Sorry for the delay. Unfortunately, pangolins were superseded by work and babysitting commitments. Well, you know what they say about children and animals.
Prelude
I don’t like the single-species paradigm in conservation. It’s not that I hate pangolins, nor do I think conserving them is pointless, but I do believe that finite resources would be better utilized protecting ecosystems and their functions. This is how I ended up with a reputation for pholidotophobia.
However, I am also a pragmatist. I don’t think pangolins represent the best use of resources, but, if pangolin conservation is our goal, we should use the most effective methods. This is essentially the same viewpoint at a smaller scale: optimum strategies have the highest benefit to cost ratio. I will continue with this second stance below.
Hopefully that clarifies my position and we seem to have reached a consensus that this program is not the optimum strategy. I think that’s why I’ve been struggling with my response: I largely agree with FG and TLD’s latest entries (or did they agree with me?
). Instead, then, I’ll focus on why I think this
isn’t better than doing nothing at all.
@FunkyGibbon: For the sake of brevity and coherence, I’m addressing your points thematically rather than chronologically. Everything else I either agree with, or would be tangential nit-picking.
@TeaLovingDave: I’ve only responded where I wouldn’t be repeating myself. Needless to say, feel free to jump in wherever.
@Everyone Else: The following is long, dull, and you probably won’t agree with it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
1. Miscellaneous
Before making my own argument, I wanted to address a few points…
1.1. Transparency
With regards to transparency, I think if you take a hardline, 'Rorshach' style approach to morality then this was clearly wrong and the zoos no doubt want to avoid a battle on that front. In utilitarian terms they might find themselves on steadier ground, but again, I see no real advantage in running towards that fight.
Utilitarianism, at least to my knowledge, would typically hold the rights of the individual over any “good of the species” position. It would be incompatible with this effort, in the strict sense anyway.
Rorschach was the bloke with the leaking pen, right?
Retreating from my sketchy knowledge of ethics, “transparency” doesn’t necessarily mean broadcasting everything. Earlier this year, a paper was published on captive pangolin nutrition. The authors didn’t give details on the diets themselves, due to legitimate concerns this could facilitate commercial farming. That was absolutely the right decision. However, I find the total opacity of this program alarming. Not only does it imply something to hide, it also runs counter to the principle that collaboration is vital.
The One Plan approach to conservation is when all stake-holders,
in and
ex situ, work collectively to develop a coherent management strategy for the species – One Plan. The six recipient zoos have not only ignored the pangolin action plan, they have also alienated those “on the ground”. As it happens, I was talking to someone involved with African pangolin conservation recently; lovely man, tremendously knowledgeable, and incensed by this move. Needless to say, these
in situ parties would be critical to the success of any future reintroduction program.
Lack of transparency also means this debate is, to some extent, speculative. Whilst I don’t think that speculation is wholly unwarranted, I have tried to limit my assumptions and welcome any informed corrections.
1.2. A Different Set of Choices?
Please note I'm absolutely not arguing that we shouldn't try to preserve pangolins in the wild, I just think that zoos face a different set of choices to national governments, NGOs or private individuals about how to use the tools and resources they have.
I’m not certain what you mean here, so I don’t know how far I agree. Certainly, zoos have different strengths (and weaknesses) to other stakeholders, with captive breeding programs a prime example. However, I disagree that they should necessarily play to these “strengths” when alternative strategies would be more effective. If tightening environmental protections
in situ doesn’t play to a zoo’s strength, for instance, it can always support stakeholders better placed to do so.
In other words, optimum strategies should be identified from an evaluation of the issues at play, not adopted just because we can. Again, this has been done for pangolins, and the focus was strongly
in situ. Even if it succeeds, an
ex situ captive breeding program is fighting the symptoms, not the cause.
1.3. Pangolins and Pachyderms
I think pangolin scales may be analogous to rhino horn or ivory. Despite the huge resources poured into the protection of elephants and rhinos results have been mixed at best, and it's not at all clear what the final result will be (although I'll happily conceed that there is plenty to be encouraged by). Pangolins are almost certain to not receive the same level of attention, and because many of the species are geographically constrained they are far less resilient to regional extinction.
