Cover artwork by Ale Silva
Summary
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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Show Notes and Credits
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, with help from Eden Zinchik
Featuring 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
Music by Thumbug, Adrian Avandaño, and Sunfish Moon Light
Special thanks to Tal Engel
This episode includes audio recorded by ___, accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses.
Citations
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Cox, S. (2024). Signs of Life: Field Notes from the Frontlines of Extinction. Goose Lane. https://sarahcox.ca/signs-of-life/
Cruickshank, A. (2025). B.C. failing to protect 81% of critical habitat for at-risk species: government docs. The Narwhal
Diller, L. V., Hamm, K. A., Early, D. A., Lamphear, D. W., Dugger, K. M., Yackulic, C. B., Schwarz, C. J., Carlson, P. C., & McDonald, T. L. (2016). Demographic response of northern spotted owls to barred owl removal. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 80(4), 691–707. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.1046
Dobbie, T. (2008). Middle Island Conservation Plan. Parks Canada. https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/on/pelee/info/middle
Dumbacher, J. P., & Franklin, A. B. (2025). When avifauna collide: The case for lethal control of barred owls in western North America. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 23(3), e2817. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2817
Dubois, S., & Fraser, D. (2013). Rating harms to wildlife: A survey showing convergence between conservation and animal welfare views. Animal Welfare, 22(1), 49–55. https://doi.org/10.7120/09627286.22.1.049
Dubois, S. (2019). Killing for Conservation. In B. Fischer (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics (1st ed., pp. 407–419). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315105840-37
Dubois, S., Fenwick, N., Ryan, E. A., Baker, L., Baker, S. E., Beausoleil, N. J., Carter, S., Cartwright, B., Costa, F., Draper, C., Griffin, J., Grogan, A., Howald, G., Jones, B., Littin, K. E., Lombard, A. T., Mellor, D. J., Ramp, D., Schuppli, C. A., & Fraser, D. (2017). International consensus principles for ethical wildlife control. Conservation Biology, 31(4), 753–760. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12896
Dubois, S., & Harshaw, H. W. (2013). Exploring “Humane” Dimensions of Wildlife. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 18(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10871209.2012.694014
Environment and Climate Change Canada. (2024). Amended Recovery Strategy for the Spotted Owl caurina subspecies (Strix occidentalis caurina) in Canada [Revised Proposed version]. Species at Risk Act Recovery Strategy Series. Environment and Climate Change Canada, Ottawa. x + 51 pp. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/species-risk-public-registry/recovery-strategies/spotted-owl-amended-proposed-2024.html
Hebert, C. E., Pasher, J., Weseloh, D. V. C., Dobbie, T., Dobbyn, S., Moore, D., Minelga, V., & Duffe, J. (2014). Nesting cormorants and temporal changes in Island habitat. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 78(2), 307–313. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.659
Hobbs, J. (2022). Species at Risk Recovery in BC: An Audit of Federal and Provincial Policies and Tools. bit.ly/SpeciesatriskRecoveryinBC
Morton, T. (2018). Being Ecological. Penguin Books. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665567/being-ecological-by-timothy-morton/
Peiman, K. (2025) Ontario is killing its Endangered Species Act. Here’s what you need to know. The Narwhal
Spatz, D. R., Holmes, N. D., Will, D. J., Hein, S., Carter, Z. T., Fewster, R. M., Keitt, B., Genovesi, P., Samaniego, A., Croll, D. A., Tershy, B. R., & Russell, J. C. (2022). The global contribution of invasive vertebrate eradication as a key island restoration tool. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 13391. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14982-5
Waples, R.S., Nammack, M., Cochrane, J.F., Hutchings, J.A. (2013) A Tale of Two Acts: Endangered Species Listing Practices in Canada and the United States. BioScience, 63(9), 723–734. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2013.63.9.8
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Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:01
You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.
Adam Huggins 00:06
Hey, Mendel.
Mendel Skulski 00:07
Hey, Adam.
