When, on 18 March, 2024, Nicole Sapalovski sent a letter to Parks Canada (PC) expressing her concerns about the rampant killing of wildlife by PC, she received a typical, “boilerplate” response from Michelle Bowden, Director, Conservation Programs, Protected Areas Establishment and Conservation, Parks Canada, dated 09 May, 2024.
Bowden states that management may require, “reducing hyperabundant or invasive wildlife populations…”. Bowden says this has to be done when the animals, “…are negatively affecting the health and conditions for other plants and animals in the park.”
Bowden says that when animals like deer and moose eat too many plants, they “…consume the forest faster than it can regrow…” and so “…other forest-dwelling animals such as birds lose their food and habitat, and the whole ecosystem declines.”
And finally, we get to the phrase so beloved of all wildlife management, when Bowen writes, “…population reduction may be necessary to maintain ecological integrity…” as PC is legislatively required to do. “Ecological integrity” and the synonymous “ecosystem integrity” are beloved buzz phrases of wildlife managers (many being supported by our tax dollars). They are value-laden concepts that have no objective relevance to the real world, as explained in the essay: Ecosystem integrity is neither real nor valuable.
The essay’s abstract reads:
We argue that “ecological integrity” is a bad fit as a value for conservation biology and restoration ecology. Both fields are organized around shared values, but it is important to be clear about the specific values and reasons motivating protection of or interventions in specific ecosystems. In practice, appeals to ecological integrity often fail to account for losses in value when ecosystems change. Ultimately, we do not believe ecosystems are the kinds of things that have integrity. Ecosystems are simply too dynamic in space and time, their complex interconnections, including coevolved relationships, ultimately fleeting at the geological scale. Any impression of “wholeness” is an artifact of the brevity of human lives and the shallowness of our historical records. We believe “ecological integrity” as it is currently used is typically a proxy for the values of diversity, complexity, and cultural connections with beloved ecosystem states. We should simply say what we mean and retire the concept of “ecological integrity.”
PC sees its role, as defined by its mandate, as maintaining each national park as a garden, or zoo, or farm, with “ecosystems” being predictably non-changing, thus not like actual ecosystems, where dynamic change happens and not always on a geological scale. Changes leading to many species extinctions came as a result of a rapidly dramatic change in the environment, in many cases the change being the arrival of humans. Some of those things that happen when change inevitably happens we don’t “like”. We don’t want to see extirpations or extinctions and we don’t want animals, especially familiar ones, starving. But food availability has been what scientists call a “limiting factor” in survival since life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago.
Humans like to maintain specific numbers of specific animals and plants in gardens, farms, and zoos to suit our needs. Ecosystems are what circumstances make them, and we are a dominant manager of circumstances. Animals don’t “need” to starve, but neither do they “need” to be shot or trapped, which PC does all too often. You might wonder why this “need” exists in PC managed areas while those same species survive in the absence of people? To see what can happen in the absence of “management”, see the Addendum.
When Nicole – full disclosure, she is a friend and a colleague – wrote to PC she wasn’t advocating allowing animals to starve, something that happens to less well-known species from time to time and always has. She was opposing the continued slaughter of animals by PC gunmen and trappers.
National parks tend to be insular, and, from an ecological perspective, like an island in that they contain animals and plants that survive there in conditions that differ from what surrounds them. They are often surrounded by terrain that is difficult, if not impossible, for some of their animal residents to traverse.
Real oceanic islands are not near continents and never have been attached to the mainland, have high rates of “endemism” – species who occur there but nowhere else. That is because from the time their ancestors arrived, the forces determining which individuals survive are different from the forces on the mainland. Islands are smaller than continents, thus have less geological diversity and thus fewer species – less biodiversity – than on the mainland.
So our national parks are not the same as real oceanic islands. But neither are they wilderness, and they most assuredly have nothing to do with “ecological integrity”, whatever it is supposed to mean. They have more in common with zoos, farms, and gardens than with real wilderness, free from human management. When Bowden suggests that without the killing, “the whole ecosystem declines”, she fails to notice her flawed logic, specifically that ecosystems change. The “decline” is in what the observer values, whether it would otherwise be present or not, if nature were left to be natural. If there are a specific number of certain species, the results are not what PC wants – a value-based judgement having nothing to do with “ecological integrity”. Change is what is natural, thus preventing change can be deemed unnatural.
Or can it? Yes, if we consider the actions of technologically equipped humans to be “unnatural”. But the answer is no if we think all we do is “natural”, thus a beaver’s dam or a bird’s nest becomes no more or less “natural” than the CN Tower or Highway 401 or a rock concert. We are dependent upon, and affect, “nature”, thus are “natural” and thus our values are “natural” and if we value killing, so is killing! If we value compassion, it is also natural.
And that is the concern that Nicole, and many of us, have. The earliest creatures ancestral to us occurred in Africa. As they developed what we would consider to be primitive technology, including weaponry, they began to move into what is now Eurasia, eventually reaching Australia, Oceania, and the Americas. Expansion was facilitated by the decline of the last ice-age and the subsequent increase in land available for our ancestors. Wherever humans went, species went extinct. The elephants, camels, horses, and many of their predators who once roamed Canada, in some cases up until just a few thousand years ago, became extinct, unable to survive the twin changes of a warming climate, and the arrival of the deadliest species the world has seen – us. No other species kills as many other species in as many different ways, including their own, as does the human species.