I know I promised a single-species approach, but there is an important distinction here. Elephants and rhinos are conservation “flagships”: they inspire the protection of their habitats, attracting interest and resources which other species also benefit from. Pangolins do not. Because they’re famously unknown (irony intended), efforts to stop trade will largely benefit them alone (or not). This is one reason why I’m happier to see megafauna receive disproportionately more resources – they’re a source of funds, whereas pangolins are a sink.
2. Prospects
Although underpinned by ethics and wrapped up in sociology, conservation is, at heart, a science. It should be based on evidence, expertise, and empiricism. Efforts to establish pangolin breeding programs have been tried, tried, and tried again. Shipping them to America and adding a slew of new challenges exacerbates, rather than eliminates, the husbandry issues that plague pre-existing facilities. To use an absurdist but apt metaphor, throwing a pile of pangolins at a wall and hoping some stick serves only to kill a lot of pangolins.
…see also the breeding at Taipei Zoo.
But this population is still nowhere near sustainable. If Taipei, with all their effort, expertise, and experience, can only breed a handful in the last decade, the American effort is doomed. No ifs or buts, no maybes or might-just-possiblies – it won’t work.
Perhaps some useful knowledge will be gained in the process, presenting a Pyrrhic victory rather than an outright failure, but this would surely have been facilitated by working at an existing facility, with an existing knowledge-base.
Hence…
My point is that if the evidence suggests that making a small contribution to protecting a species in situ will fail, why not try something else, even if the evidence suggests that that too will probably fail.
…You’ve answered your own question.
I do believe that it is foolish to "write off" any species which has seen problems in captive husbandry and poor success initially given how many species (gorilla, for instance) have overcome such issues successfully in captivity.
Funnily enough, I pre-empted the gorilla point in my last post, but left it out for fear of looking like a smart arse. Anyway, here’s what I wrote:
“If past form is anything to go by, your go-to hasty generalisation will be the gorilla. In which case, I’d suggest that our ability to meet an ape’s needs in captivity tells us nothing about a pangolin's. What might have a major bearing is if efforts had already been made to establish breeding programs for close relatives, because if they had, and if they had already failed, that would surely suggest this one will, too… Oh wait.”
To add to that, “has seen” misrepresents the pangolin situation; “is seeing” would be a better choice of words. Also, the
ex situ breeding program is not pivotal to gorilla conservation any more than it’s pivotal for pangolins. To steal another ZooChatter’s quote from the great William Conway: “It’s great having gorillas in New York but you’ve not saving gorillas there” (credit to
@GraysonDP).
Intermission
Q. What’s brown and sticky?
A. A stick.
That’s not relevant; I just needed a break from pangolins.
3. Costs
According to FG and TLD, an awful plan with terrible prospects is, at the very least, better than nothing. Whilst I’m sure there’s a better way to convey this point, I’ll now introduce a formula to explain why I believe they’re wrong.
Let’s assign the potential benefits of this program the letter
B, which can take any value between 0 (no benefit) and 1 (saving the species). Since this benefit is potential rather than definite, let us give
B a weighting;
r, the likelihood that
B will occur, can also be anything from 0 (definitely won’t occur) to 1 (definitely will).
And that gives us
rB. The FG/TLD position states that taking action is better than doing nothing if
rB>0.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say the values for this program are
B=1 and
r=0.01 (it has a 1% chance of saving the species).
Using our formula, this would give 0.01x1=0.01
Whilst small, the outcome is >0, so FG and TLD would presumably favour it over not acting at all. However – and here’s the crux – their approach is missing a term.
C describes the costs incurred by a strategy.
So, our golden rule is not
rB>0, but
rB>
C. And, if I give the costs of this import an arbitrary figure of, say, 0.1, suddenly…
0.01x1<0.1
…Which was a long-winded way of saying that the costs incurred by this effort outweigh the remote chance of its success.
Now, the savvy among you may have noticed several things: first, I’m repurposing Hamilton’s Rule, for which I hope you’ll forgive the affectation; second, determining the likelihood of a successful outcome (
r) is unlikely to be numerically precise, in which case I’d suggest “very unlikely
” is sufficient for our purposes; and, third, I’ve failed to define costs (
C). To achieve the latter, we could stick to a conservation standpoint, with 0 being “no cost to conservation efforts” and 1 “dooming the species”. If we added a second
r to
C, and knew the value of each term, we could even calculate whether this effort did more harm than good.
