the planting of crops that provided wintering geese in the southern U.S. more food than they had ever had before. It was called an “agricultural subsidy.” So, how much food did geese have before, say, the industrial revolution? No one even asked.

This differs from the fisheries’ version of shifting base syndrome only because so many fish species never got a chance to recover, while the snow geese did. But, in both circumstances, management decisions are based on faulty estimates of what “should” be there based on the historic record—and would be, had they been left alone.

I know this is all sort of technical, thus boring, which is why it’s so easy to waste Canadian tax money… But stay with me on this, because it is also not very hard to understand.

If these “biologists,” on government payrolls and/or various government grants or funding from NGOs in the business of supporting the entire sham, flying about the Arctic and subarctic garnering “data” to prove their point, were right, then surely early records would show low numbers of white geese. The exact opposite was true.

Most of the killing off of snow geese occurred before there was much effort or ability to count them, and long before aerial photography and other technologies for producing accurate estimates were available. But, read this quote from pioneering ornithologist Herbert W. Brandt, describing an experience in Texas, where, on March 23, 1919, he and his companions visited a marsh on the plains. “As we approached it looked as if it was covered with snow, but it proved to be thousands upon thousands of snow geese and other wild geese. Here is their winter home, coming into the great pastures at night to feed on the abundant grass. Last year for the first time known a couple of large flocks remained the entire summer.” Indeed, like small numbers of other such first-hand accounts that survive from that era, it suggests abundance comparable to, and possibly greater than, what we experience today. Brandt continues that the owner of the ranch “told us that the geese we saw were just a few left from the great winter flocks, most of them having now departed for the northland. He has seen 500 acres of solid geese, he said, just one snow bank…”

There are other such accounts, even photographs, all dutifully ignored or dismissed as “anecdotal” by the CWS. It’s important, because assuming that the various accounts were right, huge numbers of snow geese have naturally occurred before, and left no permanent damage. Indeed, in a private moment at a waterfowl conference in Memphis some years ago, a CWS waterfowl manager said to me, “Barry, it will take a good fifty years for some of that vegetation to recover.” I just looked at him. He blinked, and then said, “But that’s your point, isn’t it?”

Exactly.

Politicians would far, far rather scapegoat wild animals than address serious and real environmental threats. I mean, yes, the Arctic is in peril, but from a wide range of anthropogenic forces culminating in rising temperatures on average—not from a native species who has been there since the retreat of the glaciers.

Which brings us back to Ross’s geese. When I was a young child in the 1950s, it was, to me, a mystery bird: a small version of the snow geese, whose nest had not been discovered until 1938. In one of my childhood reference books, it stated, “They winter entirely in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California, where they are known to gunners by the name ‘China geese’ and now enjoy absolute protection under the game laws.”

No longer. They made the mistake of trying to recover to former numbers. Those stubby little beaks of theirs are now implicated in the increased “peril” we are supposed to believe the Arctic endures at the hands, or beaks, of the white geese—even the little, once endangered Ross’s goose. The CWS has issued its “notice of intent” to designate these small geese as “overabundant.” Well… They were rare back when I was ten years old, and now they aren’t… Wow… Maybe their current numbers are unprecedented.

Well, no, not according to the always easy-to-ignore historic record. It is a fragmented record because, apart from a handful of ornithologists, no one in the 19th and early 20th centuries could identify them as anything other than, at most, puny snow geese. And yet, a knowledgeable chronicler wrote in 1928, shortly before the bird became endangered, that on its wintering ground in central California, it was “often quite common. It seems to be tamer than other species of geese which visit that region; hence many are shot for the market…” Remember, we are talking about an era that saw the elimination “for the market” or otherwise, of vast herds of bison; the extinction of our most common bird, the passenger pigeon; the elimination of huge flocks of Eskimo curlews, now extinct; the elimination of our only native parrot, the Carolina parakeet; the extinction of our only flightless birds, the spectacled cormorant and the great auk; the extinction of the Labrador duck; the extinction of the Atlantic gray whale; the extinction of the heath hen; and on and on… It was an era of mass wildlife destruction, and a small white goose who came from a place where few or no humans lived—and we thus had not learned to fear them—wouldn’t have had a chance.

Based on what happened with the snow geese when they were designated as “over abundant,” what will be wanted when the designation is given (and it will be) is absurdly extended bag limits, use of recorded calls and baits, a spring hunting season, and anything else that replaces the concept of “fair chase” or “sport” with permission to slaughter. There is the added advantage that hunters who enjoy this sort of thing (and I emphasize that many don’t) will be able to bang away at any white birds with black wing tips (hoping they exclude whooping cranes and white pelicans) without the nuisance of having to tell the Ross’s goose from the snow goose. They will be able to kill large numbers of them using bait and electronic calls, all with federal blessings.

At the time this all began, we predicted it wouldn’t work. First, there was no way hunters would or could slaughter enough snow geese to reduce their continental population to a number satisfactory to the wildlife managers: a number where their feeding showed virtually no “impact” on vegetation. In fact, many hunters were quite disgusted with the idea, and with the inevitable waste of meat if one meets the bag limits. Snow geese are not generally tasty, and we taxpayers unwittingly funded a government cook book on how to make them more palatable. A guy who shoots twenty a day is hardly going to eat all twenty! Also, Arctic wildlife populations typically display “boom-bust” increases followed by population crashes; think lemmings, for example, and the predators who eat them. But, by knocking the top off the growth curve, one assures that the “bust” part does not happen… They don’t peak, there is no subsequent crash, and numbers stay high.

Two decades later, we have been proven to be right. As the CWS puts it, “Despite recent efforts to reduce the numbers of mid-continent Lesser Snow Geese, the population continues to grow.” But, paradoxically, that’s good news for wildlife biologists whose ineptitudes are so seldom challenged; their work, their grants, are assured into the future.

