When is it ethical to kill one thing to save another? Lethal intervention is a common practice in the field of wildlife management, especially when the survival of a species hangs in the balance

For as long as we’ve existed, human beings have employed killing as one of our primary responses to adversity. We seem to believe at some deep level that if we have a problem, killing the manifestation of that problem might just make it go away. This is the logic of political assassinations, revenge plots, and the endings of most Hollywood blockbusters. But when we actually apply this logic to the more-than-human world, what does it mean for the species and ecosystems we’re impacting? And what does it mean for us?

In this episode, we're facing this essential moral dilemma as we learn a way to navigate the tension between collective and individual well-being.

— — —

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You are listening to Season Six of

Future Ecologies.

Hey, Mendel.

Hey, Adam.

[Sigh]

Uh... what's on your mind?

I'm finding I'm having to, like, take deep

breaths a lot these days, just in general.

Yeah, these are those days.

Unfortunately, I have a bit of a downer of an

episode for us today.

What perfect timing.

Right? But I promise you, there is some light

at the end of this dark tunnel I'm about to lead you into.

Trust me.

Well, I guess I have to take your word for it.

What do you got?

So, today's show is really about life and death.

We are gonna explore one of our deepest moral dilemmas as human

beings living through an extinction crisis.

Woo hoo! One of our deepest moral dilemmas. And

that would be?

That would be, is it okay to kill one thing in

order to save another? Here, let me give you an example.

Okay, shoot ...no, wait! Don't shoot!

Uh... where are we headed?

Mendel, if you were to guess what the southern

most peace of Canada is. Where would you guess?

Somewhere in Ontario?

Yes, it's part of Point Pelee National Park in Ontario. And

specifically, we're on a boat going to this tiny, 46 acre

forested island in the middle of Lake Erie, which goes by the

name of Middle Island.

And it is a remnant of the Carolinian ecosystem,

which is an ecosystem that has largely been wiped out of

Ontario because of human activity. There's very little of

it left.

Long time listeners might recognize Sarah

Cox.

Yes, I was on the show, I think maybe six years

ago.

Yeah, that was in season two, our episode on

lichen and mountain caribou, which was also a depressing one.

Purely coincidental Mendel. And just to

remind folks, Sarah is an author and a journalist with the

excellent investigative environmental news and

photography outlet, The Narwhal. And our story today is partly

inspired by a book she wrote.

My most recent book is called Signs of Life — Field

Notes From the Front Lines of Extinction.

Bringing us back to Middle Island, which, as

Sarah said, is one of the last Canadian outposts of the

Carolinian ecosystem.

Caro.... like North and South Carolina?

Yeah, actually. Carolinian forest is an

ecosystem and a relatively common one across the eastern

United States, but it reaches its northernmost extent in the

southern most part of Canada, and that part also happens to be

the most densely populated part of the entire country.

Yeah. So in southern Ontario, through development,

through agriculture, through industry, we have eliminated,

like, more than 90% and 95% in some places of this ecosystem,

with beautiful hardwood trees like sassafras.

Sassafras! Sassafras, sassafras... great

name.

Sassafras, yes, and a bunch of other really cool

plants that are really rare in Canada, like the Blue Ash or the

Clustered Sedge, the Common Hop Tree — not so common in Canada,

it turns out — the Red Mulberry, the Wild Hyacinth and the

Kentucky Coffee Tree.

Kentucky coffee tree...?

Yes, it does not produce coffee.

Oh.

It is a tree. It is found in Kentucky, and it's

actually in the legume family.

Huh... bean tree

Yeah, pretty cool tree. Also a schedule one

threatened species in Canada.

Okay, so we've got a bunch of species at risk

in an endangered ecosystem in Canada

On a tiny island in a national park. Yes.

Right. Okay, so right, where they belong — under

protection.

Well, they're protected, true. At least from

people.

So what's the problem? What's threatening all

the rare plants of Middle Island, if not people?

Well, the rare plants of Middle Island are

being threatened... how can I put this politely? They're being

threatened by bird [splat].

So there's so many layers of complexity to this,

but basically, Parks Canada, the problem that they ran into after

they acquired Middle Island was that cormorants had taken over

the island. Cormorants are this beautiful sea bird out on the

ocean or the Great Lakes. They're kind of iconic of this

black bird with its wings outspread to dry.

You're familiar with cormorants, right?

Yeah, I've been pooped on by cormorants, in

fact. Have I never told you that story?

I am pretty sure you have not.

I spent a summer working at the False Creek Yacht

Club under the Granville Street Bridge, writing anchor permits

and washing the boardwalk — because every morning under the

bridge, they'd be covered in cormorant droppings. And every

time I had to cross under that particular section, I'd have to

put my hood up on my rubber rain jacket, because they would just

be spraying poop... like actively, all day. It was crazy.

It's like, absurd how much those birds poop. And hearing it hit

the water like prtprtptptptpt... So yeah, they're poop machines

for real. You

You know, it's funny, Mendel, not so long ago,

cormorants almost went extinct.

Cormorants themselves are a conservation success story

because they were almost wiped out due to DDT, which thinned

their eggs and made it hard for them to reproduce.

cormorants moved back in to Lake Erie, and they

started to nest on Middle Island, and there were so many

of them there that they were destroying the trees and the

Carolinian ecosystem on the island. Never mind that humans

had already destroyed most of this same ecosystem in southern

Ontario, the cormorants, with their guano and just their sheer

numbers, were putting this ecosystem at risk on the island,

and so Parks Canada decided that the only option to save Kentucky

Coffee Trees and the other species at risk of extinction on

the island was to kill the cormorants.