Adam Huggins 00:10
[Sigh]
Mendel Skulski 00:10
Uh... what's on your mind?
Adam Huggins 00:11
I'm finding I'm having to, like, take deep breaths a lot these days, just in general.
Mendel Skulski 00:16
Yeah, these are those days.
Adam Huggins 00:19
Unfortunately, I have a bit of a downer of an episode for us today.
Mendel Skulski 00:23
What perfect timing.
Adam Huggins 00:25
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.
Mendel Skulski 00:35
Well, I guess I have to take your word for it. What do you got?
Adam Huggins 00:39
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.
Mendel Skulski 00:51
Woo hoo! One of our deepest moral dilemmas. And that would be?
Adam Huggins 00:57
That would be, is it okay to kill one thing in order to save another? Here, let me give you an example.
Mendel Skulski 01:05
Okay, shoot ...no, wait! Don't shoot!
Mendel Skulski 01:08
Uh... where are we headed?
Adam Huggins 01:18
Mendel, if you were to guess what the southern most peace of Canada is. Where would you guess?
Adam Huggins 01:25
Somewhere in Ontario?
Adam Huggins 01:27
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.
Sarah Cox 01:44
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.
Adam Huggins 01:57
Long time listeners might recognize Sarah Cox.
Sarah Cox 02:00
Yes, I was on the show, I think maybe six years ago.
Mendel Skulski 02:05
Yeah, that was in season two, our episode on lichen and mountain caribou, which was also a depressing one.
Adam Huggins 02:14
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.
Sarah Cox 02:30
My most recent book is called Signs of Life — Field Notes From the Front Lines of Extinction.
Adam Huggins 02:36
Bringing us back to Middle Island, which, as Sarah said, is one of the last Canadian outposts of the Carolinian ecosystem.
Mendel Skulski 02:45
Caro.... like North and South Carolina?
Adam Huggins 02:48
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.
Sarah Cox 03:08
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.
Mendel Skulski 03:26
Sassafras! Sassafras, sassafras... great name.
Adam Huggins 03:30
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.
Mendel Skulski 03:48
Kentucky coffee tree...?
Adam Huggins 03:51
Yes, it does not produce coffee.
Mendel Skulski 03:53
Oh.
Adam Huggins 03:53
It is a tree. It is found in Kentucky, and it's actually in the legume family.
Mendel Skulski 03:57
Huh... bean tree
Adam Huggins 03:58
Yeah, pretty cool tree. Also a schedule one threatened species in Canada.
Mendel Skulski 04:03
Okay, so we've got a bunch of species at risk in an endangered ecosystem in Canada
Adam Huggins 04:10
On a tiny island in a national park. Yes.
Mendel Skulski 04:13
Right. Okay, so right, where they belong — under protection.
Adam Huggins 04:18
Well, they're protected, true. At least from people.
Mendel Skulski 04:23
So what's the problem? What's threatening all the rare plants of Middle Island, if not people?
Adam Huggins 04:29
Well, the rare plants of Middle Island are being threatened... how can I put this politely? They're being threatened by bird [splat].
Sarah Cox 04:38
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.
Adam Huggins 05:02
You're familiar with cormorants, right?
Mendel Skulski 05:04
Yeah, I've been pooped on by cormorants, in fact. Have I never told you that story?
Adam Huggins 05:08
I am pretty sure you have not.
Mendel Skulski 05:10
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
Adam Huggins 05:43
You know, it's funny, Mendel, not so long ago, cormorants almost went extinct.
Sarah Cox 05:49
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.
Adam Huggins 05:59
After the ban on DDT, most species of cormorant bounced back from the brink of extinction and made a remarkable recovery — here on the Pacific coast, and on the Great Lakes.
Sarah Cox 06:02
So the 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.
Mendel Skulski 06:53
Wait, what?
Adam Huggins 06:55
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.
Mendel Skulski 07:07
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.
Adam Huggins 07:18
I mean, some very special plants, Mendel and the species that depend on them.
