People were fascinated, excited, and some were enraged, by this awareness raising campaign of BirdLife South Africa.

I might have preferred this modification:

But I went anyway. Curiosity.

Our quarry was the elusive and tasty woodcock. I find it funny that hunters, prone to dick jokes, hunt this particular bird. And not only do they shoot the woodcock but later they eat it. But I digress.

We were after woodcock, which is a tiny woodland bird with long beak and an overall sandpiper-like body. We went down to an island on the Hudson River where there was both good woodcock habitat and good duck habitat. The idea was this: We’d check out the duck habitat, observe the ducks, figure out where a good place to shoot the ducks from might be, work out the approach to the duck-spot, and so on, and while we were there if any woodcock dared to spring into view as they tend to so late in the afternoon, the hour before sunset, we’d blast them. And later, eat them. In a non sexual way, of course. Meanwhile, the intelligence gathered regarding the ducks would be used by my hunting companion during duck hunting season, which as I understood it was coming up.

It was on this trip to the river-island, by the way, that I learned that duck hunters are not allowed to shoot the duck while it is in the water. You have to wait until it flies into the air. That told me quite a bit about what bird hunting entails … it is as much, or more, about shooting as it is about hunting. I also suddenly realized the meaning of the term “sitting duck.” Prior to that I had not thought about it much.

So we checked out the duck habitat, and wandered back and forth among the clearing and brushy woods and water spots, mostly quietly, when suddenly we saw the crane. I had never seen a crane before. It came out of nowhere, and in just a few long and slow wing beats traversed the open sky and disappeared beyond the treeline. The moment the bird came to view my companion raised his shotgun and threw the cocking mechanism and safety. By the third wing beat he clearly had a bead on the bird. He kept his aim steady as the bird flew out of sight, but he never pulled the trigger.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I dunno. But I’m pretty sure it’s not in season.”

“That why you didn’t shoot it?”

“I guess.”

I was impressed that he was able to raise the gun and not fire it. That was good. That meant that if there was some endangered species flying around among non-endangered species that were being hunted, a hunter, with skill, could avoid shooting the endangered ones and only shoot the non-endangered one. I wondered if all hunters were this skilled. Or not.

Then, moments, even seconds, later, something else flew into view and he raised his shotgun and fired.

BAM!!!

And a thing came reeling down out of the sky landing pretty close to us.

“Woodcock!” he yelled. I was impressed that he was able to spot the bird and fire so quickly and actually hit the thing. Yes, yes, this sport was about shooting more than anything else.

So we walked over to it and as we got close I could see it still moving, either not quite dead or twitching from nerves. And as we got close enough I could see that it was not a woodcock. It wasn’t even a bird. It was a bat, trying to crawl away using its wings. The hunter stepped on it and killed it.

“Oh well,” he said.

I was no longer impressed.

Stop the Kentucky Sandhill Crane hunt. Click here for more information.

Everyone wants to be nice to the animals

A contemporary North American hunter may kill an animal for sport, but every hunter I know prefers a “clean kill,” meaning, the animal dies instantly. If one disdains hunting, this may be hard to reconcile. Like “Rules of Warfare” this sounds absurd, or Orwellian. But even if one disdains hunting one has to admit that normal sports hunting does not involve trying to make the animal feel a lot of pain, but rather, the opposite. This fact is not meaningless or irrelevant. Even those who kill for sport usually prefer to do it in a fashion that they would label as “humane” and the polarity of what is “inhumane” vs. “humane” is commonly understood to be the same by most people, even if we don’t always agree on the details of how to get there. Less pain is better than more pain, if death is going to happen it should be quicker.

A contemporary Western non-vegetarian, if given the choice, would prefer that animals are raised in a more humane environment and brought to slaughter in more humane ways. If you ask people about this, you’ll find many who claim they don’t care. But if you show these people the alternatives and ask if they would vote for the more humane over the less humane version very few would choose the less humane one.

People keep their pets in different ways. In North America, some dogs are working dogs and are never allowed in the house, while the same breed will be “part of the family” in a different household. Nonetheless, there are broad standards that most people agree on and there are certain things that society generally accepts as wrong, even if they are regularly supported and participated in (like the “puppy mills” from which many household pets come).

It is fair to say that except for those who are pathological or especially mean spirited, it is easy to construct binary choices regarding treatment of animals and find almost everyone having about the same preference for one of the two choices, where the preferred choice is the more humane one. Just as importantly, it seems that we use the term “humane” in a similar way across a range of contexts.

