Does "compassionate conservation" work?

I started out reading this article thinking that Wallach was challenging some assumptions in an interesting way and that there was perhaps something to be learned here. I finished it convinced that she is morally wrong and represents a danger to conservation itself, albeit a minor one. I think the author of the article was steering towards that viewpoint anyway.

She may well be right that small mammals do better when dingos aren't culled, although the data clearly aren't in yet. But that question seems to be irrelevant when faced with her main thrust that killing animals is wrong and that humans should 'stay in their lane'. Her views seem to have very, very little to do with conservation.
 
FunkyGibbon said:
She may well be right that small mammals do better when dingos aren't culled, although the data clearly aren't in yet. But that question seems to be irrelevant when faced with her main thrust that killing animals is wrong and that humans should 'stay in their lane'. Her views seem to have very, very little to do with conservation.
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If humans had stayed in their lane these problems wouldn't have been there in the first place, so it is rather damage limitation of irresponsibly getting out of their lane....
 
I had no idea that there were people calling themselves 'conservationists' who would be against something like eradicating the mice from Gough Island or even saying they're not sure if it's the right thing to do. That's really shocking. Not compassionate and also not conservation.

I don't know how widespread this 'compassionate conservation' attitude is, it seems very niche and not particularly serious, but while I doubt this kind of attitude is likely to spread among actual conservationists I hope the general public doesn't latch on to the idea. Leaving introduced species to just kill all the native animals so that humans don't have to kill cats and mice seems to be the very opposite of both compassion and conservation and I could imagine a negative consequence of this would be an increase animal rights type people protesting to the bating of rats and cats and getting in the way of actual conservation.

I also wonder about the risk of the phrase 'compassionate conservation' being used like that in a way that seems entirely uncompassionate and against conservation. Without looking into what it actually means (apparently leaving an island of endemic seabirds to be eaten alive by mice) very few people are going to be against 'compassionate conservation'.
 
I’ve come across “compassionate conservation” before but it is not wide spread. Interesting that the “conservationist” highlighted is not Australian. Also interesting there was almost no mention of the many unique species of Australian wildlife that the feral she is so concerned about will displace. Is it these people only care about what they know?

There is growing evidence that dingoes (now generally regarded as native) do help the survival of many other native species, of course by ripping apart foxes and cats in a very uncompassionate way.
 
So called animal rights activists are difficult to talk to. Especially that they tend to reset. One talks to an activist, points (as MRJ tried) that dingo is a predator and his prey gets killed every day, the activist grudgingly accepts. Then next day the activist sort of resets and talks the same.

Most probably, those people are extremely emotive, not very rational but visually oriented. So they should be shown pictures, like dingos eating meat and killing other animals. Or a dead kangaroo carcass, because feral donkeys and camels ate its grass. Then their passionate emotion towards a dingo or a camel would evaporate.
 
Are camels and donkeys suppressing Kangaroo numbers? Are they increasing biodiversity and mimicking the larger Australian herbivores lost in the last 40,000 years?
 
Camels and donkeys destroy vegetation and habitat for especially smaller endangered species. However, reptiles and small marsupials are less cute than kangaroos. My point is that you are trying to reach very emotive and not very rational people.

Answering your question: information on ecology of Pleistocene Australian megafauna too basic to know what their effect was. It is equally possible that introduced hoofstock have different and damaging effect, just like introduced cattle don't replace grazing by native buffalo in America.
 
Other than overgrazing, a real problem, hoofed mammals cause considerable damage by cutting into the fragile Australian soil, leading to soil loss and erosion. In this regards, camels are probably the least harmful introduced animal.
 
Impacts of such exotics are also density dependent and if you can keep their numbers relatively low impacts on the vegetation and soil might be negligible, but without any natural predators such herbivores can reach insane densities destroying most of the native vegetation (see a notorious Dutch nature reserve). All the shooting does not have the target of complete eradication as that is just not feasible in Australia, but at keeping densities at an acceptable level...
 
lintworm said:
see a notorious Dutch nature reserve
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While hardly comparable to the Australian situation, some of the same problems occur indeed in the Oostvaardersplassen where far too large populations of introduced large herbivores wreak havoc on many of the inhabitants. After years of debate they finally decided to shoot large numbers of deer, but "compassionate" individuals think that's cruel and instead want to feed the deer to avoid massive die-offs. Naturally the number of deer will increase even further as a result, turning a nature reserve into a huge empty pasture were only a few species can live.

