Invasive

This continues on from yesterday's musing... and incorporates more quotes. Firstly, this is interesting to set the scene. It's from Cull of the Wild, an interview with a vet:

‘Just look at the level of attention different animals get – there are 153 animal research laboratories in the country, which are attended to by about 20 inspectors. This means that each inspector has eight premises to check. But farms, well, there are around 80,000 farms and between 100 and 200 inspectors, depending on how you calculate it, meaning they could each have 800 farms to attend. And wildlife gets no routine inspection. Yet all of the animals concerned can suffer and we, as a society, have decided that some are worthy of more care than others.

‘Take zebra fish, for example,’ he continued. ‘In a laboratory in Oxford where they use them as they provide a good model for neuroscience experiments, they have to account for every single one of these animals and there is trouble if they are mistreated in the eyes of the law. Yet look into a broiler farm – those chickens, probably more capable of suffering than the zebra fish, are routinely treated expendably, millions of them.’

Sticking with the same book and another mind-blowing example of how law or culture and ethics are is bizarre misalignment:

George Monbiot takes us into the Pythonesque reasoning. To justify gamekeepers’ killing of corvids, pheasants and partridges need to be classified as livestock. But as you are not allowed to shoot livestock for sport, when they are released, they are transformed into wildlife. As you are not allowed to round up wildlife and trap them, they become livestock at the end of the season. Now, if a pheasant flies into a car windscreen, the person who reared and released the bird is not liable because at that moment it is wildlife. Though if it survives the crash and you round it up to create more pheasants, it is livestock again. And only as a keeper of livestock can you claim tax breaks and subsidies. George goes on to wonder who wrote these laws, and of course, it is the very people who own the shooting estates. The sheer volume of birds released is astounding: 47 million pheasants are bred and released each year. The biomass of pheasants and partridges released each year is greater than the entire biomass of native birds. Just let that sink in for a moment.

The pheasant and partridge carcasses strewn across the land unbalance further an already enormously degraded ecosystem. Those who benefit are the scavengers, the foxes and corvids, the very animals that are being killed to protect the target birds in the first place.

Now back to The New Wild. Here Pearce considers an alternate view of "invaders":

So I was interested to find that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds now often takes a benign view of new arrivals – perhaps because many of its million members like nothing more than a new bird to go and watch. Britain is a happy hunting ground for new bird species, often because of the attractions of changing climate. Twenty new wetland species have arrived since 1960 alone, including the little egret, which first bred in Britain in 1996, the spoonbill in 1998, the pectoral sandpiper in 2004, the cattle egret in 2008, the purple heron in 2010, and the great white egret in 2012. ‘We are not against all exotics’, said the RSPB’s Grahame Madge. ‘We have many colonists arriving from Europe, partly probably in response to climate change. We won’t introduce them or help them, but if they come then we will ensure that they are at home here.’ They won’t be taking shotguns into their protected areas, he says. ‘The birds that have established here have been relatively benign. The little egret, for instance, is a favourite now.’

As it happens, when grey squirrels first escaped from captivity, they were a favourite. Britain had been assiduously killing red squirrels - as they were claimed to damage timber. Grey squirrels were initially popular because they seemed so confident and friendly and could be easily tamed. We loved them. For a while.

Now, thousands of greys are killed as pests and to create grey-squirrel-free habitats for reds. Now, here's a question. All animals will die. Whether they are one of a plentiful species or the last of their species, they will die. How much does it matter to the individual? Sure, it matters if her or she can't be in a community size that is ideal for his or her species-nature or if he or she can't find a mate. But assume an equally OK life. Now, it also matters if a young creature can't learn his or her culture - which is a problem for animals born in captivity or in species with very depleted numbers. Just don't get caught up in those (albeit important) issues. An animal isn't just important to themself or their conspecifics but also to a wider community, but in this case, the animal may be fungible (what reds do, greys could also do for the ecosystem) and is adaptable - so an animal can "invade" a new place and then become an important part of the evolving ecosystem. As Pearce puts it:

Darwin held that natural selection allowed species to adapt to changing local environments – and that was all. Ecosystems were not perfect or imperfect, good or bad, healthy or sick. There was no goal, no ‘climax’, no perfect model against which they could be measured. They just were.

This is what Kairos said to me about the muntjac. They just are here - and they and the ecosystem are engaged in a long, slow (in our terms) process of adaptation, of sympoesis.

To me, all this suggests the need for greater humility.

On which subject, check out this video of a zen buddhist talking about what he considers when in silent meditation.