Mendel Skulski 07:21
Okay... but doesn't this seem, like, a little extreme? Like they poop a lot, but how much harm can they really be doing?
Adam Huggins 07:29
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.
Mendel Skulski 07:43
Unfortunately.
Adam Huggins 07:44
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.
Mendel Skulski 07:53
Gross.
Adam Huggins 07:54
Yeah. And Sarah got to see and smell all of this for herself when she visited.
Sarah Cox 08:01
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.
Adam Huggins 08:10
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.
Sarah Cox 08:32
Exactly.
Mendel Skulski 08:33
How did that go?
Adam Huggins 08:35
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.
Sarah Cox 08:45
We heard the guns. We saw the birds, not just cormorants, but herons and pelicans and other birds being really disturbed by the gunshots.
Mendel Skulski 08:55
There's pelicans here too?
Adam Huggins 08:56
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.
Mendel Skulski 09:04
Wow. But just to pick up on what you said a second ago, these observers couldn't actually watch the cormorant cull directly?
Adam Huggins 09:13
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.
Mendel Skulski 09:28
Right, unsurprisingly.
Adam Huggins 09:30
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.
Mendel Skulski 09:43
On the other hand, you might wonder how safe any species is south of the border right now.
Adam Huggins 09:48
Yeah, from a scientific point of view, there is a really good reason why we choose to protect marginal populations like this.
Sarah Cox 09:55
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.
Adam Huggins 10:13
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
Mendel Skulski 10:33
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.
Adam Huggins 10:47
Exactly.
Sarah Cox 10:48
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.
Adam Huggins 11:02
And this isn't just some isolated case. You can see this same dynamic playing out with species after endangered species across Canada.
Sarah Cox 11:13
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.
Adam Huggins 11:26
For as long as we have been a species, human beings have employed killing as one of our primary responses to adversity.
Dirty Harry 11:34
You gotta ask yourself a question. Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?!
Adam Huggins 11:42
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 11:51
You're a disease, and I'm the cure.
Adam Huggins 11:55
This is the logic of political assassinations, of revenge plots and the endings of most Hollywood blockbusters.
Terminator 12:03
Hasta la vista, baby. [Gunshot]
Adam Huggins 12:09
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?
Mendel Skulski 12:24
From Future Ecologies, this is Humane Being,
Introduction Voiceover 12:33
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.
Mendel Skulski 13:15
Well, since we have Sarah Cox back in the house, does she have any updates on the mountain caribou situation?
Adam Huggins 13:22
Nothing particularly encouraging.
Sarah Cox 13:25
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.
Mendel Skulski 13:50
I'm already seeing a parallel here between the situation with the wolves and the cormorants.
Adam Huggins 13:56
Yeah. So that episode about the wolves and the caribou was about many things
Mendel Skulski 14:02
Famously
Adam Huggins 14:03
But it was mostly about extinction. Yeah,
Sarah Cox 14:06
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.
Adam Huggins 14:19
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.
Sarah Cox 14:34
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.
Mendel Skulski 14:48
Well, we are off to a rosy start.
Adam Huggins 14:51
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.
Mendel Skulski 15:00
I'm afraid to ask, but what could be more downhill from the state of the mountain caribou?
Adam Huggins 15:08
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?
Mendel Skulski 15:17
Not really. I've never seen one. Also never been pooped on by one, either.
Adam Huggins 15:21
Don't worry, Sarah has got you covered.
Sarah Cox 15:23
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.
Adam Huggins 16:13
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.
Sarah Cox 16:33
And you would think that this would engender some type of action to protect the spotted owl, and in the States, it did.
Adam Huggins 16:42
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,
Sarah Cox 16:53
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,
Adam Huggins 17:06
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.
Sarah Cox 17:18
And no politician is coming out and seeing that publicly — we have lost the spotted owl from Canada's wild.
Mendel Skulski 17:28
Well, maybe it's an obvious question, but like, how did we get here?
Adam Huggins 17:34
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.
