In Last Animals at the Zoo, Colin Tudge argues that zoos have become an essential part of modern conservation strategy, and that the only real hope for saving many endangered species is through creative use of zoos in combination with restoration of natural habitats. From the genetics of captive breeding to techniques of behavioral enrichment, Tudge examines all aspects of zoo conservation programs and explains how the precarious existence of so many animals can best be protected.
In Last Animals at the Zoo, Colin Tudge argues that zoos have become an essential part of modern conservation strategy, and that the only real hope for saving many endangered species is through creative use of zoos in combination with restoration of natural habitats. From the genetics of captive breeding to techniques of behavioral enrichment, Tudge examines all aspects of zoo conservation programs and explains how the precarious existence of so many animals can best be protected.
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Overview
In Last Animals at the Zoo, Colin Tudge argues that zoos have become an essential part of modern conservation strategy, and that the only real hope for saving many endangered species is through creative use of zoos in combination with restoration of natural habitats. From the genetics of captive breeding to techniques of behavioral enrichment, Tudge examines all aspects of zoo conservation programs and explains how the precarious existence of so many animals can best be protected.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610912822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 266 |
| File size: | 968 KB |
About the Author
In addition to Last Animals at the Zoo, he has written The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter; So Shall We Reap; The Time Before History; The Impact of the Gene; and coauthor (with Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell) of The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control.
Read an Excerpt
Last Animals at the Zoo
How Mass Extinction can be Stopped
By Colin Tudge
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Colin TudgeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-282-2
CHAPTER 1
WHY CONSERVE ANIMALS?
There may be 30 million different creatures on this Earth; 30 million different species, that is, each kind capable of breeding successfully only with others of its own kind, and not with those who are not. Most of those 30 million live in the tropical rainforests. Most of them are animals. Most of those animals are insects. And most of those insects are beetles – for God, as J. B. S. Haldane allegedly remarked, had 'an inordinate fondness for beetles'.
What use are they, most of them? The figure of 30 million is an estimate, for only 1 million or so have yet been counted. Most of those that have been described are beetles, too (which is why biologists believe that most of those that have not been described are beetles), and only a handful of people in all the world can tell most of them apart. Many, we know, are disappearing by the hour, because the forests in which they live are being cleared away, and they do not live anywhere else. What care I, what care you, what difference does it make to anybody? What difference does it make, come to that, even if more spectacular creatures go by the board? When did you last see a Hyacinthine macaw, that you should regret its passing? What have Sumatran tigers ever done for us?
Zoos justify their existence these days – or at least the serious ones, which are the subject of this book, do – by their contribution to animal conservation. But why should they bother? Why should any of us give a damn?
It may well be true that Sumatran tigers and Hyacinthine macaws seem to contribute very little to our daily lives. There is, though, a strong group of arguments which in a general way we might call 'utilitarian', which say that wild animals and plants can be good for us, and that this is a good reason to hang on to them. What are these arguments?
'WHAT'S GOOD FOR ANIMALS IS GOOD FOR US'
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is affiliated to the United Nations and is in effect the 'offical' organisation and voice of conservation worldwide. IUCN has declared its belief that conservation policies should seek to reconcile the needs of wildlife with those of people.
This approach is far from foolish. There is first of all the inescapable reality: that the human population passed the five-billion mark in the 1980s, and that it will probably peak some time in the mid-21st century at between eight and 12 billion, and remain at this prodigious height (if the world can sustain it) for centuries to come. Michael Soulé, a leading American ecologist who is president of the Society for Conservation Biology, envisages a future world that is like South-east Asia today, 'where every square inch is put to use'. Such a mass of people will not be denied. Unless they see some benefit from the wildlife in their midst, they will destroy it, and no amount of legislation will prevent them. In parts of Africa people are shot on sight for poaching; throughout history, indeed, poaching has commonly been treated as a capital crime. But each person can die only once; and if people are threatened with starvation, then they risk the retribution.
