Tag: wildlife
We Should Rethink Naming Wild Animals

We Should Rethink Naming Wild Animals

Animals do not name themselves. The lion illegally hunted down in Zimbabwe last year did not know he was “Cecil.” The western lowland gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a 3-year-old fell into his enclosure did not answer to the name “Harambe.”

We can understand why zoos, nature preserves and animal rescue groups give their headliner animals a name. It helps humans imagine a bond with the creatures, leading to donations, visits and other support for their institutions.

But naming wild animals is not all good. “It trivializes wildlife and makes it less wild,” complains Don Thomas, a well-known hunting writer and environmentalist based in Montana.

Thomas told me that while writing an article about the zoo controversy, he had used “Harambe” as the original title but then caught himself. There’s a long tradition of hunters giving names to “special” game animals, he added. That, too, should be discouraged.

Naming wild animals makes them seem human and also less dangerous. That can work to the detriment of both the animals and humans. The “beloved Cecil” had become a virtual pet in a game reserve and thus may have lost a natural wariness toward humans.

The outcry over the killing of “Harambe” included a good deal of fantasy about the gorilla’s relationship with the toddler. Many insisted that “Harambe” was actually protecting the boy.

Protective? Aggressive? No one could possibly know, Thomas insists. “The video clearly does show a powerful, agitated animal dragging a small child rapidly through water deep enough to drown the kid and roughly enough to kill it in an instant, intentionally or not.”

Expecting wild animals to act with human benevolence is especially risky in the case of primates closest to us on the evolutionary charts. Recall the terrible story of “Travis,” the chimpanzee that virtually tore off a Connecticut woman’s face and hands.

If any animal deserved the title of honorary human, it was “Travis.” He appeared in a Coca-Cola commercial and on TV shows. “Travis” wore a baseball shirt and could operate a TV remote control. But in 2009, he suddenly tore at one of his owner’s friends. Police shot him dead.

Facebook is heavy with videos that seem to unite natural enemies, feeding the human dream that all creatures can get along. A cat plays with a parakeet. A chicken cares for a kitten.

A problematic example that has gone viral shows a 1,500-pound Kodiak bear cuddling with its keeper. The bear has a name, of course — “Jimbo.”

The video promotes a wildlife rehabilitation center in upstate New York. The center may do good work nursing injured animals, but is it doing the public a service in portraying bears as potential playmates?

The gruesome demise of Timothy Treadwell should have put an end to the idea of bears as trusted companions. Heavily into self-promotion, Treadwell claimed to have forged loving relationships with grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. He recorded himself living among these fearsome mammals — and playing roughhouse with them.

In a documentary about him, “Grizzly Man,” Treadwell is seen talking baby talk with a giant bear he named “Mr. Chocolate.”

National Park Service rangers accused him of harassing wildlife.

On Oct. 6, 2003, the rangers found the chewed-up remains of Treadwell and his girlfriend. They killed a large male grizzly near their campsite and found human body parts in his stomach.

Could he have been “Mr. Chocolate”?

We grow up with teddy bears and stuffed lion toys. Ideally, children — and adults — will learn to distinguish between make-believe and biology. Holding back on giving wild animals names might be a good start.

 

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: Max Goldberg

Ethical Hunters Shocked By Cecil Story

Ethical Hunters Shocked By Cecil Story

BOZEMAN, Montana — That picture of Cecil the lion’s corpse and the American dentist posing triumphantly over it was ghastly. Cecil had apparently been lured out of a safe haven in Zimbabwe and illegally shot.

It happens that the Cecil story appalled many of the hunting and fishing writers gathered here by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The partnership represents sportsmen dedicated to maintaining wildlife habitats.

Its members often see themselves squeezed between other environmental groups hostile to hunting and the “slob hunters” they believe sully the sport. And they feel underappreciated as protectors of the wild environment. Hikers and campers pay far less for conservation than they do.

“Cecil was an absolute disaster on multiple fronts,” Don Thomas, a well-known outdoor writer and co-editor of Traditional Bowhunter magazine, told me. From what is known, Thomas places most guilt on the dentist’s hunting guides. It is their responsibility to know the laws and see that hunters abide by them.

“The hunter’s errors seem to be more a matter of sleaze factor than of illegality,” Thomas added, though he is not cleared of the latter.

But Thomas also has a problem with the Disney-fication of Cecil — “taking a wild lion, giving it a name and turning it into a faux pet as a tourist attraction.” The biggest threat to African lions, he explained, is not hunters but the loss of wild habitat through human overpopulation, development, and climate change.