Mendel Skulski 17:53
Yeah, I'd call that an understatement
Adam Huggins 17:55
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.
Mendel Skulski 18:32
Yes.
Adam Huggins 18:33
Are you familiar with the rivet popper hypothesis, Mendel?
Mendel Skulski 18:36
I am not.
Adam Huggins 18:37
So the rivet popper hypothesis is this famous thought experiment proposed by the biologist Paul Ehrlich in the 1980s.
Mendel Skulski 18:47
Okay?
Adam Huggins 18:47
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?
Mendel Skulski 19:16
Hmm, I don't appreciate being a kind of captive passenger in this grand experiment, but that's where we find ourselves.
Adam Huggins 19:26
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.
Sarah Cox 19:46
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.
Adam Huggins 20:03
Canada's Species at Risk Act, otherwise known as SARA. The preamble reads, 'wildlife in all its forms, has value in and of itself'.
Mendel Skulski 20:14
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.
Adam Huggins 20:23
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.
Mendel Skulski 20:40
I think it's time you reminded me.
Adam Huggins 20:41
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.
Sarah Cox 21:39
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.
Mendel Skulski 22:08
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?
Adam Huggins 22:22
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.
Sarah Cox 23:09
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.
Mendel Skulski 23:35
A breeding center?
Adam Huggins 23:36
Yes, Indeed.
Sarah Cox 23:37
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.
Adam Huggins 24:24
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.
Mendel Skulski 24:38
How romantic.
Adam Huggins 24:39
Yeah, I couldn't help but ask Sarah if she took them up on it.
Sarah Cox 24:44
I did not.
Adam Huggins 24:45
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.
Sarah Cox 24:56
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.
Mendel Skulski 25:37
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.
Adam Huggins 25:58
Exactly and just like how caribou have wolves, spotted owls have their own antagonist.
Sarah Cox 26:05
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.
Adam Huggins 26:25
I actually happen to have a nesting pair of barred owls in my own backyard. Listen... that's them calling.
Mendel Skulski 26:34
Mmm.
Adam Huggins 26:35
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.
Sarah Cox 26:52
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.
Mendel Skulski 27:30
We need to... do something... about barred owls.
Adam Huggins 27:33
Which means we're killing them.
News Announcer 1 27:37
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 27:47
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.
Sarah Cox 28:01
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.
Mendel Skulski 28:21
Okay, so we're not killing them everywhere. We're just focusing on spotted owl habitat.
Adam Huggins 28:28
Yes, the breeding pair in my backyard is not currently at risk.
Mendel Skulski 28:32
But like the big question is, does it work? Does removing barred owls actually help the spotted owls?
Adam Huggins 28:39
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.
Sarah Cox 28:49
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%.
Adam Huggins 29:03
In other words, it does help, even though it's still pretty controversial.
Sarah Cox 29:09
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.
Adam Huggins 29:21
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.
Sarah Cox 29:42
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.
Mendel Skulski 29:57
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.
Adam Huggins 30:12
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.
Mendel Skulski 30:39
To say nothing of plants.
Adam Huggins 30:41
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.
Mendel Skulski 30:53
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?
Adam Huggins 31:13
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.
Mendel Skulski 31:28
Uh... final boarding call for Paul Erhlich's airplane.
Adam Huggins 31:33
God, I would not step on board that aiplane.
Mendel Skulski 31:35
You don't have a choice.
Adam Huggins 31:36
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.
Mendel Skulski 31:51
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.
Adam Huggins 32:14
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.'
Mendel Skulski 32:39
...What is that supposed to mean?
Adam Huggins 32:41
We'll find out together — after the break.
Mendel Skulski 32:48
Okay, mid-roll, lightning round. Future Ecologies! Independent! Listener supported! Patreon.com/futureecologies! Love you!
Mendel Skulski 33:02
Welcome back. I'm Mendel
Adam Huggins 33:05
And I'm Adam.
Mendel Skulski 33:06
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?
Adam Huggins 33:28
I have another Sara to introduce you to.
