Animal “management”

We’re so good at it, right?

Hence the cane toads in Australia, the lack of predators in the American West (until recently) and the reduction in size of the collie’s brain!

Today we have in the news, the starvation of carrion as in the EU they’ve outlawed leaving carcasses to rot because of BSE. (and actually under animal “management” what they did was outlaw it, notice the problem with rare carrion starving and changed the law so now those dead animals are all contained within fences causing young bears to starve who used to eat this rot)

And an article out of Spiegel considering moving animals about due to global warming.

The Spiegel article quotes the IPCC report on global warming while other sources discount their math as being way off base.

According to a report issued in April by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…..

Yet today:

A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC’s peer review process.

What to do, what to do. Move those tigers out of their last safe place to live? Move those polar bears to the other pole?

Or maybe consider that “industrial scale farming” is the number one killer of animal habitation.

Indeed, scientists cannot even agree on the fundamental issues yet. “The debate over climate change completely distorts our perspective,” says Josef Reichholf. According to Reichholf, global warming is not a key factor for the extinction of species. “Industrial-scale farming,” says Reichholf, “is the No. 1 killer of species.” For this reason, he argues, it is questionable “whether climate change can even cause anything to become extinct.” Reichholf could be right, at least in the case of the Bengal tiger in the Sundarbans. About half of the forest cover in the region, home to more than 4 million people today, has been eliminated within the last 200 years.

Even without global warming, the tiger is losing his cover.

Is the answer – stop feeding people? Of course not, but consider the big picture.

Instead of running off half cocked moving animals hither and yon to deal with a global warming scare that may or may not be accurate and that may or may not “trap” animals in places where they’ll die, maybe we should look at what’s really causing harm here and try to work out a fair solution.

The Spiegel article mentions maintaining corridors for animal movements. Something I am in favor of and is advocated by places like the Nature Conservancy. Obviously we take over most of the world, but it isn’t too much to ask to keep some human free zones for animal travel imho.