The Animal Manifesto (6 page)

We observe animals, gawk at them in wonder, experiment on them, eat them, wear them, write about them, draw, paint,
and photograph them, move them from here to there as we redecorate nature, make decisions for them without their consent, and represent them in many varied ways. Yet we often dispassionately ignore who they are and what they want and need.

It’s almost too obvious to say, but animals do not need our help to live in nature. Whenever humans seek to “manage” nature, creating parks and artificial boundaries, it is always only for the benefit of humans. Perhaps, to the degree to which animals are left alone within these parks, it might be said that animals benefit, that they have been protected from humans. Otherwise, most of what passes for “wildlife management” looks like nothing so much as a direct attack on wildlife itself, bent on destroying homes and killing indiscriminately.

From an animal’s perspective, it’s hard to see how the U.S. government is working with their best interests in mind, nor how the federal Wildlife Services — formerly called Animal Damage Control, ADC — is their friend. Consider their conflict of interest: many divisions of wildlife and state and federal parks support themselves by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. Their essential mandate is to preserve animals so that some can be killed. Hunting is promoted as a source of income and as a “culture” to be preserved; to get more kids involved, in June 2009 Wisconsin lawmakers moved to lower the legal hunting age from twelve years of age to ten. State Representative Scott Gunderson noted, “It’s important for us to include young people in the activities that a lot of us hold near and dear. . . . This is about our heritage.” The Colorado Division of Wildlife claims that they keep Colorado wild by managing
and protecting all wildlife. Clearly they don’t, for they support the killing of innumerable fish and other sentient beings using methods that cause great pain, suffering, and death. Would humans put up with such a trade-off in their own communities, in which some folks are sacrificed so that others might live?

Sport hunting and fishing are only one aspect of “management,” however. Typically, Wildlife Services has spent about$100 million a year to actively kill more than one million animals, of which about 120,000 are carnivores, but these numbers have spiked recently. Of course, though they maintain official counts, they can’t keep track of all the individuals they kill. Wildlife Services shoots, traps, and snares animals, and uses a panoply of dangerous toxicants that harm a wide variety of species, not only the target species, for the benefit of the agricultural industry. Between 2004 and 2007, by their own records, Wildlife Services killed 8,378,412 animals. The numbers of mammals killed overall has increased recently. In 2004, for example, the agency killed 179,251 mammals compared with 207,341 in 2006. Wildlife Services has increased the number of endangered species it has killed as well, for a total of almost 2,500 individuals, primarily gray wolves, since 1996. The average number of endangered species killed annually between 1996 and 2004 was 177.5, while the average between 2005 and 2007 was 294.3. This represents a
66
percent increase in the numbers of endangered species killed in the past three years (2005–2007) as compared to the previous nine (1996–2004). As one employee of Wildlife Services was quoted as saying, “No one wants you to see this shit. . . . It’s a killing floor.”

The numbers are staggering, sickening, and increasing. In the fiscal year 2007, people working for Wildlife Services killed 2.4 million animals representing 319 species and spent$117
million doing so. This included a total of 196,369 mammals, of which 340 were gray wolves, 90,326 coyotes, and 19,584 feral hogs. Along with the larger trend, the number of carnivores killed has been steadily rising, and these numbers do not include youngsters who die after their mothers or other caregiving adults are killed. In 2008, Wildlife Services killed nearly five million wild animals and pets, a record number and a 125 percent increase from the number killed in 2007.

Invariably, the “wildest” places need the most “management,” resulting in more killing. In Wyoming alone during the fiscal year 2007, Wildlife Services gunned down, snared, trapped, and poisoned 10,914 coyotes, 2,054 more than were killed the previous fiscal year. During the summer of 2008, the Alaska Board of Game approved the killing of all wolves in an area near Cold Bay, and state officials illegally killed fourteen wolf pups after gunning down their mothers — yet another grisly chapter in Alaska’s out-of-control wolf slaughter.

Nontarget species are also killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. During the fiscal year 2006, at least 400 river otters were killed by accident, as were about 700 turtles. Not even humans are safe. Airplanes are used to track and kill animals as part of their aerial slaughter program, and Wildlife Services had twenty-four accidents with seven fatalities between 1989 and 2006.

Wildlife Services was established for “creating a balance that allows people and wildlife to exist peacefully.” Not even the most strident utilitarian could come up with a cost/benefit analysis that would make any sense of this slaughter. Where is the balance and peace in a situation that requires so much death to maintain? For many decades this has been humanity’s answer to the “problem” of wild animals intruding on our farms,
ranches, and communities — or of predators who “compete” with hunters for elk and deer — and by the simple standard of effectiveness, it should be clear by now that killing does not work. We must figure out new ways of coexisting with our fellow animals. Indeed, the data show that in fact poor husbandry and disease have a larger impact on food animals than predation by wild animals.

Killing wildlife in the name of peaceful coexistence is not restricted to America; it occurs worldwide. There has been ongoing debate about whether or not elephants in certain areas of Africa have to be culled, or killed, to solve problems that occur when they intrude into human habitat. Not everyone agrees that killing elephants is the best answer. For example, John Skinner, the former head of the Mammal Research Institute at Pretoria University, said there was not a shred of evidence that the elephants in Kruger National Park or elsewhere adversely affected ecosystems. Other researchers, including Ian Raper, president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, also are opposed to culling. Raper notes, “Based on studies from across Africa we conclude that science does not provide satisfactory evidence that elephants have a lasting negative effect on either animals or plants. It’s not true that culling reduces numbers. So what purpose does it serve?”