Mendel Skulski 33:30
Okay, so this episode has become a tale of three Sara's.
Adam Huggins 33:38
It has.
Mendel Skulski 33:39
We've got Sarah Cox, we've got SARA, the Species at Risk Act in Canada, and now...?
Adam Huggins 33:47
And now we have Dr. Sara Dubois.
Sara Dubois 33:50
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.
Adam Huggins 34:03
I spoke to Sarah because she's at the forefront in BC of a movement sometimes known as compassionate conservation.
Mendel Skulski 34:12
And for those who don't know, the SPCA is...?
Adam Huggins 34:16
Short for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And there are versions of it all around the world.
Sara Dubois 34:23
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.
Adam Huggins 34:35
In British Columbia, the BC SPCA is a charity that has been charged by the province with enforcing animal cruelty laws.
Mendel Skulski 34:44
Huh... okay, interesting. It runs animal shelters, and it also enforces the law.
Adam Huggins 34:50
Yes, it is a donor-funded law enforcement agency, among other things,
Mendel Skulski 34:55
That's wild. So what's Sara's story?
Adam Huggins 34:59
Well, she started on this path pretty early. She remembers telling her parents that she was going to grow up and save wildlife.
Mendel Skulski 35:07
Classic.
Sara Dubois 35:08
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.
Adam Huggins 35:32
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.
Sara Dubois 35:57
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.
Adam Huggins 36:07
And apparently in university, she actually had to dissect a cat.
Mendel Skulski 36:11
Oh... I would not be capable.
Adam Huggins 36:16
You are not alone.
Sara Dubois 36:18
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.
Adam Huggins 36:36
And that can work for some of us, but this kind of rationalization just doesn't sit right with lots of people.
Sara Dubois 36:44
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.
Mendel Skulski 37:11
I get that. We've talked before about botanists who specifically got into working with plants because they just couldn't stomach killing animals.
Adam Huggins 37:22
That's right. It is undeniable that the field of biology can, at times, be a killing field.
Sara Dubois 37:29
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.
Adam Huggins 38:10
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.
Sara Dubois 38:21
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.
Mendel Skulski 38:54
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.
Adam Huggins 39:08
Oh...
Mendel Skulski 39:09
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?
Adam Huggins 39:25
Well, that brings us to one word with several meanings. Allow me to introduce the curious concept of what is and isn't humane.
Sara Dubois 39:35
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.
Mendel Skulski 40:15
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.
Sara Dubois 40:42
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.
Adam Huggins 41:12
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.
Sara Dubois 41:36
Yes, once we give an animal a label, it justifies to certain people that they can do bad things to it.
Adam Huggins 41:43
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.
Sara Dubois 42:01
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?
Mendel Skulski 42:11
Like with the barred owl?
Adam Huggins 42:12
Exactly. Mendel, I kid you not. When I sat down to interview Sara, she had a big barred owl on her t-shirt.
Mendel Skulski 42:20
Hah! No way.
Sara Dubois 42:22
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.
Mendel Skulski 42:55
Well, what were the results? What did people say?
Adam Huggins 42:58
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.
Mendel Skulski 43:21
I mean, biologists are people too, I guess.
Adam Huggins 43:25
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.
Sara Dubois 43:43
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?
Mendel Skulski 44:18
Wait, how often do these things just fail outright?
Adam Huggins 44:21
Um... it happens. I should mention that the best record that we have on the overall success rate of lethal interventions in conservation is a website called the Database of Island Invasive Species Eradications.
Mendel Skulski 44:25
Hmm. Islands, of course.
Adam Huggins 44:40
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.
Mendel Skulski 44:57
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.
Adam Huggins 45:07
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...
Sara Dubois 45:20
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?
Adam Huggins 45:39
And all of this controversy and vitriol caused Sara to stop and ask,
Sara Dubois 45:44
Are there criteria that are justifiable from a very objective lens?
Adam Huggins 45:50
And this is where the International Consensus Principles for Ethical Wildlife Control began.