Wait, what?

Parks Canada has been killing cormorants

periodically on Middle Island since 2008. And this activity

has predictably put them in the crosshairs of animal rights

activists.

Okay, but hold on. I feel like there's a

there's a contradiction here. The cormorants were almost

extinct, and we saved them, and now we're killing them to save

some plants.

I mean, some very special plants, Mendel and the

species that depend on them.

Okay... but doesn't this seem, like, a

little extreme? Like they poop a lot, but how much harm can they

really be doing?

Well, consider this. You've got 1000s and 1000s

of these big black water birds nesting and hanging out in trees

across this little island, eating fish and defecating

constantly, which you're familiar with.

Unfortunately.

And all of that guano is coating the leaves of

the trees, coating the ground and essentially changing the

soil chemistry to the point that it can kill these plants.

Gross.

Yeah. And Sarah got to see and smell all of this

for herself when she visited.

Definitely there was a strong smell of guano. It

actually looked pretty denuded. Quite honestly, I think the

cormorants had done a number on the forest.

And what number is that, you might ask, Mendel?

Number two, of course. Anyhow, Sarah was there because a couple

of animal rights organizations, the Animal Alliance of Canada

and Born Free USA, had taken Parks Canada to court, and while

they weren't able to stop the cull, they did win the right to

observe it. And Sarah went along for the ride.

Exactly.

How did that go?

Well, the observers were pretty limited in

what they could actually... observe. Parks Canada had strict

limits on where their boat could be while the sharpshooters did

their work.

We heard the guns. We saw the birds, not just

cormorants, but herons and pelicans and other birds being

really disturbed by the gunshots.

There's pelicans here too?

There's lots of bird life and wildlife using

this area. I mean, remember, it's one of the last remnants of

this kind of ecosystem left anywhere in Canada.

Wow. But just to pick up on what you said a

second ago, these observers couldn't actually watch the

cormorant cull directly?

At least not while Sarah was there, and we'll get

into this a bit later, but this tracks with Sarah's overall

experience of wildlife culls in Canada. They're not easy to

observe, right? They're done with relatively limited

visibility to the public. And you know that can breed

distrust.

Right, unsurprisingly.

And the reality of many of these species at risk

here in Canada is that some of them are more common south of

the border. Some folks might argue that they don't actually

need this level of protection up here because they have habitat

left in the States.

On the other hand, you might wonder how safe

any species is south of the border right now.

Yeah, from a scientific point of view, there

is a really good reason why we choose to protect marginal

populations like this.

When you think about climate change and how species

are going to have to shift north and up to try to adapt, it

becomes far more important to protect the northern extent of

the species and ecosystems that are found in southern Canada.

According to Parks Canada, the cull is achieving

the desired effect. There are published reports and peer

reviewed studies out there to support what they're doing. My

understanding is actually that if they were to stop culling the

cormorants, some of the endangered species on Middle

Island would almost certainly be extirpated, as they have been

elsewhere in the region

Oof. So there's your moral dilemma. We can save

these rare plants, or we can let these birds live, but as long as

the habitat itself is threatened by our kind of our bigger

systems, we can't have both.

Exactly.

The efforts that we are going to try to protect

those trees and other species on the island, while we're just

with abandon destroying them in other areas was really food for

thought.

And this isn't just some isolated case. You can

see this same dynamic playing out with species after

endangered species across Canada.

If you just were to step back and look at all of

these efforts and the amount of money that it costs, I was

really thinking, is this the best way to go about things? And

of course, you know the answer is no.

For as long as we have been a species, human

beings have employed killing as one of our primary responses to

adversity.

You gotta ask yourself a question. Do I feel

lucky? Well, do ya, punk?!

We seem to believe at some deep level that, if we

have a problem, killing the manifestation of that problem

might just make it go away.

Lt. Marion "Cobra" Cobretti: You're a disease, and I'm the cure.

This is the logic of political assassinations, of

revenge plots and the endings of most Hollywood blockbusters.

Hasta la vista, baby. [Gunshot]

But when we actually apply this logic to the

more than human world, what does it mean for the species and the

ecosystems that we're impacting? And what does it mean for us?

From Future Ecologies, this is Humane Being,

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

Well, since we have Sarah Cox back in the

house, does she have any updates on the mountain caribou

situation?

Nothing particularly encouraging.

The situation hasn't changed. We're not hearing about

recovery stories. The BC government is still continuing

to sanction clear cut logging and old growth caribou critical

habitat in the Kootenays. We're witnessing the decline of

various herds. We are shooting wolves to try to save caribou

herds at the very last minute, while we are continuing to

destroy their habitat.

I'm already seeing a parallel here between

the situation with the wolves and the cormorants.

Yeah. So that episode about the wolves and the

caribou was about many things

Famously

But it was mostly about extinction. Yeah,

So, many people think of Canada as this natural

Wonderland. You know, we're known for our mountains and our

prairies and our old growth forests, but the fact is that

Canada has a growing extinction crisis.

In her reporting, Sarah points out that we've

already lost over 100 species in Canada, plus about 5000 wild

species in Canada are at some risk of extinction, and almost

900 of those are critically imperiled, meaning they could

soon be lost.