Besides, most of the world's leading conservationists (including Dr Soulé) are humanitarians. Some people have said in their time that they 'prefer animals to people'; but I personally know no one who wants to see people disenfranchised, even in the worthiest of conservation causes. Conservation cannot work but also should not work, unless it also takes account of the needs of people. It is indeed incumbent on us to seek compatibility.
Fortunately, there are many ways in which the needs of people and the needs of animals can be reconciled. The utilitarian arguments make an impressive list. For a start, one of the biggest industries these days is tourism; human beings have become the most mobile of creatures, to add to their list of 'firsts'. For rich countries and poor alike, but particularly for poor countries, tourism has become a prime source of income. Kenya derives a third of its income from tourists. Richard Leakey, director of the Kenya Wildlife Services, has no doubt that the principal reason for going to Kenya is to look at the animals. The country has wonderful beaches, to be sure, but so do a lot of other places. Only the countries of Africa have retained the Pleistocene megafauna – the big mammals – in such abundance. Allow them to die and then, he says, the Kenyan economy would be shot to pieces. Rwanda, too, an even poorer country to the north of Kenya, makes money from its mountain gorillas. Few outsiders would even have heard of the country, and even fewer would go there, were it not for them. Rich countries also 'sell' their wildlife. The people of Queensland gain from the tourists who come to admire the Great Barrier Reef; and indeed it has been suggested that the overall management of the Reef (which includes provision for science and fishing, as well as tourists) is a model for wilderness everywhere.
People want more than photographs and memories. They want trophies too, even if only a seed-case or a shell; and they are prepared to pay for them. This raises many issues, both ethical and practical. The bottom line, though, is that every successful population of creatures produces more offspring than its environment can contain. Some individuals should be culled in the interests of conservation; and if they are not, they will die anyway. In general, then, it makes sense to sell 'products' from the animals that the habitat cannot support. To this end, IUCN suggests that wild habitats can be modified somewhat, to increase the output. Thus it supports schemes in Papua New Guinea to plant extra food trees in the forest, to increase the population of large, colourful butterflies of the kind favoured by tourists. Without such a trade, the IUCN argues, the local people have no option but to cut the forest down, and grow crops. The raising of butterflies gives them a reason to protect the forest. Some African countries, such as Zimbabwe, charge very rich people appropriately enormous sums to shoot their surplus elephants, and other 'big game'; animals that would have to be culled in any case.
It has often been pointed out, too, that animals native to a difficult territory may fare much better than livestock imported from elsewhere. In particular, antelope and zebra thrive in the African savannah, where domestic cattle, even of the tropical zebu kind, often find themselves in desperate straits. There has been many a scheme, then, to cull small antelope for meat, and even to milk the eland, which is the largest antelope of all.
A more general argument along similar lines – one much favoured by Dr Norman Myers, which he applies in particular to the rainforest – is that wild creatures may have all kinds of properties, and contain all kinds of genes, which may not be useful to us now, but which could be useful in the future. We do not know that they will be useful; but that is the point. All we can say is that many wild creatures have already proved useful, and as we have so far identified only a small percentage of what the world contains – and examined precious few of those in detail – we can be sure that there is much more to be found and exploited. Discoveries so far include most of the world's most popular drugs, from aspirin to agents in the Madagascar periwinkle that are effective against leukaemia; and many a gene contained within the wild relatives of food and other crops, which help confer resistance against disease, or drought, or salinity. To be sure, most such examples come from plants, which are the world's most accomplished pharmacologists. But animals are sources of such agents too; including corals from Australia, which are exposed to the sun all day, and produce protective materials which manufacturers of suntan lotions are now extracting and synthesising.
Finally, it is widely argued that biodiversity helps in a general way to conserve the stability of the world's ecology; and hence to maintain a generally benign environment for all of humanity as well as for the rest of life. A typical version of this argument runs as follows. Tropical forests absorb huge quantities of carbon dioxide, and if the trees are removed the CO2 content of the atmosphere increases, which enhances the greenhouse effect; the stability of the tropical forests depends upon their enormous biological diversity; so if this diversity is reduced, the existence of the forests is placed in jeopardy, and we could all suffer from consequent global warming.
