Our meddling is driving intelligent animals crazy
Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Recent headlines about the unfortunate death of Luna after a boat accident mean it's time to revisit arguments for ending British Columbia's annual trophy hunt for grizzly bears.
What on earth do grizzlies have to do with killer whales? Back to that connection in a moment.
Any discussion of Luna must first recognize that the playful orca was abnormal. Charming as the whale may have seemed in human terms, Luna's behaviour was bizarre by the norms of killer whale interaction within their family-based social structure. While orcas are social animals, Luna was a weird loner who transferred attachments to another species.
Now, this was amusing to some, a mystical symbol to others and it was certainly grist for the mass media with its hunger for celebrity misbehaviour -- a response driven by the public's insatiable appetite for the cute, the exotic and the tragic, preferably in one convenient package.
Luna provided all three. Yet only the completely insensitive could fail to observe that the whale's behaviour indicated something seriously out of kilter.
I actually began thinking about Luna's fate and B.C.'s grizzly hunt while reading about elephants. A troubling article in New Scientist summarized evidence of increasingly strange behaviour by elephants throughout Africa.
For example, while elephant populations in Uganda are at historic lows and wild forage has never been more abundant, New Scientist reports wild elephants showing unprecedented aggression toward humans, destroying cultivated gardens and in one case invading a village, trampling dwellings and blocking roads.
The article reports that elephants in South Africa's national parks have begun attacking other species -- rhinos, for example -- and each other. In one park, 90 per cent of the male elephants killed are victims of other male elephants, a rate that's 15 times the usual rate of conflict.
Last year, New Scientist says, leading scientists reported that "elephant breakdown" is taking place all over Africa.
What's behind it? Humans are, thanks to both poaching and scientifically planned herd management.
First, scientists now say these highly intelligent animals are exposed to great psychological trauma as they watch humans -- whether poachers or wildlife managers culling herds -- publicly kill members of their tightly-knit families.
Second, in both poaching and managing, complex elephant families are often deprived of both matriarchs who teach the young and mature dominant males who keep young males in line.
The result, New Scientist reports, is dysfunctional families in which teenage mothers without parenting skills are raising "a generation of juvenile delinquents," while the absence of mature dominant males leaves young males with no curbs on their aggression. Some scientists argue that elephants now deliberately direct violence at humans who have traumatized them.
We've been "scientifically managing" elephant populations for half a century and it's only just begun to dawn on us that the mechanisms in which we've meddled are far more complicated than imagined.
Now we discover that the outcomes of our insensitivity -- shooting parents in front of their relatives is devastating for humans, why would we assume elephants don't care? --may eventually affect us as well as the elephants.
So when I see a Luna and then read about the epidemic of deranged elephant behaviours in Africa or witness the depleted gene pools of "managed" salmon populations, I'm led to wonder about the unforeseen impacts of trophy grizzly bear hunting.
If prime male grizzlies are routinely "culled" from relatively small and dwindling gene pools by hunters and if "problem" females are slaughtered, often in front of maturing cubs, what future disasters might our self-assured meddling be creating?
Alberta has suspended its spring hunt because experts there now worry the surviving grizzly population is too fragile to sustain further kills. Here in B.C., to satisfy the desires of fewer than a thousand hunters, we permit the annual killing of grizzlies for no reason other than human vanity and bloodlust.
I think it's time to end this trophy hunt for good. That means citizens actively getting on their government's case. Why should a few hundred trophy hunters and a handful of guide outfitters get to set this agenda without challenge?