Things are not trending in the right direction

in Canada, shall we say, despite this kind of growing wildlife

slash extinction crisis, we are not managing to turn things

around.

Well, we are off to a rosy start.

Oh, the story about killing cormorants because

they're defecating too much on plants was definitely the most

light hearted thing I have on offer today. It is all downhill

from here.

I'm afraid to ask, but what could be more

downhill from the state of the mountain caribou?

Well, if we're looking at Canada, then it would

be the state of the northern spotted owl. Are you familiar

with spotted owls Mendel?

Not really. I've never seen one. Also never been

pooped on by one, either.

Don't worry, Sarah has got you covered.

The spotted owl is about the size of a football. It

has chocolate brown coloring with creamy white spots. It has

brown eyes, which is very distinct from many owl species.

And this spotted owl has evolved in tandem with old growth

forests in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. It

nests in cavities in old growth trees. Younger trees just don't

provide those nesting opportunities. Its main sources

of prey are bushy tailed wood rats and flying squirrels, which

are also found in old growth forests. And unlike other

species, and other owl species, for example, like the barred

owl, the spotted owl, just cannot exist outside of these

old growth forests.

And as we are all well aware, most of the old

growth forests in the Northwest have been logged. So spotted

owls are now so rare that neither you, nor I, nor our

listeners are likely to see one, regardless of how many hours we

log in the woods. That pun, for once, was not intended.

And you would think that this would engender some

type of action to protect the spotted owl, and in the States,

it did.

To make a very long story short, through the US

Endangered Species Act and the Northwest Forest Plan, the

spotted owl eventually received significant protections... South

of the border,

1000s and 1000s of hectares of forest lands were

set aside, and today, there's about 4000 Northern Spotted owls

left in the States, but what happened in Canada was...

basically nothing. Nothing happened,

just like the Carolinian forest, the spotted

owl only has a small portion of its northernmost range in

Canada, in the forests of southwestern BC. And now, it's

basically gone.

And no politician is coming out and seeing that

publicly — we have lost the spotted owl from Canada's wild.

Well, maybe it's an obvious question, but like,

how did we get here?

Ah, it is a long sad story that resembles other

various long and sad stories in the sort of environmental

history of this country. You and I both know that the society and

economy that we grew up in did not historically value

biodiversity. I think it's fair to say.

Yeah, I'd call that an understatement

On an individual level, however, many of us do

actually care a lot about the fate of all of the other

incredible species that we get to live with. And for some of us

in this group of people who care, that is just because, at a

philosophical or a spiritual level, we believe that all life

forms are inherently valuable and that it's morally wrong to

drive some of them to extinction. And you know,

there's also a more utilitarian argument, right? If we lose

biodiversity, we risk destabilizing the biosphere, and

selfishly, we want there to be a biosphere so we can live.

Yes.

Are you familiar with the rivet popper

hypothesis, Mendel?

I am not.

So the rivet popper hypothesis is this famous

thought experiment proposed by the biologist Paul Ehrlich in

the 1980s.

Okay?

And it goes something like this, imagine

that an ecosystem is an airplane, and it's flying along,

and all of the species in that ecosystem are the rivets holding

it together. If you lose a few rivets, says Ehrlich, then the

wings probably won't fall off the plane right away. But if you

keep removing rivets one by one, who can say exactly when you've

removed one too many?

Hmm, I don't appreciate being a kind of

captive passenger in this grand experiment, but that's where we

find ourselves.

That is where we find ourselves. And because

Sarah wrote this book about species at risk, I asked her if

she resonated more with the idea that species have intrinsic

value, or that species are rivets in an airplane that we

would like to keep flying.

I think I'm both, actually, I'm an airplane and

rivets analogy person. And I also believe that every species

has an intrinsic value to exist, and in fact, that is recognized

in the preamble to Canada's Species at Risk Act.

Canada's Species at Risk Act, otherwise known as

SARA. The preamble reads, 'wildlife in all its forms, has

value in and of itself'.

Okay, cool, right. Like our economy may not

value the spotted owl, but at least we have a law that says it

should be protected.

Yes, a federal law. BC has never passed any

endangered species legislation of its own, and the Federal

Species at Risk Act is for a variety of reasons, some of

which we discussed the last time Sarah Cox was on the show, much

weaker than its US counterpart.

I think it's time you reminded me.

Okay, I don't want to go too deep here, but

basically, there are some issues with the way that SARA was

designed. For example, it allows political influence to enter

into key decisions in listing and protecting at risk species.

And there are also some issues with how it's implemented. Like,

a recent review noted that the government regularly overshoots

its own deadlines for designating critical habitat and

publishing recovery strategies, often by years, sometimes by

decades. But the biggest issue is that SARA only applies to

federal land, which makes up about 4% of Canada and only

about 1% of BC. So when a province like Ontario is gutting

its own species at risk legislation, or when a province

like BC has never adopted its own species at risk legislation,

SARA doesn't apply. Not at least until the situation gets very,

very bad.

So we have this act. It looks pretty good on paper.

It gives the federal government the option of stepping in if a

province isn't doing something to protect a species that we

know is at risk of extinction, and we know why it is at risk of

extinction. But the problem is the federal government doesn't

do that. It has only done that for two species in the history

of the act. So in more than 20 years, it hasn't done that for

the spotted owl.

