Thread by @9brandon

I disagree with just about every point in this thread, but most of all this:

The idea that conservation is primarily about killing animals.

That is such a profoundly impoverished, untrue, and self-defeating vision.

(An essay-length) 🧵...

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983841357631494

Protecting habitat, connecting habitat, ecological restoration & rewilding, protecting keystone species, solving human-wildlife conflict, stopping poaching & the wildlife trade, finding less-harmful alternatives to current economic processes: this is conservation, too.

Killing some animals to protect other species or a desired ecological configuration is just one part of conservation.

Even if someone opposes killing animals under any circumstances, they can still support the rest of it.

Moreover, this dichotomy between people who wholeheartedly support killing animals and those “opposed to all killing” is false.

Most people fall somewhere between those poles. Many—like myself—are not opposed to all killing, but think the bar for it should be set high.

Some more thoughts on this thread. It was sparked by a WildAid fundraising campaign that invited donors to name two rescued baby pangolins.

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983816456040455

The idea that animals (except our pets, of course!) are basically interchangeable units with no intrinsic value as individuals—no thoughts and feelings and self-awareness and social relations and memories and plans—is intellectually unsupportable.

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983820629348358

I mean, one could conceivably argue that yes, they *do* have all that, but it doesn’t matter, they’re still just a bunch of animated toasters.

But that thinking undermines our most fundamental values and leads to some very dark places.

It’s interesting that many conservationists acknowledge the importance of working with people who have different values—unless, as exemplified by this thread, those people think animals should have rights, in which case they're treated as illegitimate.

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983822416125954

That some parts of the conservation world welcome people who kill animals for fun—it’s a big tent!—but would exclude those who value all animal lives is unfortunate.

Ecological catastrophe and biodiversity collapse demands more hands on deck, not fewer.

Aside: I wonder if this discomfort stems in part from the fact that most conservationists are kind-hearted, animal-loving people who, confronted with any individual pig or cow or chicken, respond with delight and affection …

… but also eat industrially-produced meat from—per @harari_yuval—those “tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, [who] live and die on an industrial production line.”

theguardian.com/books/2015/sep…

The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. It’s easier to avoid than confront.

But it needs to be confronted—not magnified by reinscribing arbitrary lines between those animals for whom one ought to have great empathy and those animals for whom one should have almost none.

Back to the thread. Here I'd like to note that—millennia of observation aside—the scientific literature now abounds with animals recognizing one another as distinct individuals. Some, like 🦜 and 🐬, have actual names for each other.

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983829810704387

Others, from 🦇 to 🦎 to 🐻 to 🐟 to 🪰, recognize one another's distinctive odor or sound or appearance. They might not have names but there is a concept of individuality.

Calling the recognition of this "anthropomorphism" is anthropocentric science-denial.

Back to the subject of conservation-oriented killing....

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983824345452552

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983826191024129

First of all, it’s possible to embrace the moral value of individual animal persons but sometimes accept killing.

The great Mary Midgley wrote of this in "The Myths We Live By." 20 years old, but still fresh:

Chelsea Batavia, Michael Paul Nelson, and Arian Wallach have also written of what they call the "moral residue" of conservation killing. It may be justified, but it should be accompanied by grief and moral awareness. medium.com/@ConservConfli…

Valuing every animal's life also means that rationales for killing are rigorously scrutinized.

There are so, so, so many cases where killing is a stopgap solution obscuring deeper problems that *could* be solved—except it's inconvenient, or we're too cheap.

Recently I visited Point Reyes National Seashore, where animal rights activists & old-school conservationists have fought the National Parks Service's killing of "overpopulated" Tule elk. sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-4-…

Much of that national park is used by industrial dairy farms. Elk live in fenced enclosures. Giving more land to elk and less to cows is unthinkable and the NPS won't use contraception to regulate elk numbers, though it would work. Instead they shoot them.

Yay conservation?

Another famous example involves killing cormorants to protect dwindled salmon populations—though other animals would still eat the salmon, and the real problem is impassable dams. But dam removal is hard and killing birds is easy! audubon.org/news/killing-c…

Then there's Australia's continent-scale killing of millions cats and foxes and kangaroos even as dingoes—who keep those animals in check—are widely persecuted by ranchers. Better to keep killing cats than rock the boat, though. theconversation.com/like-cats-and-…

Sometimes a too-easy reliance on killing blinds people to how ostensibly harmful animals are actually beneficial. To wit: "invasive" donkeys revealed by @ejlundyyy's marvelous work as ecosystem engineers whose well-digging benefits biodiversity: nationalgeographic.com/animals/articl…

And there are cases where conservation rationales for killing are not so clear as they seem. These "non-native" mountain goats killed in Grand Teton National Park would have been considered native if they lived a few dozen miles west. nps.gov/grte/learn/new…

Here’s a red-eared slider living in a tiny artificial pond in Morningside Park in Manhattan. Some conservationists want them culled because they’re displacing native turtles.

Yes, all those turtles who would otherwise be found in—ahem—*a tiny artificial pond in Manhattan.*

All of which is to say that, yes, killing is sometimes justified, but sometimes it’s not, and recognizing the value of individual animals’ lives gives us the foundations necessary to call bullshit when bullshit needs to be called.

And there will be times when values other than maximum biodiversity promotion guide our participation in the more-than-human communities of which we're a part. It's okay. Roll with it.

Back to the original thread....

And then there’s zoos.

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983833472335877

If treating gorillas as individuals whose lives matter is incompatible with keeping them in zoos, the solution isn’t to stop treating them as individuals. It’s to find a better way of keeping them—or just not keep them at all. theguardian.com/world/2021/nov…

Yes, animal ethics are complicated.

Dealing with that complexity by adopting ethically schizophrenic attitudes that ignore the modern science of animal intelligence—and the values of tens of millions of people—is not helpful.

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983846810226690

https://twitter.com/Nikolaj_Bi/status/1465983848559251464

Conservation desperately needs both traditional conservationists *and* all those people who name baby animals and support animal rights. The tent needs to be big indeed.

Thanks for making it to the end!

I’d just like to say that critiques too often feel like attacks, and I don’t intend any of this as an attack. We’re all just trying to do our best in a crisis. Debate is a good thing.

I’m also writing a book about animal personhood and our relationships to nature. There’s actually not much in it about conservation killing; it’s mostly about other ways people are putting the ethics of animal personhood out onto the landscape.

https://twitter.com/9brandon/status/1196082107354796035

* Epilogue *

“Any sane and workable approach to life has to contain both an attitude to individuals and an attitude to larger wholes.” — Mary Midgley

/Fin

(Is it even possible to publish a thread without discovering a mistake afterwards?

Here's that laggardly turtle!)