What we challenge is Parks Canada’s alacrity in killing as the only solution to any perceived “problem”; any circumstance or condition of the environment they don’t like. One term we use for such an approach is “gardening”. A gardener has very specific likes and dislikes, and very common plants whose abundance causes the loss of other rarer or prettier plants, are called “weeds” and targeted for removal. Whether they are a deer, moose, elk, wolf, cormorant, or any of a plethora of plant species, they are to be “weeded” out.
Every part of society contains people who want to kill; it is what so many of us want to do, and by catering to them our national parks function as gardens or an unfenced zoo, with selected species on display in pre-determined numbers. The most zoo-garden-farm-like of the National Parks are those that are surrounded by barriers preventing the free movement of fauna and flora – ocean’s water in the case of Sidney Island in British Columbia, and fencing in the case of the aptly named Elk Island National Park, in Alberta.
As well, it is difficult to look at various park plans and not see efforts being made to increase attractions to people, who, with their demands for fishing, campgrounds, visitor centers, roads, hiking trails, and all other such amenities and infrastructure, further emphasize the parks’ functioning as zoo-garden-farms. That is inevitable, but also highly reflective of an attitude that served those ancient, deadly ancestors of ours well when they were a tiny part of the overall whole, still able to wipe out species as they spread across the planet, but with ample resources over the horizon. Killing worked. We could afford to be, and came to think of ourselves as, gods among lesser beings whose sole purpose, if any, was in service of our needs, including our need to experience the pleasure in killing.
But we also thrived because of another of our characteristics: compassion. The need and ability to help others and seek to control our need to kill.
While even the deadliest killers among us always have reasons for killing – other species and/or each other – we have increasing reasons not to. Our imperialistic disregard for life renders the planet, our own habitat, ever less supportive of life. And this is happening as the same access we have to technology makes us increasingly deadly, presents us with alternatives. In the case of our zoo-garden-farm-parks, for example, immunocontraceptions is an emerging technology that can control numbers of large herbivores, to prevent the natural progression that would otherwise occur, and in doing so, offend us.
That would defeat the function of a National Park as viewed by Parks Canada; in the zoo-garden-farm-park model they want to preserve, we want to see less or no killing by humans. This is a direction increasing numbers of us, like me and Nicole, would like to go in but not, obviously, Parks Canada.
Sincerely,
Barry Kent MacKay
Addendum One:
Let me introduce you to the key deer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_deer). This is a small subspecies of White-tailed Deer and is found only in some of the larger of the Florida Keys, a chain of small islands that extends south into the Gulf of Mexico from the southern tip of Florida. I’ve seen these knee-high deer, and they are cute, miniature versions of the much bigger mainland deer familiar to most of us.
Why so tiny? During the ice age there were no Florida Keys. How they formed is complicated but put simply, at one time so much of the planet’s water was frozen in massive, continent-straddling glaciers that sea levels were low enough to expose sea bottom, which became dry land suitable for deer and the vegetation they require. But as the ice melted, the water rose, filling in the lower land and isolating the higher areas, as islands. Deer can swim, but as the islands became increasingly smaller, the larger deer could not find enough to eat on those islands and would leave, or starve. That meant that the smaller the deer, the greater the chance that enough food could be found to allow that deer to live, and breed. Size is genetically determined and so the genes that made animals small continued, a process called evolutionary adaptation to a changing environment. Many plant species disappeared from the islands. But there, too, adaptation inevitably happened so that the species most able to survive, did so, passing on those traits that enhanced survivability – smallness in the case of the herbivorous deer – to each succeeding generation.
Of course, Key deer, now endangered by loss of habitat and being struck by cars, are ultimately doomed as rising seas resulting from global climate change will almost assuredly eventually cover the Keys and the last Key deer will drown – unless, of course, some are put in zoos. Ah, but in zoos they can have lots of food, smallness will not be selected for unless, of course, humans, valuing this distinctive kind of animal, prevent larger individuals from breeding. That would have nothing to do with “ecological integrity” but would be a human-imposed process that inevitably leads to domestication, as PC practices daily. Had PC been in charge of Key deer management all those many of thousands of years ago they would have deemed deer to be “hyperabundant” and killed off enough big deer to allow survivors to exist on the amount of food available, thus preventing the “natural trajectory” of the ecosystem. That would violate another of their mandates, which is to protect the natural trajectory of the ecosystem.
Addendum Two:
The first Tree Swallows to return to Canada in the spring get to choose the best nest sites, ahead of their late-arriving rivals, thus early migration is “selected for”, a trait passed to the next generation. But Tree Swallows depend on flying insects for survival and sometimes there is a very late spring, with unseasonal cold, and that causes many insects to remain dormant – there are not enough insects to feed all the swallows and so many may starve. I have seen their small corpses piled in the “optimal” nest cavities they got to choose ahead of their late arriving “rivals”, who, being late, survived, and so it was their genes that got passed on to the next generation.
No one goes out and kills Tree Swallows so there will be less competition for food. Deer, however, are more noticeable than Tree Swallows, and more edible. In the minds of so many of us, they exist to be killed. Is there an alternative? Yes, of course. Fencing can protect valued plants from herbivores, and there have been enormous strides in immunocontraception. The latter is the practice of rendering the female animals incapable of conceiving a viable fetus. It is invasive but not as invasive as bullets from high powered rifles, or quarrels from crossbows. It is less expensive than the millions PC spends on such endeavors as gunning down wildlife from helicopters or shooting thousands of cormorants as they try to nest.
To paraphrase an expression from my own long-ago youth, give compassion a chance.