What is ethical hunting?

It’s not killing an animal who has no legitimate means of escape. It’s not taking an animal who has been around people a lot and has lost its instinctual fear of humans. Collared and long studied by biologists, Cecil would seem to fit into that second category.

Ethical hunters have long condemned “trophy mania,” that is, measuring the experience merely by the size of the antlers harvested.

The general public, meanwhile, does not grasp how much conservation is paid for by hunters and anglers. Hunting and fishing license and permit fees largely go toward habitat restoration.

The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 taxes the sale of hunting gear. The proceeds, more than $12 billion so far, go to state wildlife agencies for conservation. A similar tax on fishing equipment followed the 1937 law. Buy a fishing rod and you pay the excise tax. Buy a sleeping bag and you don’t.

In 1900, fewer than 500,000 white-tailed deer remained in North America. Extensive deforestation, poaching, and over-harvesting had decimated the population of deer, as well as of turkeys and ducks. Now there are 30 million white-tailed deer.

Better habitat care and hunting practices deserve the credit, Brian Murphy, a wildlife biologist who heads the Quality Deer Management Association, told me.

The complaints nowadays are of too many deer — and with reason. “Too many deer imperil the health of the forest, removing forage that other species rely on,” he said.

Many hunters and anglers feel right at home in the locavore movement, which promotes food grown locally. They say their relationship with the hunted dinner is far more intimate than with a plastic-wrapped chopped meat shipped from wherever.

When his family says grace over a meal, it thanks the animal itself, Murphy said. “I’ve never felt that way over a Big Mac.”

Furthermore, the game animal on the dinner table had probably enjoyed a far fuller life in the wilds than the penned cow turned into hamburger. These hunters have a point.

The Cecil story should have little to do with them.

Photo: Kevin Chang via Flickr

Congress: Protect Wildlife Refuge From Alaska’s Greed

Congress: Protect Wildlife Refuge From Alaska’s Greed

By Allen E. Smith, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

President Barack Obama showed great leadership in announcing his intent to protect our nation’s vanishing wild, natural capital by recommending that Congress protect 12.28 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness. Congress has been busy talking about the decision during this month’s budget hearings, and we likely haven’t heard the end of it.

Alaskan politicians were quick to attack Obama, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the updated refuge plan and forward-thinking proposal to protect our most valuable wilderness under the Wilderness Act.

“They’ve decided that today was the day that they were going to declare war on Alaska,” Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said when the plan was released. “Well, we are ready to engage.”

Murkowski routinely denounces protective actions on federal lands in Alaska.

Alaska’s freshman senator, Dan Sullivan, accused the president of “declaring war on Alaska’s families.” As a Marine, Sullivan should be ashamed of resorting to such bellicose rhetoric. As a former Marine myself, I am deeply offended by such disrespect.

Murkowski’s and Sullivan’s cries of “no more wilderness” are firmly rooted in the erroneous belief that Alaska belongs to the state to plunder as it wishes. This illusion of the “owner state” is based on the false theory that statehood was a “compact” giving Alaska sovereign control of all land within its borders.

At statehood, Congress granted Alaska 104 million acres to benefit the sparsely settled state. That provided the state enormous wealth and fostered its dependence on oil revenue.

Alaska abolished its income tax and bestowed generous entitlements on its citizens. Alaskans pay no state sales or income tax. At least 85 percent of the state’s budget is funded by oil revenue. The Alaska Permanent Fund balance is more than $52 billion and pays annual dividends to every resident man, woman and child. Last year’s dividend was $1,884. Dividend disbursements since 1982 total $21 billion. Oil also funds educational and cultural institutions.

Alaska faces a $3.5 billion budget shortfall because of declining North Slope oil production and a recent drop in oil prices. Alaska has no right to continue its entitlements by balancing its checkbook at the expense of the Arctic Refuge, which belongs to all Americans.

The revised Comprehensive Conservation Plan would afford the 19.6 million-acre Arctic Refuge the highest level of protection available for our public lands. The plan fulfills National Wildlife Refuge System and Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act requirements to update management plans, review refuge lands for wilderness suitability, and forward wilderness recommendations to Congress. Resulting from years of effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to assess Arctic Refuge management needs and wilderness values, it received nearly a million public comments from Americans supporting designated wilderness in the refuge.

Pro-drilling arguments dismiss the fact that the 1.4 million-acre coastal plain is the biological heart of the refuge that pumps life into a vast ecosystem of Alaska and Canada recognized for its extraordinary diversity of wilderness and wildlife.

