Introduction Voiceover: You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.

Adam Huggins: Hey, Mendel.

Mendel Skulski: Hey, Adam.

Adam Huggins: [Sigh]

Mendel Skulski: Uh...

what's on your mind?

Adam Huggins: I'm finding I'm having to, like, take deep breaths a lot these days, just in general.

Mendel Skulski: Yeah, these are those days.

Adam Huggins: Unfortunately, I have a bit of a downer of an episode for us today.

Mendel Skulski: What perfect timing.

Adam Huggins: 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: Well, I guess I have to take your word for it.

What do you got?

Adam Huggins: 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: Woo hoo!

One of our deepest moral dilemmas.

And that would be?

Adam Huggins: That would be, is it okay to kill one thing in order to save another?

Here, let me give you an example.

Mendel Skulski: Okay, shoot ...no, wait!

Don't shoot!

Uh...

where are we headed?

Adam Huggins: Mendel, if you were to guess what the southern most peace of Canada is.

Where would you guess?

Somewhere in Ontario?

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: 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: Long time listeners might recognize Sarah Cox.

Sarah Cox: Yes, I was on the show, I think maybe six years ago.

Mendel Skulski: Yeah, that was in season two, our episode on lichen and mountain caribou, which was also a depressing one.

Adam Huggins: 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: My most recent book is called Signs of Life — Field Notes From the Front Lines of Extinction.

Adam Huggins: Bringing us back to Middle Island, which, as Sarah said, is one of the last Canadian outposts of the Carolinian ecosystem.

Mendel Skulski: Caro....

like North and South Carolina?

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: Sassafras!

Sassafras, sassafras...

great name.

Adam Huggins: 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: Kentucky coffee tree...?

Adam Huggins: Yes, it does not produce coffee.

Mendel Skulski: Oh.

Adam Huggins: It is a tree.

It is found in Kentucky, and it's actually in the legume family.

Mendel Skulski: Huh...

bean tree

Adam Huggins: Yeah, pretty cool tree.

Also a schedule one threatened species in Canada.

Mendel Skulski: Okay, so we've got a bunch of species at risk in an endangered ecosystem in Canada

Adam Huggins: On a tiny island in a national park.

Yes.

Mendel Skulski: Right.

Okay, so right, where they belong — under protection.

Adam Huggins: Well, they're protected, true.

At least from people.

Mendel Skulski: So what's the problem?

What's threatening all the rare plants of Middle Island, if not people?

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: You're familiar with cormorants, right?

Mendel Skulski: Yeah, I've been pooped on by cormorants, in fact.

Have I never told you that story?

Adam Huggins: I am pretty sure you have not.

Mendel Skulski: 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: You know, it's funny, Mendel, not so long ago, cormorants almost went extinct.

Sarah Cox: 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.

Sarah Cox: 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: Wait, what?

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: I mean, some very special plants, Mendel and the species that depend on them.

Mendel Skulski: 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: 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: Unfortunately.

Adam Huggins: 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: Gross.

Adam Huggins: Yeah.

And Sarah got to see and smell all of this for herself when she visited.

Sarah Cox: 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: 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: Exactly.

Mendel Skulski: How did that go?

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: There's pelicans here too?

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: Right, unsurprisingly.

Adam Huggins: 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: On the other hand, you might wonder how safe any species is south of the border right now.

Adam Huggins: Yeah, from a scientific point of view, there is a really good reason why we choose to protect marginal populations like this.

Sarah Cox: 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: 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: 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: Exactly.

Sarah Cox: 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: 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: 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: For as long as we have been a species, human beings have employed killing as one of our primary responses to adversity.

Dirty Harry: You gotta ask yourself a question.

Do I feel lucky?

Well, do ya, punk?!

Adam Huggins: 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: You're a disease, and I'm the cure.

Adam Huggins: This is the logic of political assassinations, of revenge plots and the endings of most Hollywood blockbusters.