Why not? Like, the point of the law is exactly

that to have the Feds step in when a province isn't doing

enough to protect a listed species, right? Like, why

haven't they?

It's complicated, and the truth is we don't really

know. I'm sure there's a lot of back and forth behind the

scenes, but it's just not a very transparent process. What we do

know often comes from lawsuits. For example, in 2020 Ecojustice,

an environmental law charity acting on behalf of the

Wilderness Committee, put pressure on the feds to enact an

emergency order, basically asking them to enforce SARA when

the province wouldn't, and stop the deforestation of spotted owl

habitat by taking over the logging permit process in BC.

And under the threat of losing that provincial privilege, BC

finally took some action. They put a logging moratorium on two

valleys, which had, at the time, the very last three wild born

spotted owls in Canada.

And then a couple more years go by, and even those

three owls are gone. And I actually went to the valley

called the Spuzzum Valley, and at that time, the logging was

coming closer and closer to the boundary of the wildlife habitat

area where the last breeding pair had hatched three chicks

over a couple of years, and those chicks were captured and

taken to the conservation breeding center.

A breeding center?

Yes, Indeed.

So as the population declined about 15 years ago, the

BC government decided to try to breed owls in captivity and then

release them back into the wild to bolster populations that were

sharply in decline. But spotted owls are not falcons or condors,

and they do not like to breed in captivity. So it has been an

uphill slog with biologists and other people doing their utmost

to try to hatch spotted owls in captivity. Here we are, like 15

years later, and they have just not been able to get the numbers

up enough to be able to release them back into the wild.

You might have heard of this breeding center

recently, actually. They did a Valentine's Day fundraiser where

they offered that if you donate $5 they'll name a rat after your

ex and then feed it to an owl.

How romantic.

Yeah, I couldn't help but ask Sarah if she took

them up on it.

I did not.

But she did visit the center, and she got to see

how they tried to breed and raise the owls. You'll have to

read her book for the details, but suffice it to say, she came

back with a sobering perspective.

The experiment is not going well thus far. But it does

mean that we can still hold out a little hope of reintroduction,

and it means that politicians don't have to get up there and

say the spotted owl has been extirpated from Canada on my

watch. However, as BC has poured millions of dollars into the

conservation breeding center, it has also continued to sanction

clear cut logging in spotted owl habitat, and that includes

logging in designated wildlife habitat areas that the same

government set aside for Spotted Owl recovery.

Well, this sucks, but the whole situation

seems so similar to what's happening with the mountain

caribou, right? We're continuing to destroy their habitat, while

on the other side, we spend lots of money on last ditch efforts

like captive breeding programs and killing wolves, in that

case.

Exactly and just like how caribou have wolves,

spotted owls have their own antagonist.

One of the problems the spotted owl faces right now

is barred owls. And so barred owls traditionally, historically

were found on the eastern side of the continent, but over

decades, they kind of hopscotch their way across the continent

of their own accord, and now they're well installed in the

Pacific Northwest.

I actually happen to have a nesting pair of barred

owls in my own backyard. Listen... that's them calling.

Mmm.

They're haunting and beautiful, and I love having

them there. And Mendel, barred owls look quite a bit like

spotted owls, to the point that Sarah told me that they're often

mistaken for them. But these owls are not what they seem.

There are some key differences.

Barred owls, unlike spotted owls, are a generalist

species. They eat like so many different things, including

earthworms. They will nest in all kinds of places. They are

happy in suburbia. They're happy on the edge of a clear cut.

They'll take over a crow's nest. They're very adaptable, and they

have encroached on spotted owl territory and are competing with

it for food in the Pacific Northwest. Then we face a

dilemma if we really do want spotted owls back, either in the

States or in BC, we need to do something about the barred owls.

We need to... do something... about barred owls.

Which means we're killing them.

News Announcer 1: US Fish and Wildlife has a plan to save a

species of bird, but it would come at the cost of killing

barred owls. Almost half a million barred owls would be

killed to protect the spotted owl.

News Announcer 2: Saving one species of bird by killing

another. It seems extreme, but experts say the spotted owl, it

is in a dire situation, and thinning out the population of a

main competitor may be the only way it survives.

Oh yes. So in BC, we've been shooting and

relocating barred owls. Biologists are going out and

identifying areas, for example, in the valleys where there's

logging moratorium, where spotted owls might be

reintroduced and recover. And they see a barred owl, it is

either being shot or relocated.

Okay, so we're not killing them everywhere.

We're just focusing on spotted owl habitat.

Yes, the breeding pair in my backyard is not

currently at risk.

But like the big question is, does it work? Does

removing barred owls actually help the spotted owls?

Yeah, so barred owl culls have been implemented

at scale in the United States. And what we know is thanks to

some scientific work done on exactly that question.

They would take spotted owl territory, they

would divide it in half. They would cull barred owls in one

half, and they would leave them in the other half. And where

they didn't cull the barred owls, the spotted owl population

declined by about 12%.

In other words, it does help, even though it's

still pretty controversial.

BC, of course, has gone about it far less

scientifically and with far less transparency in terms of how and

when and why they're eliminating barred owls.

So while barred owl culls have been shown to

benefit spotted owls in the United States right now in BC,

in the absence of a systemic approach, in the absence of

robust habitat protections, you could argue that it's not much

more than a way for the province to shield itself from any actual

federal enforcement.