Proposing to protect the wilderness and wildlife values of the Arctic Refuge is a visionary act of conservation. Future generations will thank the president; we should thank him now.

The Arctic Refuge is the cornerstone of that vast ecosystem stretching hundreds of miles from the trans-Alaska oil pipeline to the Mackenzie River in Canada, and from the Yukon River to the Beaufort Sea. This wilderness ecosystem is home to remote villages of the Athabascan Gwich’in Nation, and the Porcupine Caribou Herd that sustains their culture and subsistence way of life.

To the Gwich’in, protecting the Arctic Refuge is a matter of human rights. In their language, they call the coastal plain “the sacred place where life begins” because it is where caribou give birth to their calves, maintaining the herd that sustains Gwich’in families.

Congress should reject the high-pitched whine of Alaska’s greed. The nation’s choice is that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be left as it is — as wilderness.

Allen E. Smith served The Wilderness Society as vice president, Alaska regional director, senior policy analyst and Arctic consultant. He was previously president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife and executive officer of Land & Natural Resources Division, USDOJ. He wrote this for CQ-Roll Call.

Photo: A rainbow over the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (Judith Slein via Flickr)

Boom In Shipments Of Turtles Overseas Could Lead To Protective Measures

Boom In Shipments Of Turtles Overseas Could Lead To Protective Measures

By Chris Adams, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government is proposing a new level of protection for certain freshwater turtles, concerned that a massive increase in overseas demand for the reptiles could hurt their long-term prospects.

The proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service involves four species: the Florida softshell, the smooth softshell, the spiny softshell and the common snapping turtle.

While none of the four species is at risk of extinction, federal officials and biologists say that a booming international trade in turtles had prompted concerns about the animals’ long-term survival. And existing laws, which vary from state to state, have not been completely successful in preventing the unauthorized collection and trade of the turtles, officials said.

“These turtles are suffering declines in large part because they are being collected in the wild and shipped overseas for food or pets or medicine,” said Collette Adkins Giese, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group that petitioned federal officials for the protective status. “Turtles are slow to mature, and their populations depend on having large adults. That’s what the turtle trappers are catching.”

According to Adkins Giese, turtle shells are used in traditional Chinese medicine, which ascribes great power to the turtle to purify the blood, cure diseases and bestow longevity or virility.

In its official proposal to list the turtles, the Fish and Wildlife Service documented a massive increase in softshell turtle exports over the past few years.

Among the Florida softshell, exports of live turtles were up 71 percent from 2009 to 2011, the most recent year included; a total of 367,629 live Florida softshell turtles were exported that year.

Common snapping turtles saw exports jump 24 percent — to 811,717 — over the same period. Exports of spiny softshell turtles, as well as snapping turtle meat, were also up.

Those numbers come from U.S. export records and are likely low, given that the Florida and other softshell turtles aren’t now listed, and so exporters aren’t legally required to declare turtle shipments by species. It’s also unclear how much of the trade is of turtles caught in the wild or of those raised on turtle farms, as many in Florida are.

“We don’t know how much is farm stock versus wild,” said Clifton Horton, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. “This listing may help us get this information as well.”

And there’s no question smugglers are doing whatever it takes to get the turtles outside the United States. Federal officials have been involved in cases in recent months where traders attempted to spirit out protected turtles — including a man in Detroit in August who federal officials said was caught with 51 turtles stuffed inside his pants as he entered Canada. Those weren’t Florida or other softshell turtles.

The Florida softshell turtle is found in all parts of the state, as well as in South Carolina, Georgia and southern Alabama. The harvest of them in Florida primarily comes from the southern part of the state and goes on year-round.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the capture of live freshwater turtles is tightly controlled, with a limit of one turtle per person per day from the wild for noncommercial use. According to the state, freshwater turtles can only be “taken by hand, dip net, minnow seine or baited hook,” and taking turtles with bucket traps or snares — or shooting them — is not allowed.

The action by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service involves listing the turtles in a special appendix to an international treaty aimed at protecting species from the negative effects of over-harvest for international trade. The listing includes animals that officials say are in need of international trade controls; U.S. officials want to list the four turtles to better monitor existing trade and ensure that it is legal.

Once an animal is listed, any international trade — live species, parts, products — will require a special permit signifying the animal was caught properly, according to state laws, and that it is being shipped humanely. Shipments of a listed animal will receive greater scrutiny than ones of a non-listed animal.

The permit process also will give federal officials insight into how many wild turtles are actually leaving the United States — information that could help officials manage the species’ long-term survival. The proposal is open to public comments before it is finalized.

Photo via WikiCommons

Want more political news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!