Cecil, Trophy Hunting, and Ethical Relativism

The emotion and outrage at Cecil the lion's killing by an American hunter in Zimbabwe has ebbed in the last week. So I thought I would take an opportunity to add my two cents to the debate that has emerged over trophy hunting. 

Everything that has been reported about Cecil's killing indicates it was not only illegal, but also ill conceived and poorly-executed, starting with the guides who lured the lion out of its preserve to the hunter who initially wounded the lion instead of achieving a fast and humane kill. Despite this, I find that I can’t join in the widespread condemnation of trophy hunting. The reason is I strongly suspect that most trophy hunters place great value on animals and the conservation of nature, perhaps even more than many "animal lovers" (myself included) who don't hunt. In fact, trophy hunting is arguably a component of effective conservation policy for some species and in many places around the world.

Here's a basic question: what is the value of animal or species? It's been the subject of much philosophizing since the early 1970s. As countries began extending legal protections to threatened animals and species, environmental ethicists tasked themselves with articulating and debating their source of moral value: Is it their rarity? Scientific interest?  Aesthetic beauty? Ecological significance? Cuteness? Because they just….exist?

For most of the world this debate isn’t nearly so abstract. The value of an animal or species is utilitarian and related to survival: an animal that assists in survival is valuable; one that hurts survival or is simply inconsequential is less so. In these terms, if a lion kills the livestock of a farmer in Africa, it is not only a physical threat but threatens the livelihood (and safety) of their family and community. If the protection of a bird keeps local villagers out of the forest, it prevents them from extracting natural resources like timber, food, and medicine.

Consider the case of an extremely rare species of Tanzanian frog that became extinct in the wild due to a hydroelectric dam. The value of a Kihansi spray toad changes depending on whether you are an amphibian-lover halfway round the world, or a mother whose children will benefit from electricity generated by a new dam. Many complicated cases of endangered species today have this sort of ethical knot at their core. You could even say that the mass extinction we are currently facing had been driven by the individual humans’ prerogative for survival. 

These moral scales shift, however, when a species has value for many people, even if the source of that value is different. For instance, mountain gorillas. Tourists spend millions of dollars in Rwanda for the experience of seeing these endangered animals in their natural habitat, which has in turn increased the species’ value for many local communities who have reaped the benefits of new schools, roads, and health centers as a result. The tourist values the gorilla for its awesomeness; the local Rwandan values it for the resources it brings. 

The price that trophy hunters will pay to kill an animal can counter intuitively raise the value of a species and even achieve conservation goals. For example, as reported in Conservation Magazine, when white rhinoceros hunting was legalized in South Africa, the country’s population increased from around one hundred to more than 11,000. Hunting became an incentive for the species' preservation on private land. No one would argue that a similar policy would work for northern white rhinos, of which there are only five left today. But there is much evidence that in some cases, regulated, controlled hunting can be a tool in helping multiple stakeholders achieves goals whether those be survival, conservation, or sport.

When my own grandfather killed a polar bear with a bow and arrow in the Arctic, he paid tens of thousands of dollars for what he considered a great privilege. Much of the money he paid went to the Inuit community that had an annual quota to hunt the bears for subsistence. And when he went to Africa to hunt the Big Five, he shot a rhino with a tranquilizer that allowed a veterinarian to conduct an exam of the animal’s health. These are small examples of how trophy hunting, again, when legal and controlled, can support both local communities and conservation. These hunts are also some of my grandfather’s most-cherished memories because he deeply values animals and wilderness, and has sought direct experiences of them since he was a boy. 

Even as we condemn the circumstances and illegality of Cecil’s killing in Zimbabwe, we might take this opportunity to ask some questions about our ethical convictions. What is the source of the moral value we extend to animals and species? Can we challenge ourselves to make room for other perspectives and a diversity of values in a complicated world? And can we find commonalities with one another in order to achieve a vision of broad, effective conservation for species all over?