Meanwhile, elephants are already struggling to survive without being directly targeted by humans. Psychologist Gay Bradshaw notes in an essay in my
Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare:

The threat of elephant extinction is very real in terms of pure numbers and in consideration of the degree to
which land and animals are pressed to change. And there is something more dire. In Kenya, heart of elephant lands, the human population has jumped from 8.6 million in 1962 to over 30 million in 2004, and between 1973 and 1989 elephant numbers plummeted from 167,000 to 16,000. As a result, there are no places in Africa or Asia that can claim elephant herds even remotely resembling those of two centuries ago. . . . Infants are largely reared by inexperienced, highly stressed, single mothers without the detailed knowledge of local plant ecology, leadership, and support that a matriarch and all mothers provide. Disoriented teenage mothers raise families on their own without the backbone of elephant society to guide them. . . . Parks. . . offer no sanctuary from marauding soldiers and villagers hungry for ivory and machine gun sport. Like the majority of remaining elephant habitat in Africa, in all of Asia, the total population is estimated as low as 35,000 and dwindling fast.

Without deliberately meaning to, humans have unbalanced nature, and then take it as their right to preserve and enforce this imbalance through “wildlife management.”

The fact is, we influence the lives of animals in myriad ways, most often without any knowledge that we’re doing so. Our impact on animals and the unbalancing of nature has often occurred very subtly, over the long term, and in unexpected and surprising ways. For example, birds in different locations are
known to mimic ambulance sirens, car alarms, and cell phone rings, and they show changes in behavior due to the inundation of these unnatural sounds. Researchers from England’s University of Sheffield have reported that robins in urban areas are singing at night because it is too noisy during the day — not necessarily because streetlights trick the birds into thinking it’s daytime. But light pollution affects wildlife in other ways. Strong polarized light from glass buildings and roads can confuse animals and change their feeding and breeding habits because the intense visual cues attract them to areas where they won’t find the food or habitat they are looking for. In another example, baby sea turtles rely on the direction of starlight and moonlight reflected off the water’s surface to help them find the ocean when they emerge from their nests, but in urbanized areas, they may move toward bright buildings and street lamps instead and never find the sea.

Human-created noise in the ocean disrupts communication among whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals, and high-energy sonar causes mass strandings and deaths of various whale species. Sonar might also disrupt diving so that cetaceans suffer the equivalent of the “bends” that humans get when they surface too rapidly. Despite this, in November 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court deferred to military pressure and lifted the restrictions on the use of sonar off the coast of California. As noted in the
New York Times,
“Most disturbing was the majority’s strong statements of deference to the professional judgments of military officers. A district court and appeals court in California had shown much more willingness to probe behind the military’s claims. They concluded that the navy could effectively train its strike groups even under the two restrictions it most vigorously opposed: that sonar be shut down
if marine mammals were spotted within 2,200 yards and powered down during certain rare sea conditions.”

Of course, humans impact fish and sea creatures more directly, through both recreational and commercial fishing. Here, too, unintended negative consequences and imbalance are the rule, not the exception. Simply put, we’re overfishing. In February 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations noted that their “most recent global assessment of wild fish stocks found that out of the almost 600 major commercial species groups monitored by the Organization, 52 percent are fully exploited while 25 percent are either overexploited (17%), depleted (7%) or recovering from depletion (1%). Twenty percent are moderately exploited, with just three percent ranked as underexploited.” Meanwhile, nontarget species are getting literally caught in the net. For example, in 1990, about 42 million marine mammals and sea birds were caught in drift nets as squid and tuna were being harvested. About 129,000 Olive Ridley turtles have died over the past thirteen years because they suffocate in the nets of fishing boats not using mandatory turtle-excluder devices. Experts know the movement of giant ships and artificial illumination will put the turtles in even deeper trouble in the years ahead. Whales are also nontarget victims of fishing nets. In 2003 the World Wildlife Fund reported that nearly a thousand whales, dolphins, and porpoises drowned daily after becoming entangled in fishing nets and other equipment. Annually, more than 300,000 of these animals may perish because of fishing activities.

Finally, there is human-induced climate change. With this, all of nature is unbalanced, and it’s important to remember, when studying animal behavior, that its effects might be influencing our fellow creatures in unanticipated ways. For example, it’s
been shown that local changes in climate are responsible for an increase in tiger attacks in India’s Sundarban Islands; the tigers have lost 28 percent of their habitat in the last forty years and dwindling prey causes tigers to enter villages looking for food. The migration patterns of Pacific brants, a sea goose, are changing, with warmer Alaskan winters leading an increasing number not to migrate south at all (a potential disaster for them if a harsh winter hits). Also, recent studies have found that polar bears are getting smaller, most likely as a result of pollution and a reduction in sea ice (which means bears must work harder to catch food). While polar bears have become the iconic species for the threat posed by global climate change, biologist William Laurance argues that other less charismatic species, such as lemoroid possums and animals living in the tropics, may actually be more vulnerable.

“When human beings lose their connection to Nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environment or how to rule their world — which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal elemental connection with the phenomenal world.”

— Chögyam Trungpa,
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

On February 1, 2007, a cold, snowy day in Boulder, I went out to my car to scrape the windshield. As I focused on the frozen car, I felt what Rupert Sheldrake calls “the sense of being stared at.” I turned around to see three large mule deer staring at me from about three feet away. The fog of their breath in
the cold almost touched me, and I really might have been able to reach out and touch them physically. They didn’t move for about three minutes, as I stood there telling them how beautiful they were and how lucky I felt to be able to share their land and their presence. Eventually, I turned around to continue scraping, and they remained where they were. I got goose bumps being so close to them. They knew they were safe. After I walked down to my house, I looked back at them and thanked these trusting and generous deer.