Sara Dubois 45:56
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.
Mendel Skulski 46:34
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.
Adam Huggins 46:40
Who doesn't love a list? I mean, folks know what they signed up for.
Mendel Skulski 46:46
Okay, hit me.
Adam Huggins 46:48
Okay. There are seven principles, and I personally like them best phrased as questions. Let's start with
Principle Bot 46:56
Principle one
Sara Dubois 46:58
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?
Mendel Skulski 47:14
Well, that seems like the reasonable place to start.
Adam Huggins 47:18
Yes. Principle one asks, can we be the change that we wish to see in the world before we start killing things?
Principle Bot 47:25
Principle two
Sara Dubois 47:27
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?
Mendel Skulski 47:41
Raccoons eating garbage? That's an ecosystem service!
Adam Huggins 47:47
At the very least, it probably doesn't merit the death sentence, even if the raccoons do always look guilty,
Mendel Skulski 47:52
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.
Adam Huggins 48:07
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 Bot 48:34
Principle three
Sara Dubois 48:36
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?
Mendel Skulski 48:51
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.
Adam Huggins 49:05
Exactly. Plus, do we have a plan to assess whether what we did worked or not? In other words...
Sara Dubois 49:12
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 Bot 49:18
Principle four
Sara Dubois 49:21
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,
Mendel Skulski 49:51
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.
Adam Huggins 50:03
Yeah, methods are a question of both efficacy and ethics.
Principle Bot 50:07
Principle five
Sara Dubois 50:10
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.
Mendel Skulski 50:54
Yeah, I think this is probably an important moment to remind ourselves that public pushback can shut things down.
Adam Huggins 51:03
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.
Sara Dubois 51:30
The sixth question is the control action part of a 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?
Principle Bot 51:30
Principle six
Adam Huggins 51:47
Basically, if you're not planning long term, you're not planning for success.
Mendel Skulski 51:52
This reminds me of Alberta's rat control program, actually.
Adam Huggins 51:57
Does it?
Mendel Skulski 51:58
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.
Adam Huggins 52:17
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 Bot 52:35
Principle seven
Sara Dubois 52:39
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.
Adam Huggins 52:58
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.
Mendel Skulski 53:25
Agreed. End of list?
Adam Huggins 53:28
End of list!
Principle Bot 53:29
End of list
Adam Huggins 53:35
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.
Mendel Skulski 54:14
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?
Adam Huggins 54:27
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.
Sarah Cox 54:41
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.
Adam Huggins 54:53
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.
Mendel Skulski 55:05
Yeah...
Adam Huggins 55:06
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.
Sara Dubois 55:34
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.
Adam Huggins 56:13
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.
Sarah Cox 56:22
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.
Mendel Skulski 57:08
That's why we're here.
Adam Huggins 57:09
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.
Mendel Skulski 57:16
First a list, now a quote?!
Adam Huggins 57:18
Yes
Mendel Skulski 57:20
It better be good.
Adam Huggins 57:21
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.
Mendel Skulski 57:34
Okay, I can't say no to that.
Adam Huggins 57:35
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.'
Adam Huggins 58:02
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.'
Mendel Skulski 58:34
There it is.
Adam Huggins 58:35
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.'
Mendel Skulski 59:03
Well, thank you, Adam. I just have one more question.
Adam Huggins 59:08
Shoot... wait, no! Don't shoot!
Mendel Skulski 59:15
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?
Adam Huggins 59:28
I don't know. I think it's a central question of being human, right? Of being humane. You remember Timothy Morton, right?
Mendel Skulski 59:38
Yeah, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts.
Adam Huggins 59:44
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.'
Adam Huggins 1:00:34
Let's leave it there.
Mendel Skulski 1:00:47
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.
Mendel Skulski 1:01:08
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 supporting listeners. Become one yourself and get all the perks at futureecologies.net/join. If you like what we're doing, leave us a rating, a review or a comment wherever you're listening. Better yet, tell a friend! Okay, 'til next time.