It is part of the BC government strategy, and

something they have told the federal government they will do

as an illustration of how hard they are working to try to save

and recover spotted owl populations.

Okay, just stepping back a sec, you've

introduced us to the situation in Canada where we're destroying

habitat for endangered species on one hand and then

compensating for that in part by killing another species.

Yes, and it's not just here in Canada. All kinds

of species, both native and introduced, are being killed as

part of conservation efforts around the world, cats, rats,

goats, stoats, squirrels, owls, wolves, beavers, bison, deer. It

seems like everywhere you look, we are killing something in the

name of conservation.

To say nothing of plants.

Oh, my God. Mendel, like, if we're talking

about killing plants, I would be wanted for mass murder in the

plant kingdom. Fortunately, Canada has no extradition policy

there.

Well, you're lucky... for now. But you know,

I hate to say it, but like the fact that we kill things in an

attempt to solve our problems... this is not going to be news for

most of our listeners. Adam, are you suggesting that there is a

way out of this cycle of violence?

I mean, a way out? Probably not. But a way through?

Possibly, possibly. I did tell you there was going to be light

at the end of the tunnel. Let's return for a moment to the rivet

popper hypothesis.

Uh... final boarding call for Paul Erhlich's

airplane.

God, I would not step on board that aiplane.

You don't have a choice.

That is true. We are all on the airplane

together. Notice how the value of the species in that analogy

is reduced basically just to a small part of a larger whole.

That is the thing that we actually care about, right? The

ecosystem, the airplane.

I mean... that's the thing that feels icky about

this analogy. Because these rivets are all fungible, in a

sense, they're interchangeable, replaceable components. It

allows us to justify trading one for another. We can we can kill

cormorants or wolves or owls because it helps the airplane

stay in the air. It keeps the ecosystem whole.

It's very utilitarian, and you know,

that's one way of looking at the world. But I want to quote

another environmental philosopher at you, and that is

Timothy Morton. In their book Being Ecological, which helped

inspire this episode, they write that quote, 'the whole is always

less than the sum of its parts.'

...What is that supposed to mean?

We'll find out together — after the break.

Okay, mid-roll, lightning round. Future

Ecologies! Independent! Listener supported!

Patreon.com/futureecologies! Love you!

Welcome back. I'm Mendel

And I'm Adam.

And this is Future Ecologies, where today we

are discussing our distressing propensity as a species to try

to kill our way out of our problems, even in conservation.

And Adam has... something. I actually don't know. What do you

have?

I have another Sara to introduce you to.

Okay, so this episode has become a tale of

three Sara's.

It has.

We've got Sarah Cox, we've got SARA, the Species

at Risk Act in Canada, and now...?

And now we have Dr. Sara Dubois.

And I'm an adjunct professor at the University of

British Columbia in the applied biology department. My day job,

though, is as Chief Scientific Officer with the BC SPCA.

I spoke to Sarah because she's at the forefront

in BC of a movement sometimes known as compassionate

conservation.

And for those who don't know, the SPCA is...?

Short for the Society for the Prevention of

Cruelty to Animals. And there are versions of it all around

the world.

It is a protection agency. Sometimes it's the

police for animals, sometimes it is a sheltering agency. Overall,

we're there to advocate for those who can't speak for

themselves.

In British Columbia, the BC SPCA is a

charity that has been charged by the province with enforcing

animal cruelty laws.

Huh... okay, interesting. It runs animal

shelters, and it also enforces the law.

Yes, it is a donor-funded law enforcement

agency, among other things,

That's wild. So what's Sara's story?

Well, she started on this path pretty early. She

remembers telling her parents that she was going to grow up

and save wildlife.

Classic.

But when I got into university, I was told I

couldn't care about individual animals and care about the

environment and conservation. I had to pick a lane. I could go

towards veterinary medicine and take care of individual animals,

or I could go into conservation biology, marine biology and take

care of ecosystems, but there wasn't a career for me to do

both.

And this duality that Sara encountered is

reflective of the polarization in general between animal rights

groups and ecologists, biologists. we tend to fall into

camps that either care about individuals or collectives, but

not both. And there's a moment that underlines this even

earlier in our education, I would wager it's a universal

part of the high school experience.

So we learn about animals by cutting them open and

in studying biology, I don't know about you, but in grade

eight, we dissected sheep eyeballs and frogs.

And apparently in university, she actually had to

dissect a cat.

Oh... I would not be capable.

You are not alone.

I think that that's really where people's kind of

mind and body disassociate in order to do the hard work and be

okay with killing animals or opening them up, dissecting

them. Answering big problems can be messy, and sometimes we just

kind of compartmentalize that.

And that can work for some of us, but this kind of

rationalization just doesn't sit right with lots of people.

I have so many students who come to me and say,

like, I want to work in biology, but I just can't dissect

animals, or I just can't imagine I have to go into the field and

kill animals as part of my job. And yet, these are people who

would make incredible contributions to our field, who

are creative thinkers, who are critical thinkers, who could

make such a difference, but they're turned off by the fact

that they have to choose which lane they have to go through.

I get that. We've talked before about

botanists who specifically got into working with plants because

they just couldn't stomach killing animals.

That's right. It is undeniable that the field of

biology can, at times, be a killing field.

So now, okay, we're trying to make amends for

changes that we made to the landscape over many, many

generations. So how do we bring back species that should have

been here? And in the meantime, other animals have moved in, and

now we need to remove them, and that's a very difficult decision

in order to restore landscapes back to what they evolved to be.