And, even if a government infamous for cutting funding to work that raises alarms about the environment figures it all out – which is highly unlikely – well, they will happily keep signing the cheques so they can say they are funding conservation. I mean, hey; you could address, say, climate change, but that might mean limiting, say, the Alberta oil sands, or proposed pipelines, or Arctic resource exploration… So, you can see the dilemma. It’s easier to kill geese.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA

Originally published http://www.bornfreeusa.org/weblog_canada.php?p=4063&more=1

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.

The Lies Parrot Keepers Tell

The Timneh Parrot

Ironic. A couple of weeks ago – mid-December – I had decided to do a National Bird Day blog about the Timneh Parrot. You won’t see the blog I nearly completed because, as I was finishing it, I took a brief break to check my e-mails—and in one, there was a link to an online article by Scott Malone entitled “U.S. parrot rescuers struggle to keep up with unwanted birds.” As anyone who has seen the wonderful new film, Parrot Confidential, is well aware, most parrots are extremely ill-suited to be “pets” or “companion animals,” and a huge number are doomed to lifelong imprisonment under cruel conditions. Sanctuaries, as the title of Malone’s article said, can’t keep up with the demand for suitable homes for these birds—especially the largest and noisiest of them, who become unwanted once the novelty of owning them wears out.

In classic journalistic tradition, after quoting the owner of a “wild bird rescue facility” clearly fed up with owners “no longer able or willing to keep their pets,” Malone quoted an apologist for keeping parrots, one Al Decouteau, chairman of the 4,000 member Society of Parrot Breeders and Exhibitors (SPBE), saying, “Of the 350 breeds of parrots, about 12 have become extinct in the wild, but because there are breeders, those breeds have lived on.”

The problem is, that’s simply not true. First of all, the term “breed” refers to a domesticated form of a species that has been, through careful breeding of individuals showing desired mutations over many generations, turned into something that did not ever naturally occur. A breed is not a species. Poodles, pugs, and great Danes are all breeds, but belong to a single species: the dog. Those breeds didn’t evolve naturally in the wild. You could “release” all of the collies, retrievers, and boxers you wanted; it would not lead to there being wolves, the original species.

Decouteau, a veterinarian, presumably meant “species.” There is one species of parrot, the ill-fated Spix’s Macaw, that is currently only known as a captive bird—but what pushed it to the edge of extinction was the demand by the exotic pet industry for parrots. Owners were so zealous about having one of these rarities that it was difficult, if not impossible, to get them to cooperate in an effectively managed captive breeding and release program. The last known wild bird had to be protected from parrot collectors, yet “mysteriously” disappeared.

There have been some international efforts to captive breed and release some endangered parrot species, but they don’t involve pet birds. Conservation successes are disappointingly difficult to achieve. An effort to restore one of the only two parrots native to the U.S., the thick-billed parrot, failed because birds lacked the benefit of teaching from wild parents, and were thus easy prey for predators. (The other species, the Carolina parakeet, is extinct…and yes, they were kept in cages until, sometime early in the 20th century, none were left to cage. SPBE incongruously uses a drawing of one in its online logo.)

Captive breeding, centrally managed to maximize genetic diversity, with very carefully-timed release done “in situ” (within the bird’s native habitat), can enhance a suite of conservation efforts – things like provision of nest-boxes and habitat protection – for some parrot (or other) species, such as the Mauritius parakeet and the Puerto Rican parrot. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the exotic pet trade, which vies with habitat loss as the most significant contributor to the endangerment of parrot species.

But, as I said, I was writing about the Timneh parrot. I had originally thought to make the interesting point that this distinctive African parrot, though well known, had been considered a subspecies, or race, of the more widely distributed and better known African gray parrot. I knew that would require an explanation of how species evolve and how the term “species” is defined. Put very simply, subspecies are forms distinct in some, often very minor, ways from others of their kind, with said distinctions not being enough to prevent them from freely interbreeding where their populations abut, or overlap, and produce viable offspring. For example, adult male American robins who live in Labrador and Newfoundland have black backs and heads, while those living in Michigan or Ohio have black heads and gray backs, and those living where I do in Ontario are in between, but closer to the Michigan birds, while the further east you go, the darker, on average, the backs become. Those are “subspecific” differences. The Newfoundland and Michigan populations belong to two separate subspecies of the same species—the American robin—and most folks would notice no difference between them.

The Timneh parrot is found only in the forests of countries on the African gulf coast – Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, southern Mali, and the Ivory Coast. They are slightly darker than the African gray parrot, with a dark maroon, not red, colored tail, and a light yellowish or pale horn-colored patch on the upper beak, while the beak of the adult African gray is entirely black. The populations of the two species do not overlap.

According to BirdLife International, the Timneh parrot is “vulnerable” to extinction because “population declines have been noted across the range. In all of these declines, trapping for the wild bird trade has been implicated” along with habitat destruction, although the species can use second-growth forest, cultivated areas, and even gardens. But, “during 1994 – 2003, over 359,000 wild caught African gray and Timneh parrots were reportedly exported from the range states.” For both species, the numbers taken from the wild are not sustainable, despite the fact that both are also bred in captivity.

Here is what SPBE (and other folks who see nothing wrong with keeping parrots) fail to mention. Breeding is not the issue. The African gray, Timneh, and all other vulnerable, rare, or endangered parrots actually do know how to breed. They’ve been doing it without our help for millions of years. What they need protection from is the actions that are driving them to extinction: the wild bird trade and habitat destruction. Keeping a pet parrot does not address those problems. Neither does SPBE, the exotic pet trade, or supportive industries making all the paraphernalia, from cages to cuttlefish-holders, that produce profits. None of it addresses the root causes of so many declines in so many species of parrots.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

National Bird Day 2014: Cockamamie, Contrarian Cockatoos

Why You Really Do NOT Want to Have this Group of Parrots for "Pets"

In celebration of National Bird Day 2014, Barry Kent MacKay, Senior Program Associate for Born Free USA and lifelong bird enthusiast, is writing a special six-part blog series in December and January where he will describe some of his favorite avian species.