The Atlantic: Making Rhino Horns Out of Stem Cells

Last spring I was reporting on the last Northern white rhinos in Africa and I had an interesting conversation with a bush pilot on the veranda of my host's home on the outskirt of Nairobi. I had been explaining how in the future, stem cell technology might be used to recreate Northern white rhinos in surrogate rhinos, when he asked me, "Why don't they just use stem cells to recreate rhino horns and sell them to stop poaching?" I went home and set out to find anyone else who had the same idea and sure enough, I found the bioengineer and entrepreneur Garrett Vygantas. My piece in The Atlantic focuses on how Vygantas is launching a company to produce and sell artificial rhino horns to Asian markets, and the ethics of this endeavor. 

One of Seven (Now Five)

I travelled to Nanyuki, Kenya recently to sleep at Ol Pejeta Conservancy and visit Suni, one of seven Northern White rhinos alive today. There are three other NWR's at Ol Pejeta but Suni is the youngest and represents one of the best chances that the animals will mate and prolong the survival of the subspecies. Suni is in a large area with two female Southern White rhinos at the moment, which game keepers hope will pique his interest. 

A Diceros and Cerathotherium

Around 2 million years of evolutionary history separate black and white rhinos according to mitochondrial DNA analysis. Were these two reminiscing?  "I was photographing a White Rhino in Etosha National Park busy having a mud bath, when from the opposite side a Black Rhino appeared. Much to my astonishment the two rhinos walked towards each other and rubbed their horns in greeting. I could not believe what I saw, as normally they avoid and ignore each other... I've been a wildlife photographer for many years. Never seen anything like it." 
 

Breaking down the numbers. 

How to bring a frog onto the Ark

Sometimes the act of coming to the rescue of an endangered species takes on the qualities of a military operation in urgency and logistics. Such was the case in November 2001 when a young zoologist by the name of Jason Searle traveled from New York City to the Udzungwa Mountains in Eastern Africa to bring back 500 individuals of the highly-threatened Kihansi spray toad to the Bronx Zoo. Now a banker in Boston, Searle describes here the context for the operation and what it was like to helicopter the frogs out of countryside in styrofoam coolers. 

When the biodiversity study was done by the World Bank before the dam was built, they found a lot of new species in the Kihansi gorge in Tanzania. But it turned out that these toads gave birth to live toadlets and for that reason it’s a very unusual and exciting species. So these toads were discovered and they became the ‘poster child’ for the effort to save the waterfall. Conservationists were up in arms: ‘This is a unique species and now we’re going to destroy it’s habitat!’ There was uproar in the international community that we need to save this species.

The dam, however, was already going to be built and eventually it was determined that Tanzania didn’t have the experience or facilities to set up a captive breeding program for the toads. So it was decided that the World Conservation Society would spearhead the conservation and captive breeding efforts. The United States was an attractive candidate in general because we had more resources to deal with problems with breeding the toads as they came up. There’s fairly strong institutions in the US when it comes to amphibian husbandry and veterinary care. If the project was done in Tanzania and it failed and the toad went extinct, then would fingers be pointed at the World Bank and people would be asking, “Why didn’t you do this right?!” The thinking was: If we could transport them back to our program, our resources were pretty strong.

The plans to bring the toads here was a year in the making. The biggest challenge was getting Tanzanian government officials comfortable with the fact that we were there for conservation purposes only, not to release the toads into the pet trade, and that the Tanzanian government would retain ownership. They understandably didn’t want another institution to benefit from a Tanzanian resource. If these toads got out to enough institutions and into the pet trade, you could have a huge, uncontrolled population.

Finally, we went the week of Thanksgiving. We were there for two weeks and the first week was all meetings. The first thing the [government ministers] asked was, ‘We want to hear from Jason.’ They wanted to know what kind of experience the Bronx Zoo had, what was the protocol for transferring the toads? I was only in my late twenties and I was nervous. I had spoken with different amphibian curators about the methods for transferring amphibians so what we had brought were cardboard boxes lined with Styrofoam so they were like coolers. The plastic containers inside were drilled for ventilation and had paper towels in them. We would put ten frogs in each container and four containers per box.