And you have to make trade-offs. Sometimes it comes with a lot of

emotion, and sometimes it comes with very little emotion, just

decisions are made on paper, and there's no regard for what

actually happens on the ground, and that affects not only the

non- human animals that are being removed and killed, but

also the people that are doing it.

Killing an animal for any reason is an emotionally

charged act, so emotionally charged, in fact, that we often

distance ourselves from it with language.

You can use softening words like euthanasia,

but some people just disguise it in things like harvest or

removal or cull eradication. So all of these terminologies mean

something different, but yet we put them all in this kind of

mixed bucket of euthanasia to make it sound better. And when

you think of what euthanasia means in human terms, or

releasing someone from a life of suffering, we don't use the term

in the same way for non human animals that we kill in

conservation.

Sure. I mean when you when you get down to

it, though, these are all just different words for the same

thing — killing. But like, there's more than one way to...

skin a cat.

Oh...

Sorry. What I mean is that, like, call it what

you will, but in practice, it could represent a whole spectrum

of behavior, from mercy to sadism. So what about the

language to describe how we kill?

Well, that brings us to one word with several

meanings. Allow me to introduce the curious concept of what is

and isn't humane.

I love talking about the definition of humane.

I think that it is really broken into kind of three definitions.

We have a scientific definition. We can measure how animals

suffer, we can measure distress, we can measure intensity, we can

actually scientifically measure how that experience is for an

animal, physically and psychologically. So that, to me,

is fundamental. We also have a societal definition of humane.

So this is where people think that something is acceptable

culturally. And then there's also a lens of what is legally

humane. So what is the law say would be cruelty act, for

example.

Yeah, it's funny to me though, that like in some

scientific contexts, there's a lot of hesitation to acknowledge

that animals have feelings, that they might have consciousness,

that they have complex behavior, because we're so worried about

anthropomorphizing them, and yet, you know, here we are

acknowledging that it is important that they don't

suffer.

Because I think there is a recognition that

animals feel. We are animals. We forget that sometimes. And yet,

when we have studied the lives of non human animals, we've

started to recognize, wow, they do feel pain. There's sentience

there, there's memory, there's joy, there's pleasure, there's

depression. We see it in our relations with our companion

animals, but we often don't extend it to every life form.

For example, if we label an animal a pet, then of

course, we have to protect it from harm. It's like a member of

the family, right? If we label it native or even endangered,

then in most cases, it will have some kind of recognized right to

live. But if we label an animal a pest or an exotic or an

invasive, then suddenly those protections tend to disappear.

Yes, once we give an animal a label, it justifies

to certain people that they can do bad things to it.

And the thing about labels, Mendel, is that

they're sticky. If we give a species a label like pest, it

can give people free license to indulge their cruelty. On the

other hand, a label like exotic can lead to some real conflict

and confusion within a community.

A lot of people don't know sometimes that a

species that is here actually was never intended to be here.

Hey, this animal's been here for as long as I've been here. Why

are we removing it now?

Like with the barred owl?

Exactly. Mendel, I kid you not. When I sat down to

interview Sara, she had a big barred owl on her t-shirt.

Hah! No way.

I do have an affinity for owls. And actually,

a part of my PhD research was asking people to decide, Is

there a real reason for like, causing one animal harm to save

another? And I was surprised by the results. I asked the general

public, and I assumed the general public would say, No,

you shouldn't be causing harm for spotted owls and killing

barred owls for their future, because it was so uncertain. And

then I asked biologists, and I thought biologists would be

absolutely, let's remove all the barred owls. This is important.

Well, what were the results? What did people

say?

As expected, the public was consistently opposed

to lethal interventions, which will come as no surprise to

anyone who has read comments on any news article or YouTube

video about wildlife culls, at least as long as the animal

species in question isn't considered a pest. But the

response from biologists and other professionals was

surprisingly mixed.

I mean, biologists are people too, I

guess.

Yes, biologists are people too, Mendel... and

we're the folks that are often charged with overseeing culls

for conservation. And I think that one of the reasons that we

might be divided about whether or not we should do these things

is that most of us have seen lethal approaches fail.

I've always been fascinated by this, this

conflict of, when is it justified to kill animals? And

that's really where, I think our training as biologists have told

us if there's an end goal that is going to increase

biodiversity and achieve the conservation outcomes that you

have set out, then that's gonna be the best choice. But at the

end of the day, we actually don't always achieve our

conservation goals. They fail many times. And in the meantime,

we've killed a lot of animals to get there. And for what purpose

we have to ask ourselves, was this really justifyed?

Wait, how often do these things just fail

outright?

Um... it happens. I should mention that the best

record that we have on the overall success rate of lethal

Hmm. Islands, of course.

interventions in conservation is a website called the Database of

Island Invasive Species Eradications.

We punch above our weight. Islands are the classic

case study for stuff like this. Anyhow, a recent review

published of over 1500 eradication attempts on over

1000 islands concluded that there was an 88% success rate,

which I would say is pretty good, actually.

88% is good if you're taking a test! But like,

there's 12% of these things where a bunch of animals died

effectively for nothing.

That's right, these projects can fail and

stall out for all sorts of reasons. And because of all that

uncertainty, Sara hears from people concerned about projects

like these all the time. And those folks ask her...