Scientists are a bit at odds: do the 21 species of birds collectively known as “cockatoos” belong in their own family, or are they members of the same family as other parrots?

Answer: it doesn’t matter to anyone but those scientists. To the rest of us, they’re all parrots.

The parrot family has a world-wide distribution concentrated in warm climates. The cockatoos are pretty well restricted to the Australasian region. All have at least some degree of crests and many are mostly white. However, there are six species that are mostly black, one that is dark gray with a red head, one that is mostly pink and gray, and the smallest, the Cockatiel, is predominately gray but with a yellow head and orange-red ear patch and white wing patches.

Because they are loud, conspicuous birds, most cockatoo species tend to be well known to various communities within their range, and many species have a variety of English, or “common,” names. For example, the Pink Cockatoo is also called the Leadbeater’s Cockatoo and the Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo. The Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, or some of its subspecies, are also known as the Yellow-crested Cockatoo, the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, the Timor Cockatoo, and the Citron-crested Cockatoo.

Many have quite limited ranges, restricted to certain islands or island archipelagos. About eleven species naturally occur in the wild only in Australia, with a couple of others found only in Australia and some nearby islands. Some are abundant in the wild, but others are endangered (some critically so). One subspecies of the Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, the so-called “Abbott’s Cockatoo,” found only on Masalembu Islands in the South Java Sea, was rediscovered after being thought to be extinct, and has been called the world’s rarest bird (a claim unfortunately made for several other bird species). A few cockatoo species do breed fairly well in captivity and have self-sustaining captive populations. Arguably the most dissimilar of the group, the Cockatiel, is probably the only one reasonably well suited as a companion animal, and has been essentially domesticated. It now comes in a variety of odd colors and patterns, although I think the wild type is the prettiest of all.

Cockatoos are not only beautiful; as birds go, they are very intelligent, and they tend to appeal to us by virtue of their hand-like use of their feet (a trait they have in common with other parrots, but which is exceptionally well-developed among the larger parrot species, including cockatoos). At least one cockatoo, the Palm Cockatoo (also known as the Cape York Cockatoo, Great Palm Cockatoo, Black Palm Cockatoo, Black Macaw, Great Black Cockatoo, and the Goliath Cockatoo), has been filmed “tool using;” it can take a sturdy stick and beat it against a log, like a primitive form of drumming.

Cockatoos are, by any reasonable definition, intelligent. That makes them inquisitive, restless, and intellectually engaged in their surroundings. They are quite emotional. They naturally occupy huge regions where there are uncountable interactions with a vast multitude of physical complexities. Captivity provides none of that. And so captive cockatoos are easily bored, and when bored, they can literally become psychotic and indulge in unfortunate, often self-destructive, stereotypic behavior. Most notorious is so-called “feather plucking,” a serious form of self-mutilation whereby the birds pull out all the contour (body) feathers within reach. Once this horrific behavior starts, it is extremely difficult, if not almost impossible, to cure. It can lead to bleeding, hypothermia, and infection, and is sadly unsightly.

Cockatoos form strong bonds, and these can cause problems with captive birds when they bond with one human, and become jealous or resentful of others, to the point of biting other people. And, a cockatoo bite is quite powerful and can cause a very serious injury and permanent scarring.

And then there is the noise: loud screeches that developed over millions of years to allow the birds to communicate long distances across mountain valleys and through jungle forest canopies, or over vast desert landscapes. They grate on human nervous systems and exceed safe decibel levels to the point of putting human hearing at risk.

They are also destructive. It is in their nature to chew, and so the well-intentioned cockatoo owner who allows a bird some freedom of the house may incur expensive repair or replacement bills to doors, molding and sills, books, and furniture.

And finally, since captivity is not healthy for them, if they are to be humanely treated, they may generate costly veterinarian bills.

There is a certain irony here. Many owners, thousands of them across the country, finally become fed up each year—or, perhaps the birds, being long-lived, outlast their owners, and it is assumed that the now unwanted birds will easily find a new home. They are valuable, aren’t they? In fact, as a general rule, so many people get rid of them that zoos are soon filled to capacity and will take no more. Sanctuaries and refuges are never guaranteed to be available, and even if they are, they are usually filled to capacity, or beyond, having reached that unfortunate state where they have so many birds that they can no longer provide adequate care for each one.

Sadly, huge numbers of these birds spend years, even decades, huddled in steel cages or chained to perches, unfortunately deprived of the rich stimuli their minds crave, until death finally releases them from miserable existence.

They may look ever so cool when seen in movies or on TV shows, or in properly equipped zoos—but after the initial novelty of having a pet cockatoo is replaced by the frustrations they generate, the results are too often tragically negative, for bird and human both.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

Artwork by Barry Kent MacKay

A Letter to Minister Madeleine Meilleur and Premier Kathleen Wynne regarding "province taking action to enhance animal welfare" announcement

The Honourable Madeleine Meilleur
Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services
18th Floor, George Drew Building
25 Grosvenor Street
Toronto, Ontario M7A 1Y6

The Honourable Kathleen Wynne
Premier of Ontario
Main Legislative Building, Queen’s Park
Toronto, Ontario, M7A 1A3

Dear Minister and Premier:

On behalf of our thousands of members, supporters and constituents throughout Ontario, we would like to express our profound disappointment in your recent announcement regarding the protection of animals and the enhancement of animal welfare in Ontario, particularly with regard to wildlife in captivity.

While we have no issue with increased funding for the Ontario SPCA, your October 25, 2013 announcement failed completely to address the long-standing core issues regarding the keeping of wild animals in zoos, menageries, aquariums and by private individuals in Ontario. In fact, not a single key point discussed in your consultation conducted earlier in 2013 was included in your announcement. Wildlife in captivity in Ontario will remain largely unmonitored and unregulated and the fall out from lack of regulation will be left for the Ontario SPCA to deal with.