I'm all for compassionate conservation in the sense that animal welfare is taken into account. But I definately don't agree with the extreme variety as presented in the article.
 
I read the article with an open mind but after I finished reading it my only take away from it was that people like Wallach ultimately picked the wrong career and don't really need a newly minted PhD or an ivory tower career to justify all the time they have wasted nor to confirm their delusional bias.

In some instances where the risk posed to native species is hybridization it may be more "ethical" to sterilize / castrate invasive species rather than to cull them. However, this is very time consuming, logistically difficult, not at all cost effective (as it requires an allocation of huge amounts of resources) and in many cases doesn't even eliminate the problem (though it does work PR wonders in appeasing some animal rights fanatics).

In most other cases the most effective means of controlling invasive species that threaten natives is to simply erradicate it. As some of the other people who have commented have already mentioned this is where true compassionate conservation can make a difference. This can be done by ensuring that the culling is done in the most humane and ethical way possible in order to avoid the unnecessary suffering of an invasive species.

Several quotes in the article seem to suggest that conservationists are "desensitized" or even just psychopathic when it comes to dealing with how unpleasant the job of culling an invasive is. From what I've observed nothing could be further from the truth.

Conservationists do feel moral discomfort with the act of killing individual invasive species. However, we calibrate these transient feelings with the knowledge of the greater moral tragedy of the loss of an entire species or ecosystem.

We obviously feel this greater moral tragedy far more keenly than "animal rights" activists like Wallach and friends do and we realize that their branch of "compassionate conservation" *cough* bulls*** *cough* basically spells a death sentence for native / endemic species and this is ethically unacceptable for us.
 
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Mr. Zootycoon said:
While hardly comparable to the Australian situation, some of the same problems occur indeed in the Oostvaardersplassen where far too large populations of introduced large herbivores wreak havoc on many of the inhabitants. After years of debate they finally decided to shoot large numbers of deer, but "compassionate" individuals think that's cruel and instead want to feed the deer to avoid massive die-offs. Naturally the number of deer will increase even further as a result, turning a nature reserve into a huge empty pasture were only a few species can live.

I'm all for compassionate conservation in the sense that animal welfare is taken into account. But I definately don't agree with the extreme variety as presented in the article.
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I had never heard of Oostvaardersplassen so I decided to look it up. It sounds very similar to Yellowstone back in the day in the respect that what in needs in wolves. Badly.
 
birdsandbats said:
I had never heard of Oostvaardersplassen so I decided to look it up. It sounds very similar to Yellowstone back in the day in the respect that what in needs in wolves. Badly.
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Wolves would certainly help to solve quite a few of their issues (and probably generate much more controversy).

However, I'm not sure that introducing wolves or other predators would technically be legally allowed to occur. Oostvaardersplassen is as far as I know an enclosed / fenced in area / reserve so I assume that there could be some steep legislative and "ethical" issues with placing predators into that kind of context.
 
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Unfortunately the Oostvaardersplassen is far too small and lacking in landscape diversity to make introduction of large predators viable. While the climate is certainly milder, in land area it is only about 1/200 the size of Yellowstone, which accommodates perhaps 100 wolves. There are some smaller fenced reserves in South Africa that have large predators, which typically involves heavy-handed management. Rietvlei reserve just outside Johannesburg is an example. Wildlife authorities will occasionally relocate a couple of cheetahs there for a limited amount of time, but never as a permanent population.
 
birdsandbats said:
In that case it sounds like the best thing for Oostvaardersplassen is to get rid of all those herbivores, then.
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It is not that simple. Large herbivores bring a dynamic force to the ecosystem that human management hardly can, and they have done so in lowland western Europe for eons before humans depleted their numbers. The ideal solution (at least from a nature conservation perspective) is the presence of a large carnivore to influence the densities and behaviour of the herbivores, along with a connection to other reserves so that the animals can move between them. That is next to impossible at this moment.

However, if we manage the number of herbivores the vegetation can be given a chance to regenerate. This hopefully gives rise to an area where herbivory and succession can balance each other out, so that a dynamic and diverse ecosystem can develop. A mosaic of forest and shrub of different stages, grasslands, reedbeds, marshes, and maybe even open water or bare soil at some places - just as it was intended once. Of course, the presence of large carnivores will add even more variation, but that is now practically impossible. Managed herds of a diverse range of large herbivores is probably the best we can do now in the Netherlands until we learn to live with wolf, lynx and boar.
 
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