Can't you stop these projects? They're

inhumane, they're cruel. There's no sense to them. They're not

actually meeting the objectives, whether it's the wolf cull,

whether it's the owl cull, whether it's deer culls, they're

not actually achieving their goals. And in the meantime,

hundreds of 1000s of animals are being killed. So why can't you

stop that?

And all of this controversy and vitriol caused

Sara to stop and ask,

Are there criteria that are justifiable from a very

objective lens?

And this is where the International Consensus

Principles for Ethical Wildlife Control began.

The principles came from conversations over many

years of meeting colleagues at conferences who had the same

moral dilemmas as I was having in my work. They were working

with other species across the world, encountering government

decisions that led to large scale killing of these animals,

and it was being condoned and funded by taxpayers. And

sometimes these would fail. Most oftentimes they would fail

,these programs. And these professionals in the field were

just like, you know, why are we continuing to do this? We're not

learning from our mistakes.

Oh my god, you said there was gonna be light at

the end of the tunnel. You didn't say it was gonna be a

list.

Who doesn't love a list? I mean, folks know what

they signed up for.

Okay, hit me.

Okay. There are seven principles, and I

personally like them best phrased as questions. Let's

start with

Principle one

So the first question that we should be

asking ourselves when we're looking at these dilemmas is,

can the problem be mitigated by changing human behavior? Can we

do something that our own actions can change the situation

before we have to take an intervention?

Well, that seems like the reasonable place to

start.

Yes. Principle one asks, can we be the change that

we wish to see in the world before we start killing things?

Principle two

Are the harms serious enough to warrant

wildlife control? So what's happening? Is it just that

raccoons are getting into your garbage, or is it that raccoons

are eating sea birds across an island and removing entire

populations?

Raccoons eating garbage? That's an ecosystem

service!

At the very least, it probably doesn't merit the

death sentence, even if the raccoons do always look guilty,

They're the world's cutest convicts. But

like I imagine, this is where you start to get friction

between your hardliners, right, like the people for whom no harm

justifies killing, and the others who would say it's

justified if we have an ecosystem or a species to save.

Yes, and then it becomes a question of how much

harm is too much harm? What is the threshold that we're

setting? How do we determine that? These are really hard

questions, and you know the answers are probably going to

depend a lot on science and also a little bit on cultural

beliefs. This is a principle that requires democratic

engagement to determine

Principle three

Is the desired outcome clear and achievable,

and will it be monitored? So are we killing for the sake of

killing and waiting to see what happens, or is there a clear

plan, and how are we gonna monitor it's actually working

and measure it over time?

This is it for me, right? Like, if we're

avoiding killing for killing sake, then we should at least be

demonstrating that there is a reasonable chance of success,

that we can even define what that success looks like.

Exactly. Plus, do we have a plan to assess whether

what we did worked or not? In other words...

How do we know that we've actually achieved what we

wanted to or did we just kill a whole lot of animals for

nothing?

Principle four

The fourth question is, does the proposed method

carry the least animal welfare cost to the fewest animals? And

this wording is very intentional, because we know

there will be an animal welfare cost to an animal dying, even if

the death is humane, scientifically. Animals have an

interest in living, and so we want to ensure that there is the

fewest animals that are removed as possible, and it's done in

the best method that we have available,

I see. So once we decide to take action and

that our actions have a realistic chance of success,

that's when we look at our methods, and the work is

basically to practice harm reduction.

Yeah, methods are a question of both efficacy and

ethics.

Principle five

The fifth question is, have community values been

considered alongside scientific, technical and practical

information? So we can try to predict what's going to happen

and once these animals are removed, we can try to ensure

the best methods possible are in hand. But at the end of the day,

if we're doing this in a community that's completely

opposed, it's not going to last. We've had sabotages of projects,

trespassing, a lot of pushback on different conservation

initiatives, and rightly so in some cases where decisions have

been made without really consideration for the animals or

the long term impacts. So having people buy in this is your

social license that you need to proceed with these types of

projects.

Yeah, I think this is probably an important

moment to remind ourselves that public pushback can shut things

down.

Oh, totally. I mean concerns about animal

rights or welfare, eye popping taxpayer expenses, we have seen

public outcry stop the culling of donkeys in Death Valley, and,

you know, more recently, postponing a cull of fallow deer

on Sidney island in my backyard. This principle is tough, because

public engagement is no guarantee of success, but if you

ignore it, you're definitely going to fail.

The sixth question is the control action part of a

Principle six

systematic long term management program? Is this a one and done?

We're going to go shoot a bunch of barred owls? Or is there a

long term plan that also incorporates habitat restoration

for spotted owls?

Basically, if you're not planning long term,

you're not planning for success.

This reminds me of Alberta's rat control

program, actually.

Does it?

Yeah, basically there, to this day, are

effectively zero rats in the province of Alberta, because of

constant vigilance. The rat control zone has been running

since the 1950s with the province of Saskatchewan, and

it's all about this consistent, systemic approach.

Yes, it's an interesting bit of Canadiana and

an impressive success story, as well as a reminder that failure

for a project like this can happen at any time if the

management activities were to stop. A long term approach is

essential.

Principle seven

Are the decisions warranted by the specifics of

the situation, rather than a negative categorization of the

animals? And this is where the labels comes in. This is where,

once we give an animal a label of being over abundant in a

certain area, then we justify to ourselves that it should be

removed.