After so many similar kinds of discussions and consultations on the wildlife in captivity issue, going back almost 30 years in this province, we find it remarkable that your announcement took so long to be made and that it was devoid of substantive measures to address wildlife in captivity issues.

The key points discussed that needed to be implemented to deal with this issue, and that were generally agreed upon by the NGOs attending your consultation, were entirely absent from your announcement. I will describe them below.

1. The key component of any wildlife in captivity regulatory system is an upfront licensing/permitting regime for all zoos, aquariums, private menageries and wild animal collections. Anyone wanting to acquire wild animals or establish an animal collection should be required to meet a set of criteria prior to a license/permit being approved. The license/permit serves as a filter to weed out the bad and irresponsible operators, rather than letting them establish their businesses and/or personal animal collections, letting them fester and then leaving it to a private charity to deal with the fallout. License/permit revocation is then also available as a sanction for dealing with those facilities who will not or can not maintain acceptable standards over the long term. The suggestion that a voluntary registration program and spot inspections for non-registering facilities will be sufficient is naïve and will do little, if anything, to control the proliferation of wild animals in captivity in Ontario. Anyone will still be able to acquire animals, open a captive facility or keep exotic wild animals as pets. As well, the Ontario SPCA already has the authority to enter zoo premises, without a warrant, to conduct inspections.

2. Comprehensive, enforceable standards for the operation of zoos, aquariums, private menageries and animal collections or for the housing, husbandry and care of wildlife in captivity are essential. The current standards under the Ontario SPCA Act are brief, non-specific, highly subjective, inadequate and, in some cases, unenforceable. Your announcement did not include any mention of more comprehensive standards for wildlife in captivity in Ontario.

3. Although NGOs at your consultation agreed that a prohibition on the keeping of whales and dolphins was warranted and in step with other progressive jurisdictions around the world, your announcement merely stated that experts would be consulted and a set of standards developed and publicized sometime in 2014. There was no information about who would develop the standards or what they would be based on. The concerns about marine mammals in Ontario and the voices of tens of thousands of Ontarians who spoke out have been largely ignored. What is particularly alarming is your statement that regulatory standards will consider the economic and tourism impact on affected communities.

4. Your announcement made no mention of a prohibition or any controls whatsoever on the keeping of dangerous wild animals, such as big cats, bears and giant constricting snakes. Any citizen of Ontario will still be able to buy these animals for personal amusement purposes, impacting animal welfare and endangering family, friends and community members.

5. NGOs at your consultation agreed that transparency and accountability were integral to any regulatory scheme to make it more effective and to create public confidence and support for it. There will be no change to the current system whereby members of the public find it difficult, if not impossible, to obtain information about “official actions”.

6. Whistleblower protection was another important issue that was discussed in your consultation. However, whistleblower protection that would encourage the very people who are best positioned to report on animal abuse and neglect, compassionate staff and volunteers at animal facilities, was not even mentioned. Instead, those brave individuals who do speak out to help animals will continue to be faced with intimidation and legal threats by the facilities who keep animals.

As you know, Ontario has a proportionately greater number of zoos, menageries and aquariums than any other province in Canada and that situation is due, in large part, to the fact that wildlife in captivity facilities have never been properly regulated. Your announcement will not change that situation.

You probably already know that support for increased oversight and regulation of Ontario’s zoos, menageries and aquariums is very strong. A 2013 Nanos poll found 83% of Ontarians support regulation, while a 2012 Broadview Group poll showed 82% support and a 2010 Oracle poll showed approximately 90% support. Other polls indicate similar levels of support.

We strongly encourage you to revisit this issue. You stated repeatedly over the past year that you were committed to doing whatever has to be done to address the wildlife in captivity issue in Ontario. The tens of thousands of Ontarians who spoke out on this issue deserve better and, it should go without saying, the animals do too.

Sincerely,

Rob Laidlaw
Zoocheck Inc.

Sumatran Rhinos and Zoos

A Case History of Zoos and Wildlife Conservation

Fourteen years ago, I was among a group of conservationists sitting in the board room of Toronto Zoo, discussing the fate of proboscis monkeys in distant Borneo (the only country where they occur in the wild). Wildfires had destroyed much of the monkeys’ habitat and the zoo wanted to bring some to Toronto “to conserve the species.” But, when I asked if any of the captured monkeys or their offspring would ever be returned to the forests of Borneo, I was told no; being raised in captivity would effectively prevent them from ever being returned to the wild. When I pointed out that domesticating yet another animal species had nothing to do with “conservation,” I received an odd, honest reply from one of the zoo curators. “But,” he said, after some thought, “I’m a zoo man and I just naturally think of zoo-based solutions.”

In the end, the monkeys stayed in Borneo.

As I pointed out in my previous two blogs, yes, captive breeding can be an important conservation tool for a small number of endangered species—but it does not require traditional public zoo facilities in our towns and cities. Quite the contrary. And yet, zoos imply that, in some way, the act of breeding endangered species protects them. Just last week, a local Ontario zoo, African Lion Safari, announced the captive birth of an Asian elephant, naturally conceived to parents who were, themselves, captive born. But overall, elephants are dying in North American zoos faster than they are being born. The National Zoo says, “Within the next fifty years, there may not be elephants in zoos.” For there to be zoo elephants, wild imports will be required, and they are usually animals orphaned by culls in areas where encroachment has reduced land available to elephants, or orphaned by poaching. Ironic, then, that the very forces that are endangering elephants serve the zoo community’s ability to display elephants. That’s not “conservation.”

Currently, the most critically endangered large mammal in the world is the once widely distributed Sumatran rhinoceros: a small, hairy, and little known two-horned rhino which has been slaughtered for its horn, used in traditional medicine in Asia, and has had much of its habitat destroyed, especially by palm oil plantations. Although the Sumatran rhinoceros has been kept in zoos from as early as 1872, it doesn’t survive well away from its jungle home.