These arguments seem powerful. Are they?
IN PRAISE OF EXPLOITATION
Of course, the attempts to exploit animals in order to guarantee their survival raise many problems. The obvious ethical problems do not bother me too much. It is difficult in this world to do anything that is unequivocally good, and if we have to choose between exploitation and obliteration, then the former emerges as the lesser of the two evils. Besides, the animals that are sold as trophies are, in general, those that would have to be culled in any case; and it is ethically no worse to kill and eat an antelope than to kill and eat a domestic sheep. At least, the sheep would not appreciate the difference.
The practical problems are far greater. For example, at the time of writing (early 1991) Richard Leakey is trying to raise an enormous amount of money from the world at large (about US$200 million) to upgrade the facilities that Kenya provides for tourists. At present the visitors threaten to destroy what they have come to see. Cheetahs perhaps suffer the most. Among the big cats they alone prefer to hunt by day and in the open, chasing down their prey in a 200-metre dash. Thus they are the only hunters that are easy to see in action, and people crowd around them to watch them at work. The clamour of minibuses in the cool of the morning and evening forces cheetahs to hunt in the middle of the day, which causes them enormous physiological stress. The circle of buses as they feed attracts hyaenas and lions, which easily drive them from their kill. Richard Leakey wants to put the whole operation on a sounder footing: fewer vehicles, but bigger; out-of-bounds areas; better roads (to avoid ploughing up the bush); more rangers, with better equipment.
Culling wild creatures for meat and milk, too, is far harder than it may seem. Animals intended for a general market should ideally be slaughtered humanely and prepared hygienically; there is a difference between a carcass and a clotted corpse. But if this requirement is taken to its logical conclusions – refrigerated mobile abattoirs, out in the bush – the game becomes prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, if the animals are restrained (ranched) to make them more accessible, then some of their biological advantages are lost. For example, eland are wonderfully efficient producers of milk in arid conditions, provided they are allowed to forage far and wide at night. If they are coralled at night so that they are available for milking in the morning, and so are forced to feed by day, they begin to suffer the same distress as cattle.
To be sure, there are conflicts of approach, even among different shades of utilitarian. African elephants provide a neat illustration. Their numbers have diminished appallingly in recent decades: from an estimated 1.5 million in 1979, to between 500,000 and 750,000 today. To some extent, the decline has been inevitable; and with the best conservational will in the world it may be impossible to avoid further decline, as Africa's human population continues to expand more quickly, in places, than anywhere else on Earth. Culling has also been necessary locally, to avoid the devastation that is known to ensue when a reserve contains more elephants than it can sustain. But to some extent, the decline has been caused by poaching, which is both cruel and random; a slaughter, rather than a rational diminution of population that should be achieved by controlled culling. Poaching occurs because elephants have tusks, made of valuable ivory. Every African country could benefit from more income; every African country with elephants could derive at least some income from ivory; but everyone agrees that poaching is a bad thing (bad for elephants, and bad for the economy) and would like to stamp it out.
So – is it better for governments to sell the ivory that they acquire by legitimate culling, and use the money for further conservational purposes? Or should they refuse to trade in ivory and seek to destroy the world market, and thus take away the incentive to poach? Or is some middle course possible?
Each possibility has its advocates. Dr David Jones, director of London and Whipsnade zoos in England, argues that sale of ivory legitimately obtained is not only sensible, but positively desirable; precisely because such a sale provides local people with a reason to conserve elephants for themselves, and with an income that will help them to guard against poachers. Richard Leakey argues that the only way to suppress ivory poaching is to undermine it: to make it unfashionable to own ivory, just as it is now unfashionable to own a fur from a spotted cat. This is why he supported the decision of the Kenyan government in 1989 to burn US$3 million's worth of ivory; and (in similar vein) to burn a huge pile of rhino horns in 1990. He also argued that Britain's decision to unblock the sale of 700 tonnes of ivory in Hong Kong led directly to an increase in poaching in the following months.