In other words, don't judge a bookworm by its

label. This final principle was added basically as a failsafe to

prevent actions that are taken against species that we just

really don't like. We might call them pests or aliens or invasive

or noxious. But the point here is that every situation is

unique, and we should, you know, consider the specifics without

prejudice before we make any decisions.

Agreed. End of list?

End of list!

End of list

And if we arrive at the end of this list, and

we've determined that using lethal force to manage a

wildlife conflict is still the best possible thing that we can

do. At that point, according to these principles, at least, we

can say that it's ethical. And I know that this won't satisfy

everyone, but at least it's a step towards breaking down the

duality between the world of animal welfare and the world of

ecology and biology.

Well, thank you, Adam, thank you, Sara. I can see

the appeal of these principles. So I guess now I would ask, is

anybody using them? Are they getting any uptake?

Well, there are examples of projects that have

incorporated these principles into their design, but I think

it is fair to say that they have not been widely adopted yet, at

least according to Sarah Cox.

No, I don't think people were aware of that work.

I don't think that has reached the mainstream. I don't think it

has reached government. Unfortunately, it's definitely

not the lens through which we're making decisions in Canada.

As should be abundantly clear from the fact

that we are still killing barred owls, wolves, and other species,

seemingly without regard and without a long term plan here in

Canada.

Yeah...

Despite this, I have actually found these

principles quite useful in my own work, and I will say that my

talks with both Sarahs left me feeling oddly hopeful for our

capacity to integrate these lessons together. When I spoke

to Sara Dubois, she told me that in the future, she thinks we

might not have to be so polarized around the issue of

animal welfare.

I am in a mode now of doing a lot of teaching and

working with a lot of young people who are aspiring

biologists, and I wanted to say to them that you can still be a

biologist with a heart. Because I think in my training, I was

intentionally hazed in a way that was like, you care too much

about these animals, you can't care about them and still do

your job. So I think that there are opportunities for people

with compassion and creative and critical thinking skills to be a

part of helping the natural world, but we shouldn't exclude

them because they have a heart.

And Sarah Cox, despite going into this

reporting feeling very discouraged about the outlook

for species at risk in Canada, found her own silver lining.

I really went into this, you know, a little doom

and gloomy, like the situation is a disaster. Look at these

crazy things that we're doing, like how much money it's

costing. We've got this all backwards. People don't

understand how much is at risk right now in Canada. And I did

come out of it more hopeful. In doing this research, I met

people right across the country who are actually doing

something. There is so much going on right across the

country, and I found instances of actions that are being taken

to try to turn things around for a species at risk of extinction

that we're both having success, but also looking at complex

issues.

That's why we're here.

Yeah, but I do want to end a little differently

today. I'd like to quote the conclusion of a recent paper

that I read.

First a list, now a quote?!

Yes

It better be good.

I really think it is. And it's a really unusual

paper. It was authored by a number of proponents of

compassionate conservation, and it's called Emotion as a Source

of Moral Understanding in Conservation.

Okay, I can't say no to that.

It begins, quote, 'conservation has been

pluralistic in its goals and values since its inception, and

compassionate conservation is no exception. Even among our author

group, there are differences of opinion. Some of us disallow

that harming individuals to achieve conservation objectives

would ever be the best course of action available. Others among

us acknowledge this possibility.'

They continue, 'if we were to endorse any sort of blanket

stance, it would be that conservation should strive to

operate within the constraints of a commitment to non violent

coexistence. And if cases arise where it appears impossible to

uphold this commitment, harm should not be inflicted with a

hardened sense of inevitability, but with grief and a due sense

of humility that acknowledges some amount of moral failure has

occurred.'

There it is.

They conclude, 'we seek to inhabit the world in

ways that respect and affirm all life. We aim to be kind, to love

broadly, to value widely and to feel deeply, even when feeling

hurts. And we hope to help cultivate a conservation

community in which sparing a life for love is not viewed as

weakness, even when the life in question is not human.'

Well, thank you, Adam. I just have one more

question.

Shoot... wait, no! Don't shoot!

Do you think... do you think it's possible, in

practice, to square this circle? To value the whole and the parts

equally — the rivets and the airplane?

I don't know. I think it's a central question of

being human, right? Of being humane. You remember Timothy

Morton, right?

Yeah, the whole is always less than the sum of

its parts.

The very same. I think that they summed it up

pretty well when they wrote 'the environmental approach could be

described as taking care of the whole at the expense of

individuals, while the animal rights approach could be

described as taking care of individuals at the expense of

the whole. We can start to break through this difficult impasse

by noting that what is called environment is just life forms

and their extended genomic expressions. Think of spiders,

webs and beavers dams. When you think this way, you are already

thinking about wholes and parts in a different way, and when you

think of things like that, there's really no difference

between thinking about what is called an ecosystem and what is

called a single life form.'

Let's leave it there.

This episode of Future Ecologies was produced by

Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, with help from Eden Zinchik, and

music by Thumbug, Adrian Avendaño and Sunfish Moon Light,

cover art by Ale Silva, and the voices of Sarah Cox and Sara

Dubois.

Be sure to check out Sarah Cox's book, Signs of Life — Field

Notes From the Front Lines of Extinction. Special thanks to

Tal Engel. You can find citations and a transcript of

this episode on our website, futureecologies.net. As always,

this show is brought to you by our amazing community of

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