No matter; in the 1980s, the zoo community took 40 of these rare animals out of the wild and placed them into zoos around the world. That was a sizeable portion of the entire population. All were registered in a captive breeding program, and we were told that the zoo “experts’” research into the rhinos’ reproductive biology would assure their survival and propagation. This is called “ex situ” conservation: literally off-site conservation.

But, by the late 1990s, just prior to Toronto Zoo coveting proboscis monkeys, those of us who opposed the program knew that our fears had merit. Not a single Sumatran rhinoceros was born to any of those 40 animals. In fact, half of them had died! By 1997, the three animals remaining in U.S. zoos were united in Cincinnati, where, with special hormonal treatments, young calves were finally born and shipped to Sumatra, where it is possible to keep the animals “in situ” (meaning that they are captive, yes, but “on site” within their native habitat and thus able to develop necessary skills to survive in the wild).

There is still the issue of poaching and deforestation, neither issue requiring those of zoos to be solved. For some endangered species, it may well be that hosting countries will, in the end, lack the ability to protect in situ captive animals from poaching, local warfare, or natural disasters. But oh, if only all of those Sumatran rhinos had not been wasted, and if only the money spent on shipping them across the planet had been focused on where they belong, then maybe, just maybe, there would be more of them, and they’d have a better chance of survival.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA

No Diplomacy for Pandas

A great deal of excitement surrounded the recent arrival of two giant pandas to the Toronto Zoo. On loan from the Chinese government, the bears are meant to celebrate the new foreign investment agreement between Canada and China. This is a practice known as panda diplomacy, whereby an endangered animal species native to China is shipped across the world to symbolize a kinship between humans. Politics aside, the issue of putting live animals on display as a symbol of diplomatic relations between countries is surely an outmoded practice in this day and age, when animal rights and welfare are increasingly a matter of public debate and of growing importance in Canada's legal system. Given our knowledge of animal psychology and behaviour, it is no longer possible for us to ignore the ethical wrong of keeping animals captive in our country's zoos and aquariums.

There has been much controversy in Canada recently over the question of animal welfare in zoos and aquariums, and whether certain species should continue to be held in these facilities. Last April the Supreme Court rejected an appeal to the City of Edmonton’s decision to keep a single remaining elephant at the zoo, despite a widespread campaign to have her transferred to a larger habitat where she could socialize with other elephants. In Ontario the fate of the three remaining elephants at the Toronto Zoo has been an ongoing battle for over three years, while the OSPCA continues to investigate allegations of neglect and mistreatment at Niagara Falls’ MarineLand.

The main lesson to be culled from the problems surrounding our zoos and aquariums is that we need to rethink our practice of keeping animals in captivity for the purpose of exhibition. Proponents of zoos and aquariums often cite two reasons for upholding these institutions, education and conservation, but both arguments are flawed.

Given the rise in animal rights activism and research into the physical and psychological impact of captivity, the lessons we teach our children through zoos say more about our understanding of animals as objects -- or, more simply, our disregard for that impact. As an example we can look to Koshik, the elephant at South Korea’s Everland Zoo who learned to imitate human speech. While the media largely represented this phenomenon as a heartwarming story, the scientists who published their findings in Current Biology speculate that in fact Koshik learned human words out of social deprivation from other members of his species, having spent seven years as the sole elephant at the zoo. Koshik learned to mimic the language of his keepers because it was his only hope at communication. The authors of the study also speculate that social deprivation could be a factor in other cases of animals who “talk” in captivity.

Why then are we misunderstanding their attempts at communication? And how can we purport to use zoos and aquariums as resources to teach people about the lives of animals when we deprive them of their social groups and natural habitats?

The argument for conservation should also be disputed. Indeed many zoos breed animals with dwindling populations in the hopes of one day releasing them back into the wild; this is the stated intention of the Toronto Zoo regarding the incoming giant pandas. The problem, however, is that we can easily lose sight of the well-being of the animals themselves. There is little doubt that conservation can be a worthy cause, but what is often not discussed is the moral dilemma of imprisoning one animal for the potential future generations of animals that may or may not come to fruition. The issue is then whether our desire for conservation outweighs a captive animal's quality of life.

The intentions of most people who support or engage in conservation and zoo-keeping are generally well-meaning and compassionate, but the outcome for the animals involved is not always favourable. Countless studies in animal behavioural science have shown us how captive animals resort to stereotypic behaviours that are repetitive and obsessive in nature, as well as frequently self-destructive. While studies determining the stress impact on captive pandas have been few at this point, scientists have nonetheless reported a number of stereotypic behaviours in zoo pandas which include pacing, head-tossing, self-biting, and regurgitation (repeated vomiting and ingesting of the vomit). It could be argued that the frequency and intensity of such behaviours are augmented by poorer living conditions, but even the best zoos deprive animals like pandas of the space and natural stimulation they would get in the wild. No enrichment activities or increase in enclosure space can compare to the ability to roam free for kilometres on end.

To continue to sell zoos as entertainment is cruel. Moreover, the fact that the exhibits are often directed at young people poses a larger problem. What kind of lesson are we teaching when we encourage them to derive pleasure out of the deprivation of another living being? The time has come to end this practice and start exploring other ways to observe and interact with animals. Surely by the twenty-first century we can stop looking at them in cages.

Vanessa Robinson, PhD
Guest Blogger

Funds should go to conservation, not cages

Ever since I first learned about Google Alerts, I’ve been receiving dozens of links to articles about zoos on an almost daily basis. Over the past few years I’ve gotten in the habit of printing out articles about new zoo exhibits and the refurbishment of old zoo exhibits, especially if they indicate their cost.

I expect that anyone reading those articles in isolation say to themselves, “Wow, that’s a lot of money” and leave it at that. I suppose it’s a natural reaction since a great many new zoo exhibits range in price from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars, certainly a lot of money to most of us. But most people don’t think about the fact that zoos all over North America and around the world are engaged in the same kinds of expensive projects as their local or regional zoos are. And when you start to add up the costs, it’s mind blowing.