Dr John Beddington, at Imperial College, London, suggests a third strategy; though, he stresses, he does so dispassionately, and not as an advocate. Tusks, he points out, grow throughout the elephant's life. Furthermore, their growth is exponential; that is, the bigger the elephant gets, the faster the tusks grow. Thus, he says, it would pay a businessman to buy futures in ivory. He could borrow money at (say) 15 per cent; buy an elephant; and every year the elephant stayed alive his investment in it would grow faster and faster. This is a nice twist; animals would be exploited for their ivory by keeping them alive. We could envisage reserves where septuagenarian tuskers lived out their declining years, jealously guarded by the borrowed wealth of some far-flung millionaire.
I do not presume to say which of these strategies is right. Ethically, there is not much to choose: all are well intentioned, and the animals whose ivory might be sold are those that would probably be culled anyway, while a touch of Beddington logic could give the enterprise a more benign mien. All that matters, it seems to me, is that whatever is done should work; elephants should be kept in safe numbers; the control of populations should be as untraumatic as possible; and poaching should be eliminated. I am discussing the rival strategies only because they are interesting.
In principle, after all, all practical problems are there to be overcome. In general, these 'utilitarian' arguments must hold. It is necessary in conserving animals to try as far as possible to bring benefit to local people, for otherwise the conservation effort is doomed. Neither can we doubt that such policies can work. For example, the reintroduction of the Arabian oryx to Oman, which I will discuss throughout this book, has generated more income over the past ten years for the Harasis people who are acting as its wardens than the oil industry has done.
Yet there are larger objections to the utilitarian arguments, which lead me to believe that although they may be necessary, and must be acted upon, they are not, by themselves, sufficient.
HOW MUCH WILDLIFE DO WE REALLY NEED?
The first of the larger objections is that the most high-sounding of the utilitarian arguments simply is not true; or is not true enough, at least, to carry the day. Tropical forests (which contain most of the world's biodiversity; at least 90 per cent of all species) do not, in fact, make the greatest contribution to atmospheric chemistry. Unicellular marine algae, floating inconspicuously in the plankton, probably absorb 80 per cent of the CO2 that other creatures produce.
More to the point, the ability of forests to absorb CO2 derives not from their biodiversity, but from their biomass; and although the point is often made, the fact is that the diversity does not confer the stability that makes the mass possible. The diversity may appear to be important; but that is largely an illusion. Thus, it is certainly true that monocultures – areas of vegetation containing only one species, or only one variety of one species – are extremely vulnerable to epidemic or to change or climate; and Third World farmers who cannot afford pesticides are advised to grow many different crops, or to grow 'varieties' (or, more accurately, 'landraces') of crops that are extremely variable genetically. However, a forest would probably be reasonably safe from extermination by any particular kind of pest if it contained only a few dozen clones of a few dozen species. It would not need the thousands of tree species found in natural tropical forests worldwide, and still less would it need the millions of insects that accompany them. It is true, of course, that there are many interdependencies in natural tropical forest, so that if one species disappears then many others go by the board as well. But this shows only that natural forest is intricate and fragile. It does not demonstrate that total biomass depends upon diversity; for the remaining species, though fewer in number, grow to fill the gaps left by the absentees. In short, if we wanted tropical forest simply to mop up CO2 and prevent soil erosion, then we might just as well plant a reasonably mixed plantation of commercial trees – a few dozen clones of rubber, eucalyptus, and so on. This would give us the biomass we required, with a cash return as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Last Animals at the Zoo by Colin Tudge. Copyright © 1991 Colin Tudge. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction
Chapter 1. Why Conserve Animals?
Chapter 2. The Scope of the Problem
Chapter 3. First Get Your Animals to Breed
Chapter 4. The Theory of Conservation Breeding
Chapter 5. Projects in Progress
Chapter 6. The Frozen Zoo?
Chapter 7. The Whole Animal: Behaviour Conserved
Chapter 8. The Future
Notes: Author's Note
Index