There are world wide cultural differences in how humans relate to non-human animals. Having lived with actual hunter gatherers (people who do not kill for sport, but rather, for food) I strongly suspect that few westerners would accurately predict what attitudes towards pets and towards game animals might be in other cultures. Our popular culture is full of misconceptions about how other cultures relate to non-human animals. For the present purposes, it is probably wise to stick to mainly “Western” ideas which are certainly variable enough.

There is no solution that will satisfy all parties

Even though the relative “humanity” of two or more ways to treat non-human animals will rarely be disputed, there are large differences among individuals as to what might be considered appropriate. There is almost certainly no position or policy that would satisfy every stakeholder in a particular discussion. Meat eaters don’t want to be told to not eat meat. True Vegans are generally uncomfortable about the existence of a meat food industry. There are those opposed to all use of animals in research, and there are those who assert that there is at present no unnecessary cruelty to animals or other inappropriate activity associated with the use of animals in research, as the process is already appropriately regulated.

The fact that there is no universally agreed on solution to the question of how to treat non-human animals means that every honest and earnest participant in the discussion must accept that they simply will not get everything they want in any process of negotiating changes to the status quo. Those who show up at the proverbial table with the idea that only their position should be accommodated should probably take their marbles and go home, because they are not going to get what they want and they are going to annoy everyone else. It is, of course, reasonable to show up at the table with the idea that things can change in the direction you prefer them, somehow.

Human rights are arbitrarily granted or assumed

I know of no justifiable argument for human rights of any kind arising from any special source or power. The only seemingly logical framework for human rights is basic equality combined with a kind of Golden Rule. I want you to not harm me or mine, so I’ll agree to the same for you (that’s the Golden Rule part) and since we are all equal this mutualism applies broadly to all humans.

Any other arrangement denigrates or damages a subset of humans, and as a species, or as a set of societies, we seem to be trending away from that approach, although there are still plenty of people who would (and do) gain from differential treatment. In fact, the average Caucasioheteronormative Western All Suffering Middle Class Taxpayer gains a great deal from the unfair treatment of certain groups of humans on a day to day basis. People are exploited so we can have cheap shoes, people are raped and murdered so we can have cell phones, and people are bombed and their lands invaded so we can have cheap fuel. There are ethnic, “racial,” national, religious, and other group-identity related factors that determine which people get exploited to benefit the others.

But despite the fact that exploitation happens, Western society tends to regard this exploitation as bad, and to some extent moves to limit or reduce it, and in the meantime, at least hide it and deny it so we don’t feel badly about it. Denying this sort of intrahuman exploitation is of course hypocritical and inadequate, but the fact that we live in denial of, rather than celebration of, Indonesians sweat shops, Congolese coltan killing fields, and the invasion of arbitrary West Asian countries tells us that we know at some level that it is wrong.

So in the end, equality plus some form of the “Golden Rule” results in the belief that human life is valuable and equally valuable across the species, and human suffering is bad and equally bad across the species. General human equality is, then, the principle by which we operate, or at least, aspire or pretend to operate, regardless of the basis for this particular more.

But why do humans have special rights over other animals? Why do humans have a rule that says we can kill any wild animal we want (with appropriate permits) but if any wild animal kills a human, it loses its right to live?

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is hard to see how this right comes from anything other than an arbitrary determination. We have decided that this is so, it is species-level self interest (but really, applies mainly to various subsets of humanity more than to others) and only works because we have the capacity to make it work.

I would like to mention a few alternative scenarios, some made up and some real, in which this principle of Human Exceptionalism can be viewed to put it in some perspective.

Suppose aliens show up. These aliens have independently decided that THEY have the right to live, and that we humans would make excellent snacks. You all know the story. No one ever questioned the (fictional) slaughter of invading aliens as … inhumane or inappropriate.

What about the death penalty and other sanctioned forms of homicide? We know that it is wrong to kill humans, but the state is granted the power to do so. Soldiers in war, police acting in self defense, heavily armed home invadees, and judges can kill people if they follow a few simple rules. The fact that people object to the use of the word “homicide” to describe these deaths is not insignificant. The fact that statistically those who are killed are typically from different group-identity categories than those who sanction or carry out the killing is not insignificant.