Terminator: Hasta la vista, baby.

[Gunshot]

Adam Huggins: 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: From Future Ecologies, this is Humane Being,

Introduction Voiceover: 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: Well, since we have Sarah Cox back in the house, does she have any updates on the mountain caribou situation?

Adam Huggins: Nothing particularly encouraging.

Sarah Cox: 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: I'm already seeing a parallel here between the situation with the wolves and the cormorants.

Adam Huggins: Yeah.

So that episode about the wolves and the caribou was about many things

Mendel Skulski: Famously

Adam Huggins: But it was mostly about extinction.

Yeah,

Sarah Cox: 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: 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: 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: Well, we are off to a rosy start.

Adam Huggins: 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: I'm afraid to ask, but what could be more downhill from the state of the mountain caribou?

Adam Huggins: 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: Not really.

I've never seen one.

Also never been pooped on by one, either.

Adam Huggins: Don't worry, Sarah has got you covered.

Sarah Cox: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: And no politician is coming out and seeing that publicly — we have lost the spotted owl from Canada's wild.

Mendel Skulski: Well, maybe it's an obvious question, but like, how did we get here?

Adam Huggins: 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: Yeah, I'd call that an understatement

Adam Huggins: 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: Yes.

Adam Huggins: Are you familiar with the rivet popper hypothesis, Mendel?

Mendel Skulski: I am not.

Adam Huggins: So the rivet popper hypothesis is this famous thought experiment proposed by the biologist Paul Ehrlich in the 1980s.

Mendel Skulski: Okay?

Adam Huggins: 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: Hmm, I don't appreciate being a kind of captive passenger in this grand experiment, but that's where we find ourselves.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: I think it's time you reminded me.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: A breeding center?

Adam Huggins: Yes, Indeed.

Sarah Cox: 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: 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: How romantic.

Adam Huggins: Yeah, I couldn't help but ask Sarah if she took them up on it.

Sarah Cox: I did not.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: Exactly and just like how caribou have wolves, spotted owls have their own antagonist.

Sarah Cox: 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: I actually happen to have a nesting pair of barred owls in my own backyard.

Listen...

that's them calling.

Mendel Skulski: Mmm.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: We need to...

do something...

about barred owls.

Adam Huggins: Which means we're killing them.

News Announcer 1: 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: 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: 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: Okay, so we're not killing them everywhere.

We're just focusing on spotted owl habitat.

Adam Huggins: Yes, the breeding pair in my backyard is not currently at risk.

Mendel Skulski: But like the big question is, does it work?

Does removing barred owls actually help the spotted owls?

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: In other words, it does help, even though it's still pretty controversial.

Sarah Cox: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: To say nothing of plants.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: Uh...

final boarding call for Paul Erhlich's airplane.

Adam Huggins: God, I would not step on board that aiplane.

Mendel Skulski: You don't have a choice.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: ...What is that supposed to mean?

Adam Huggins: We'll find out together — after the break.

Mendel Skulski: Okay, mid-roll, lightning round.

Future Ecologies!

Independent!

Listener supported!

Patreon.com/futureecologies!

Love you!

Welcome back.

I'm Mendel

Adam Huggins: And I'm Adam.

Mendel Skulski: 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: I have another Sara to introduce you to.

Mendel Skulski: Okay, so this episode has become a tale of three Sara's.

Adam Huggins: It has.

Mendel Skulski: We've got Sarah Cox, we've got SARA, the Species at Risk Act in Canada, and now...?

Adam Huggins: And now we have Dr.

Sara Dubois.

Sara Dubois: 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: I spoke to Sarah because she's at the forefront in BC of a movement sometimes known as compassionate conservation.

Mendel Skulski: And for those who don't know, the SPCA is...?

Adam Huggins: Short for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

And there are versions of it all around the world.

Sara Dubois: 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: In British Columbia, the BC SPCA is a charity that has been charged by the province with enforcing animal cruelty laws.

