CONDUCT UNBECOMING: Changing wild animals’ behavior could help save them, but is it ethical?
Virtually all conservation challenges have a human dimension. It's important to recognize that the most effective solutions may involve changing people’s behavior, not animals’, like controlling human food waste to discourage 'problem bears'.
DANIEL T. BLUMSTEIN: When large and warty cane toads were first brought to Australia nearly 100 years ago, they had a simple mission: to gobble up beetles and other pests in the sugarcane fields. Today, though, the toads have become an infamous example of a global problem: biocontrol initiatives gone wrong. The squat creatures have spread across the top half of the country, wreaking havoc on ecosystems. Cane toads are highly toxic, and consuming just one is generally lethal for predators like monitor lizards, freshwater crocodiles and the small, spotted marsupials called quolls.
But what if you taught other animals not to eat the toads? Could you – and should you? Conservation behavior scientists are doing just that. One of the most exciting areas in this quickly evolving field is behavior-based management, in which an animal’s behavior is encouraged, modified or manipulated in some way to achieve positive conservation outcomes.
In Australia, scientists are working with Indigenous rangers to teach predators not to eat cane toads. Next door in New Zealand – or Aotearoa, in the Indigenous Māori language – researchers, including one of us, Catherine Price, have used fake scents to condition ferrets, hedgehogs and other predators to ignore endangered birds’ eggs. Other behavior-based management efforts include re-teaching lost migratory routes to birds in North America, preparing captive animals for life in the wild in Colombia and using deterrents like colored flags to keep wildlife away from sites where they might conflict with humans.
This research has significant potential to conserve threatened species and reduce animal deaths. However, modifying behavior may come at a cost to animals or the communities they live in…
One important dimension of behavioral interventions is their potential to conserve species and ecosystems without shooting, poisoning or trapping animals that people view as problems, which has become standard practice in many parts of the world. This is particularly appealing in cases where the animal is endangered. Elephants, for example, are often killed by accident or on purpose when they wander into human environments like farmers’ fields or railroads. In Kenya, farmers and researchers have built “bee fences” that use elephants’ fear of bees to keep them out of crops…
While avoiding poisoning or shooting animals can reduce overall harm, behavioral management may generate other forms of harm. For example, using aversive stimuli such as loud noises, harassment or mild pain to train species to avoid an area may cause distress and even trauma. In other cases, there are incidental harms to other species, such as animals killed to be used as “bait” in behavioral interventions. Another potentially significant issue is what we have named “behavioral bycatch”: all the costs for organisms unintentionally caught up in a behavior-based management project…
Today, virtually all conservation challenges have a human dimension, and it’s important to recognize that the most effective solutions may involve changing people’s behavior, not animals’ – like controlling human food waste to discourage “problem bears”. SOURCE…
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