However, such a narrow viewpoint would again oversimplify the issue, because this program has further ramifications. The rest of this post explains why I don’t believe the costs – to conservation, zoos, and animal welfare – can be justified for such a longshot.
3.1. To Conservation
The Bad News: 1,000,000 lost from the wild in the last ten years.
The Good News: 100 recently rescued from the trade this month.
(let's be generous and say that we can extrapolate this to 1000 per year and thus 10,000 in the last ten)
Those ham-fisted calculations show that we are losing this battle 99% of the time.
Honestly, I have seen nothing printed that suggests that these numbers are going to come down. Certainly not in the blog, which presumably sought to make the strongest case possible that ex-situ captivity was not appropriate. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that over the coming years pangolin species will go extinct at a steady rate.
I don’t dispute that pangolins are in trouble. You might even convince me – a trenchant advocate of landscape-level approaches – that fighting the pangolin trade is crucial, given the destructiveness of some capture methods.
To clichédly misquote Orwell, however, not all pangolins are equal. Whilst I don’t rate the prospects of Asian pangolins,
in situ measures may yet stem the emerging trade in African species. This is concealed by the figures you’ve used, but crucial when considering the merits of an African pangolin breeding program. A long-term commitment from some of the world’s richest zoos could – realistically – have a major impact
in situ.
Whilst this transaction won’t doom the species in its native range, it does legitimise the trade that is. As such, I’d argue that shipping 30 pangolins to US zoos is far more damaging than serving 30 on Asian dinner tables.
Technically buying wild-caught animals is supporting the trade, and it would be far better if they had instead sourced animals that were rescued. But given the disparity between the implied 100,000 animals per year traded and the 200 it cost to take 30 to America it is ridiculous to say this action has stimulated the trade.
If you were in a restaurant and the waiter produced a pangolin to be butchered before diners, would you shrug that off as statistically irrelevant?
3.2. To Zoos
If it fails it will be forgotten by the world at large (who let's be honest are oblivious to it anyway).
I don’t share your optimism. Similar scandals have rocked major zoos, including one which (according to ZooChat) refused to be involved in this endeavour on ethical grounds. It doesn’t matter whether the public cares about pangolins; they care about animals and they love a scandal. Zoos purchasing threatened species from a shady source makes a good story, with the potential to spread rapaciously in the age of social media. This is pure speculation, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it was spun to make all zoo-based conservation look dubious.
3.3. To Animal Welfare
I left this until last for two partially-contradictory reasons: firstly, I respect one recipient’s record too much to cast aspersions and, secondly, it’s the core of the issue for me. Relating back to the opacity of this endeavour, I don’t know the ins and outs of how these animals were captured, acclimated, weaned, etc. What I do know is that this could not have been achieved without animal welfare being compromised.
Conservationists have typically been fairly ambivalent about this issue, but that is slowly changing. Compassionate Conservation is a field built on the idea that animal welfare should be taken into account. This doesn’t necessarily mean prioritising welfare over conservation efforts (the utilitarian and animal rights view), but we can strive to minimise epiphenomenal or unnecessary suffering within a conservation framework.
As such, I believe the animal welfare implications of this effort are a greater cost than the conservation implications. If you found my arguments surrounding conservation unconvincing, that may be because I’m not wholly convinced myself. This import hasn’t doomed the species, but it has harmed the animals involved. The financial transaction had a negligible impact on African pangolin populations, but a not-so-negligible impact on the animals traded by this man.
In this case, I believe the real cost to animal welfare far outweighs the remote chance of a successful conservation outcome.
Synthesis
I said at the outset that I’m a pragmatist. I agree that rigid adherence to best practice can be counterproductive, and bending the rules may present opportunities to make a real difference. “The high road is very pretty,” said my favourite
Thrones character, “but you’ll have a hard time marching your army down it.” Sometimes the ends justify the means.
In fact, under the right circumstances, I could swallow every one of the costs I’ve condemned – for the zoos involved and zoos generally, for the pangolins involved and conservation generally – but only in service to realistic prospects. Believing this effort is doomed, and caring about the costs incurred, I cannot support it.
I think this is an argument I'm going to lose...
It all comes down to a value judgement. History suggests you’ll win the court of public opinion at least.
Point noted.
and much more succinctly than I managed!
we really need to find a topic we're both a) interested in and b) on the same side of! I suspect we'd chatter for hours.