Mendel Skulski: Huh...

okay, interesting.

It runs animal shelters, and it also enforces the law.

Adam Huggins: Yes, it is a donor-funded law enforcement agency, among other things,

Mendel Skulski: That's wild.

So what's Sara's story?

Adam Huggins: 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: Classic.

Sara Dubois: 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: 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: 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: And apparently in university, she actually had to dissect a cat.

Mendel Skulski: Oh...

I would not be capable.

Adam Huggins: You are not alone.

Sara Dubois: 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: And that can work for some of us, but this kind of rationalization just doesn't sit right with lots of people.

Sara Dubois: 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: 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: That's right.

It is undeniable that the field of biology can, at times, be a killing field.

Sara Dubois: 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: 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: 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: 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: Oh...

Mendel Skulski: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Yes, once we give an animal a label, it justifies to certain people that they can do bad things to it.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: Like with the barred owl?

Adam Huggins: 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: Hah!

No way.

Sara Dubois: 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: Well, what were the results?

What did people say?

Adam Huggins: 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: I mean, biologists are people too, I guess.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: Wait, how often do these things just fail outright?

Adam Huggins: Um...

it happens.

I should mention that the best record that we have on the overall success rate of lethal

Mendel Skulski: Hmm.

Islands, of course.

interventions in conservation is a website called the Database of Island Invasive Species Eradications.

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: 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: And all of this controversy and vitriol caused Sara to stop and ask,

Sara Dubois: Are there criteria that are justifiable from a very objective lens?

Adam Huggins: And this is where the International Consensus Principles for Ethical Wildlife Control began.

Sara Dubois: 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: 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: Who doesn't love a list?

I mean, folks know what they signed up for.

Mendel Skulski: Okay, hit me.

Adam Huggins: Okay.

There are seven principles, and I personally like them best phrased as questions.

Let's start with

Principle Bot: Principle one

Sara Dubois: 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: Well, that seems like the reasonable place to start.

Adam Huggins: Yes.

Principle one asks, can we be the change that we wish to see in the world before we start killing things?

Principle Bot: Principle two

Sara Dubois: 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: Raccoons eating garbage?

That's an ecosystem service!

Adam Huggins: At the very least, it probably doesn't merit the death sentence, even if the raccoons do always look guilty,

Mendel Skulski: 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: 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: Principle three

Sara Dubois: 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: 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: Exactly.

Plus, do we have a plan to assess whether what we did worked or not?

In other words...

Sara Dubois: 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: Principle four

Sara Dubois: 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: 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: Yeah, methods are a question of both efficacy and ethics.

Principle Bot: Principle five

Sara Dubois: 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: Yeah, I think this is probably an important moment to remind ourselves that public pushback can shut things down.

Adam Huggins: 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: The sixth question is the control action part of a

Principle Bot: Principle six 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?

Adam Huggins: Basically, if you're not planning long term, you're not planning for success.

Mendel Skulski: This reminds me of Alberta's rat control program, actually.

Adam Huggins: Does it?

Mendel Skulski: 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: 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: Principle seven

Sara Dubois: 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: 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: Agreed.

End of list?

Adam Huggins: End of list!

Principle Bot: End of list

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Yeah...

Adam Huggins: 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: 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: 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: 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: That's why we're here.

Adam Huggins: 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: First a list, now a quote?!

Adam Huggins: Yes

Mendel Skulski: It better be good.

Adam Huggins: 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: Okay, I can't say no to that.

Adam Huggins: 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.' 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: There it is.

Adam Huggins: 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: Well, thank you, Adam.

I just have one more question.

Adam Huggins: Shoot...

wait, no!

Don't shoot!

Mendel Skulski: 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: 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: Yeah, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts.

Adam Huggins: 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.' Let's leave it there.

Mendel Skulski: 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.

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.

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Okay, 'til next time.