Here’s just a small sample of what I’ve come across in the past week or so. The National Zoo recently opened a new elephant exhibit that cost a whopping $56 million. The Oregon Zoo plans to exceed that with their own $58 million elephant exhibit. Meanwhile the Houston Zoo will open a $28 million gorilla exhibit in 2015, while this summer the Dakota Zoo will open a small primate exhibit that, by comparison, is dirt cheap at only $750,000. As I sat down to write this blog, another one came in. The Indianapolis Zoo is planning a $30 million orangutan exhibit. Those few projects come in at a staggering $172.75 million and that’s just the tip of the proverbial “new exhibit” iceberg.

About three years ago I added up all the zoo capital projects that were featured in articles in a 1 month period. I’m sure I didn’t see them all, but what I did see added up to $1.213 billion dollars. They’d house at most a few hundred individuals representing a motley assortment of species. All in the name of conservation.

Most of the zoo promotional material that’s used to rationalize these obscenely expensive exhibits feature vague claims about how important they are to public education, conservation and how they’ll produce a positive conservation outcome that will benefit animals and their wild habitats. Of course, most of that commentary is unsubstantiated, meaningless and self-serving. The reality is that most zoos talk the talk, but when it comes down to putting their money where their mouth is, they don’t do much to help. Instead, they construct monuments to waste and pat themselves on the back for doing it.

There are thousands of conservation projects around the world that are starving for funds. They’re aimed at preserving habitat, conducting anti-poaching patrols, mitigating human-wildlife conflict, fighting the wild animal parts trade and addressing a plethora of other concerns. Pick a handful of these projects at random, look at their cost and at what they can accomplish and it becomes abundantly clear why they should be funded and not the new zoo exhibits.

Rob Laidlaw
Zoocheck Inc.

Children & Nature - A Healthy Combination

Guest blogger N. Glen Perrett suggests getting kids out into nature as an alternative to looking at animals in captivity.

You don't need studies to realize that children aren't receiving the same amount of exercise or wilderness experiences that past generations have benefited from. However, studies do confirm this. A Statistics Canada (in partnership with the Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada) survey in 2007 found that in recent decades the health of Canadian children has deteriorated while childhood obesity has risen and physical fitness has declined.

When it comes to nature experiences, many children have replaced outdoor play and exercise with electronics including video games, social networking, and text messages to friends. This disconnect with nature and its consequences is addressed by Richard Louv in his books Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder and The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder.

There are many health benefits associated with nature that we know of - and surely many others that haven't been discovered yet. Studies indicate that nature can help those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Nature is also attributed to reducing stress and depression as well as improving our ability to concentrate to name only a few mental health benefits. Our family certainly experienced the benefits of regular nature excursions as we spent the last two years hiking wilderness areas for my book Hikes & Outings of South-Central Ontario. No matter what state of mind we were in when we arrived at the natural area we were about to explore-and we were often tired or stressed-we were in a wonderful frame of mind shortly after hitting the scenic trails or exploring a wetland.

Nature also has benefits for our physical health. Studies have shown that patients with a view of nature spend less time in the hospital compared to patients who didn't have a view of nature during their hospital stay. In their recently published book Your Brain on Nature (Wiley) Eva M. Selhub, MD and Alan C. Logan, ND cited a study published in the journal Science. The study pertained to patients in a Pennsylvania hospital from 1972 to 1981 who had surgery to remove their gallbladder. One side of the hospital featured windows with a view of a small forest while the other looked at bricks. According to the authors, "...those who had an outdoor view to trees had significantly shorter hospital stays and fewer postsurgical complaints. They also used less-potent analgesic medications (aspirin instead of narcotics)."

Of course spending time in nature usually involves hiking and other forms of exercise which have many health benefits including preventing heart disease, lowering cholesterol levels, and controlling and preventing diabetes. The benefits of exercising, particularly exercising in nature, even has the medical community considering prescribing exercise as a way for their patients to get healthier. There is even a "Park Prescriptions" program in the United States where the National Park Service works with health care professionals. Working with the park to come up with appropriate activities and trails for the patient, health care providers write prescriptions for their patients to walk, bicycle, paddle, or do some other exercise. One of the places where these nature prescriptions occur is Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore which features 15 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline along with 15,000 acres of beach, woods, marshes, and prairies in Indiana.

With nature providing valuable environmental lessons and health benefits, school boards could incorporate more field trips to conservation areas and other wilderness spaces to ensure both their students' education and health mandates are attained. In fact I can see a time in the near future when parks, schools and health care providers work together to meet our children's health needs.

N. Glenn Perrett
Author Hikes & Outings of South-Central Ontario
Guest Blogger

This blog was originally published at: http://latornellblog.blogspot.ca/2012/09/children-nature-healthy-combination.html

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

Is An Elephant-Free Zoo Desirable, Or Even Possible?

A dark confession was contained in the opening sentence of my last blog, where I said, “Unlike some of my respected colleagues and friends I don’t automatically and irrevocably oppose zoos, or to be more accurate, I think there can be grounds for keeping animals captive that can be defended on moral, conservation and educational grounds."

OK, for most of the public that’s not much of a confession nor very dark, but within the animal protection community there is huge irritation over zoos. Those who care to look, to study zoos, can easily become frustrated at how much harm zoos cause to animals, while contributing to the generally accepted social concepts of human “dominion” over animals. To some, suggesting there is anything about zoos that is, or can be, positive is an anathema.

But the problem lies, perhaps, in the concept of “zoo.” A zoo is usually more or less perceived by most people as a source of entertainment that takes various species of wild animals — who people might rarely or never see in their natural environments — and puts them on display in some form of confinement. In the case of elephants, as discussed in my previous blog, this is very much to the detriment of the animals. Not wanting to admit the paucity of moral justification of hurting animals in order to entertain (or profit), zoos have mounted an effective but mostly specious campaign to convince us that zoos serve higher functions. Primarily, it is claimed, zoos significantly assist the conservation of endangered species and educate the public.