During the 1980s elephants and rhinos were threatened with local extinction in Kenya. The Rhinos actually did go locally extinct. The Kenya National Parks Service armed and trained their rangers and instituted a “shoot on sight” policy. Non-rangers and non-tourists in certain parks were bound to be armed poachers. Shooting them to death on sight reduced their numbers and their resolve, helped save the elephants, and allowed the reintroduction of rhinos in various parks. Human rights were explicitly and abruptly put aside in favor of animal rights. Kenya (in particular, Richard Leakey, head of Kenya Parks at the time) took a lot of heat for the shoot on sight policy. But once someone takes the heat for a new policy, it isn’t so hard for that policy to be implemented elsewhere. Today, poachers in Tanzania and South Africa and elsewhere may not exactly be shot on sight, but …. in the end mainly Western White tourists, conservationists, and big game hunters have their interest protected and dark skinned formerly colonized and systematically disadvantaged natives are sacrificed. The relationship between exploitation of humans and exploitation of animals may or may not be related in all cases. In this case it is explicit, overt, and impossible to turn away from.

We know from the palaeoanthropological and archaeological records and other evidence that there was at one time a much larger number of “hominid” species (close relatives of Homo sapiens). We can not say for sure where they went. They did not evolve into something else. They definitely died off. We can not say for sure that Homo sapiens did them in, but it is quite reasonable to suggest that they may have done so in at least a few cases.

Hominoids (the broader category that includes all apes) were also more common at one time. Orangs formerly occupied mainland southeast Asia. They probably went extinct there as late as the 1950s or 1960s, certainly because of humans. (I interviewed one person who claims to have killed an orangutan in southern Viet Nam in about 1964.) Indonesian Orangs are next. Bornean orangs are becoming increasingly rare. It is likely that several species of gibbons or siamangs went extinct during the 19th and 20th centuries. Gorillas formerly occupied West Africa, but no longer. A subspecies of eastern lowland gorilla probably went extinct over the last couple of years, and the rest of the gorillas are all in trouble. The Taï chimps were nearly poached out in the 1980s. A small change in politics or economics in Tanzania could wipe out the Mahale or Gombe chimps. The bonobos of the Congo’s left bank are frequently threatened. And so on and so forth. All of this is due to human activity.

Somebody is acting like the Aliens who view the humans as snacks. And it isn’t the aliens that are doing that, and the snacks are our fellow hominoids.

…. To be continued ….

Common Knowledge: Loons are driven off lakes by boaters. The literature from the 1970s and 1980s makes it clear that there was a reduction in loon populations on lakes that were previously more isolated, and have become more accessible, and suffered greater amounts of boat traffic. Boats cause several problems for loons, including a damaging wake, and presumably it is bad if a loon is run over by a boat. Generally speaking, though, this early literature seems mainly to say that loons like the quiet and isolation and are driven away by human business. One piece of literature I read from the mid 1980s states, and I paraphrase: “increasingly, loons have gown accustom to the intrusion of boats, but shouldn’t we ask ourselves, isn’t it better to have loons that live in their natural habitat of peace and quiet?”

Challenge: There is evidence that indicates a change in the need for loons to have an out of the way and quiet habitat, and certainly this is what I see in our local loons, who are happily raising offspring among a modest number of fishing boats, the occasional skier-dragging boat, and jet ski thingies. I’m sure that these boats distract and bother the loons to some extent, but my memory of the adirondacks in the 1970s is that lakes with boats tended to not have loons. That is clearly not the case with this lake.

What I do want to point out in particular is the assertion I refer to above: That even if the loons grow accustom to boats, don’t we still prefer the old kind of loon that didn’t like boats? I understand the sentiment that author is expressing . I would love to see far more lakes in Minnesota be inaccessible by car and to have no motorized boats. At the moment there are very few, and the average Minnesotan, when you suggest this to them, stares at you blankly like they have no idea what you just said. What is the point of a lake without a road? Minnesotans are only just now beginning to realize that if you divide up every bit of land into 120 foot frontage lots on lakes, eventually there will be nothing but houses (not even small cabins) on every single lake. It is almost too late to reverse this thinking here in Minnesota.

The problem with the statement, though, is that the original plan seemed to be to link loons, as a kind of large aquatic canary, to habitat preservation. But then the loons evolved (or changed in some other way) so the disappearance of the loons from a lake was no longer the indicator of habitat destruction and human encroachment on the natural world.

In general we have to be careful what “what if” models we use, because sometimes the reality underlying the model changes (or perhaps was never what we thought it was to begin with) and we are then left not only short one rhetorical tool, but perhaps with a tool that will work against us. “Never mind what those conservationists said! They told us the loons would all die if we built too many cabins and used too many boats! But look, the loons adapted to us! So, everything will adapt to us!!”

In the next installment: Miscellaneous other stuff. Don’t miss it!