The government meetings were a little tense. I can understand it too. Here we are and they’re thinking, ‘The US is coming in and solving our problem.’ We would be the same way if someone came in and said, ‘We’re going to solve this for you.’ It was also such a highly public project. A lot of Tanzanian politicians wanted to know, ‘What’s the big deal? You are weighing these tiny little toads against power to our people.’ I don’t think anyone is going to argue that these toads are more important than providing electricity. I’m certainly not going to argue that. 

The first week was organizing and arranging equipment. You can either drive or fly to the gorge, but because we had the boxes we had to stay with them and we had to fly. There was a landing strip near the gorge because of the dam project, a sort of dirt clearing and a small motel built for the workers at the dam. At one point, there had been tens of thousands of toads near the waterfall but when I was there the water was already diverted so the population had decreased in size. I was relieved that there were even still toads visible. It had been a year of preparing and we had been getting weekly reports and each time the population would be less. It was sweet when we got there and you could see toads. They were easy to find. There was less spray so they congregated close to the river on the exposed rock or whatever vegetation, moss and ferns that were still growing.

There was no indication that there was chytrid fungus there, chytrid wasn’t a problem.  Effectively, this toad had no predators in the area, no ants or snakes, the only problem was the decreased spray area. There weren’t that many people in the spray zone either. They had the  misting system up at that time and there was an issue with sediment clogging the sprinkler heads. One person would go up once or twice a day to clean out the sprinkler heads. Since it wasn’t really working as it was intended there was talk of creating a water slide to shoot water at the exposed rock to create spray. It was a laborious, expensive effort to send someone up there to fix the sprinklers and just walking through these places caused some amount of damage.

By the third day we got everything set up and the plan was to catch the toads first thing in the morning, bring them back to the motel where there was air conditioning, and then head to Dar the next day. Everything went according to plan and we flew back to Dar. One of the government ministers had asked me to come and show him the toad before I left so I went to see him with a box. He saw them and said, ‘So this is what all the fuss is about? They’re pretty cute.’

It was the first and only time I was involved in such an effort and it didn’t feel heroic. Part of it was that I was naïve about the significance of it. It wasn’t like we were taking the last two toads from the wild. There were still toads there and no chytrid fungus. And I just figured, ‘It’s such a small area, there’s got to be another area where they could show up.’ As it turns out, they haven’t and now they’re extinct in the wild. But we didn’t know that would happen then. I think feeling of being a ‘hero,’ of saving the toads, could only come when they are reintroduced.

An African in Greenland

When Tete-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager he found a book in a store in Togo where he was born and raised about Greenland. He fell in love and spent the next ten years working his way from his homeland across Europe to the furthest reaches of the Artic Circle where he lived with Eskimos, fishing, dog sledding, and hunting for seals. His book “An African in Greenland” was published in 1981 and details his adventures eating raw whale blubber and trying to understand the cheery (but at times alarming) cultural practices of the Inuits. It’s been interesting to read Kpomassie’s story—a black man in a white world in every sense of the term—at the moment I’ve been immersed in the inverse experience of being a Mzungu (white) among Tanzanians. Of course, my trip doesn’t have the superlative qualities of Kpomassie’s, but the experience of foreignness and exposure to the new and unknown seems essentially similar...

Here is Kpomassie’s description of seeing the aurora borealis for the first time:

“On the night of the day the first snow fell I was frightened by a bizarre phenomenon. I was walking home alone and the night was still. Suddenly looking up, I saw long white streaks whirling in the wind above my head. It was like the radiance of some invisible hearth, from which dazzling light rays shot out, streamed into space, and spread to form a great deep-folded phosphorescent curtain which moved and shimmered, turning rapidly from white to yellow, from pink to red. The curtain suddenly rose, then fell again further on. The wind shook it gently like an immense transparent drapery carried by the breeze and drifting on thin air. Its movements were now regular as an ocean swell, now hurried, jerky, leaping and tumbling like a kite. There were continual changes in the intensity, the motion, the iridescent play of colors and the ripplings of this strange, gigantic veil that floated through the night sky. I stood watching it for ten minutes, stunned and fascinated.”