Oh? There have been instances of captive breeding in zoos and elsewhere contributing to conservation by producing animals who are subsequently released to the wild. But that is not done with elephants, nor would it assist their survival. Elephants breed perfectly well in the wild, thank you. What they need is protection from poaching and various forms of encroachment and habitat loss. Those needs are not provided by the Toronto Zoo, nor at any other zoo.

Education? Last year my colleagues at Zoocheck Canada conducted a study at Toronto Zoo. They found that visitors spend an average of 117 seconds, less than two minutes, looking at the elephants. A similar study at the Chester Zoo in the United Kingdom produced similar results. And in Toronto, less than 1 percent of visitors read the signs that provide information about elephants.

But here’s the good news. The Toronto Zoo could, by extricating itself from 19th century thinking, educate children and adult visitors about elephants at much less cost than the proposed expansion of the current elephant display, and do so without hurting elephants! What is being proposed is use of modern technology to produce an educational center.

It’s fun just thinking about such a concept. Imagine, for example, a simulated patch of elephant habitat where kids could literally feel the low-decibel, sub-audio rumbling by which elephants communicate. Imagine a model of elephant dung that kids could search, as elephant biologists do with the real thing, for clues as to diet and internal parasites. Imagine a life-size model of an elephant, intact on one side and cut away on the other to show organs and organ systems that could be illuminated with the touch of a button. Imagine wrap-around screens that put the viewer in the midst of a heard of African elephants with the kind of natural groupings and behavior never seen in zoos. Imagine a holograph that changes between the two species of African elephant and then changes into an Asian elephant. Imagine a succession of life-size animated models of prehistoric elephant species and a mammoth tusk you can touch. Imagine a display of one day’s consumption by an elephant. Imagine being able to cue recordings of various elephant vocalizations with an explanation of what they mean. Imagine an interactive map of Africa and Asia where you could push buttons that are numbered to different years, with each year’s button lighting up the parts of the map occupied by elephants during that year, to show the steady decline of elephants. Imagine a real, live African wildlife ranger in uniform brought to Toronto to talk about his adventures protecting elephants from poachers. Imagine displays of confiscated ivory figurines.

Imagine ... well, that’s the point: What’s needed, all that is needed, is imagination — that and compassion, and a financial commitment more in keeping with the ideals of fiscal responsibility so strongly preached by the politicians.

Right now Toronto Zoo has an unequalled opportunity to seriously educate the public about African elephants and thereby encourage donations to real conservation efforts. Is it up to the challenge?

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA

Exotic Animals Killed After Sanctuary Denial in Thorold, Ontario

On Nov. 26, the Toronto Sun started an article with: “An Ontario family that had three lions and six monkeys euthanized is blaming a city council decision that denied their request for an exotic pet sanctuary.”

A lion and her cub — not killed in Ontario.The animals were killed, slaughtered, butchered or even executed, but not euthanized. Euthanasia is the last gift you can provide the terminally suffering of any species (including human) where there is no hope for survival or comforting palliative care, and that clearly does not apply to this situation. And since these animals were killed, the term “sanctuary” also is inappropriate.

This “sanctuary” was set up within the jurisdiction of Thorold, a city of fewer than 20,000 citizens not far from Niagara Falls, Ontario. Local bylaw(called “ordinances” in the United States) did not allow the keeping of these animals. My colleagues and I work hard to see such bylaws put in place, because at the moment, Ontario is the single remaining province without any kind of zoo licensing. There currently is a bill before provincial parliament that, if passed, will at least provide some level of licensing, but there is no guarantee it will pass. Anyone can own any kind of exotic animal so long as it was acquired legally and no local bylaws prohibit it. No one knows how many lions, cobras, bears, apes and alligators are in how many barns, garages and basements in Ontario.

The animals killed (three lions and six “monkeys”) were allegedly, at least some of them, former “pets.” The animals were — according to the people charged under the Ontario Planning Act, Chris and Sharon Morabito — “unwanted” animals turned over by former owners. It reportedly was claimed that no zoo would take them because the sanctuary was not accredited. But there is no such thing in Ontario as sanctuary accreditation. There is a zoo accreditation program run by the Canadian Association of Zoos and Aquariums (CAZA), although it hardly is rigorous in enforcing what relatively minimal standards it sets for zoos (but not sanctuaries).

However, according to the news story, the Thorold “sanctuary” was not given rezoning at least in part because it was not “accredited.” The Thorold City Council is being blamed by the people charged for not OK’ing the sanctuary after the fact. But if the place was not zoned to allow the keeping of exotic animals, what did they expect? The Sun article states: “The Morabitos said the family has received conflicting opinions and orders from the city’s planning department.” But the city is claiming that it already had issued a “stop order” and that it was ignored. If there is conflict, first get it resolved!

Surely the Morabitos’ credibility was compromised a year earlier when Niagara police found marijuana growing on the property. Also present at the time were lions, a three-legged jaguar, parrots and monkeys in various cages and enclosures. The Lincoln County Humane Society was satisfied that there were no cruelty violations, but that does not placate my annoyance at the situation that led to the deaths of these “unwanted” animals in late November. The Morabitos also claim that having been to court four times, they are bankrupt.

I am no stickler who would put rules and regulations over what I would believe to be the morally correct thing to do for anyone, human or animal, although with the understanding that there can be consequences when one ignores the law. But there are too many of these “sanctuaries” claiming to be for “educational” or “rehabilitation” purposes, and which too often manage to attract devoted followers but don’t really serve the interests of animals. Just recently one of the sleazier private zoos in Ontario, also claiming to hold “unwanted” animals, finally closed, and yet it had the staunch support of a Toronto Sun columnist who seemed to think that because the animals were “unwanted” the owner was some sort of saint. Admittedly when I was young I once supported a similar enterprise, until I learned that when I found a better home for the “unwanted” animals, the guy I had trusted would not turn them over. He was simply using the animals to justify endless donations from well-intentioned people as naïve as I had been.

There are solutions. Most of all I would like to see very strict bans on the import, sale, breeding and ownership of these “exotic” animals, but that isn’t going to happen. Right-wing politicians put the “right” of people to do as they please, and to make money, way ahead of any interest in protecting the animals, or the
environment, or people at risk from inherently dangerous animal species. In the United States, Congress — having already banned the interstate movement of big cats as pets — is now considering adding primates to the list of prohibited species.)

Born Free USA runs a genuine animal sanctuary in Texas, but done properly, with no contempt for local laws and regulations and under solid management. Such sanctuaries are essential; there is a desperate need for them as more and more animals not suitable as pets are being sold by the exotic pet industry. But to work they must meet certain qualifications. That is why the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries was formed. The GFAS needs to have a global presence, to assure that sanctuaries really do serve the interest of those animals nobody wants, and that there are very specific, identifiably effectual standards to be met for meaningful accreditation for vitally required animal rescue and long-term care. Our own Adam Roberts, one of the busiest animal protectionists I know, takes the time to be the current president of GFAS.

Animal sanctuaries are essential, but in order to avoid the kind of fiasco that led to the deaths of innocent animals in Thorold last month they must be properly constituted, funded and managed. GFAS is the best bet we have for that to happen.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Canada

Ueno Zoo in Cherry Blossom Time

Last week I visited Tokyo's Ueno Zoo. It was a warm sunny day, the cherry blossoms were out in full force and throngs of people filled every corner of the zoo grounds.

Ueno Zoo is one of Japan's premier facilities and is comparable to almost any major North American zoo. Its wide pathways, tall trees, well-tended gardens, refreshment outlets around every corner and multitude of shady rest areas make Ueno Zoo a wonderful place for visitors. And that's the problem.

Like so many other zoos throughout the world, the Ueno Zoo is a people place. One would think that with a large collection of animals from the four corners of the globe the zoo would be a place for animals, but it's not. It's a place for people.

Unlike the wonderful facilities for visitors, the animal enclosures were small, bland and most of the animals were just sitting or lying around. Those that were active were often engaged in stereotypic pacing or some other abnormal behaviour.

It was obvious the zoo had made some attempt to spruce up some of the cages by adding bark chip substrates, furnishings and objects to manipulate, and I expect those things made the staff feel better, but they didn't seem to do much for the animals. The space and complexity the animals need just wasn't there.

Like most other zoos in the world, visitors noisily filed past one exhibit after another, registering one animal in their mind before moving on to the next. If the animals were inactive, many visitors didn't even stop, they just glanced toward the animals as they walked by.

As I moved through the zoo I tried to imagine what the animals felt with so many hundreds of eyes watching their every move. At a bear cage, the visitor pathway wound around the top of the exhibit allowing people to surround the animals. And there were multiple glass viewing stations at ground level as well. There was no where for the bears to get away from public view. Many other animals had it the same and some had it worse.

Studies show that many animals, ranging from lizards to gorillas, can be very stressed by being watched. That seems obvious to me. But it doesn't seem obvious to the people who build the cages and care for the animals.

Zoos have a totem pole of priorities that place the needs of visitors first, staff second and animals third. That totem pole should be flipped on its head so the needs of the animals come first, the staff second and the public third. Zoos claim they are devoted to animal wellbeing but the reality says otherwise. There needs to be a new zoo paradigm.

As I exited Ueno Zoo I couldn't help but think that a zoo is no place for animals.

Rob Laidlaw
Zoocheck Canada

Zoo’s spin on elephant death defeats zoos’ stated purposes

Another neighbor just died, in her prime. Tara, a 41 year old African Elephant, died on the last day of November, at the Toronto Zoo, near where I live. Okay, not a next door neighbor, but I feel as though I knew her as I sketched and photographed her and simply watched her, many times. She is the third elephant to die there in the last 14 months!

The Toronto Zoo has told the media that elephants only life about 40 to 45 years. This from the same industry that claims part of its raison d’être is to educate the public about wild animals. Then zoos should tell the truth. In Kenya . elephants have been known to give birth in their 50s. Elephants in the wild live well into their 60s or longer, and an Asian elephant has lived to age 86.

Tessa, Tequila, Tantor, Toronto, and TW are other elephants who died well before their time at the Toronto Zoo. In fact, friends of mine who track captive elephants predicted Tanya’s passing when Tessa, at age 39, died six months ago. And they have, sadly, predicted more of my elephant neighbors dying in the next little while, as all have reached not maturity, as the Toronto Zoo would have us believe, but are middle aged, and therefore about as old as captive elephants can expect to survive.

For some species, zoo life can be free of hunger, predation and other problems faced in the wild, and as a result, there are a few animals, a dwarf crocodile at Toronto Zoo, for example, whose captive life exceeds what would probably be expected for a wild counterpart. But not many species, most emphatically not including elephants.

While the local media was reporting Tara’s untimely death, it failed to report that India, where the Asian elephant is a native species, had just decided that no elephants should ever be kept in captivity. It is morally irresponsible.

And while zoos and refuges can breed and release a relatively small range of endangered species, that does not apply to elephants. The world’s zoo elephants are not put into the wild, nor would that serve any conservation purpose even if they could be. Breeding is something wild elephants do very well when protected in the wild. The money spent (or, in Toronto, will be spent if the idea of increasing the indoor elephant holding area’s size goes ahead) by zoos would go so much further in conserving elephants if donated to efforts to reduce elephant poaching and fight the demand for ivory that thousands of animals could survive wild and free where they belong, for every pathetic specimen in zoos and circuses. There are viable elephant sanctuaries where elephants could be sent to live a semblance of natural life in social groupings, and maybe have a chance at truly surviving to full maturity.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA United with Animal Protection Institute