A northern fulmar rests in Hecate Strait.
Seaside Times March 2010
By Chris Genovali, Executive Director, Raincoast Conservation Foundation
I was on my back on the aft deck of the research vessel. My repose was involuntary as we plied the lumpy waters of Haida Gwaii’s west coast. Not one prone to sea-sickness, I nevertheless felt like my head was virtually nailed down, a result of the interminable chop. (more…)
MacLeans Magazine, February, 2010
by Rachel Mendleson
As a general rule, it’s tough to get the public engaged in science. Which is why Victoria-based environmental researcher Chris Darimont says he’s “thrilled” about the attention his findings on the evolutionary impacts of hunting and fishing have garnered. His paper, which shows how the targeting of large animals has prompted species to get smaller and breed earlier, was just named one of Discover Magazine’s Top 100 Science Stories of 2009. “I know that it’s infiltrating the world of managers,” says Darimont. “And that, for a conservation scientist, is really important.”
In a sense, his findings were always destined for the mainstream. According to Darimont, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and research scientist with the Raincoast Conservation Society, the study gives credence to oft-told anecdotes about how, in generations past, animals were much larger. Based on the meta-analysis of 34 studies, Darimont found that humans have caused swift evolutionary change in species ranging from big horn sheep to Atlantic cod. On average, he says, in the past three decades, body mass has decreased by 20 per cent and reproductive age by 25 per cent.
Though we tend to think of our role in the ecosystem in more civilized terms, in reality, says Darimont, we are predators, “and every predator can have an evolutionary impact on its prey.” Unlike other predators, who typically target the “newly born or nearly dead,” says Darimont, humans go after “large, reproductive-aged adults.” At the same time, regulations often require animals under a certain size be spared, which, says Darimont, “promotes these evolutionary changes.”
With the exception of emails from “a few angry trophy hunters,” Darimont says the feedback he’s received has been overwhelmingly positive. His hope, he says, is that the findings influence policymakers—and us—to rethink how fish and animals are hunted. “It’s not good enough just to do good science,” he says. “It’s got to be injected into the real world, so that changes can be made.”
Special to the Vancouver Province, January 22, 2010
By Chris Genovali
A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia.
The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting controversy. Both sides are stuck in an expert-driven argument in which both camps claim science supports their positions.
It is time that the debate was conducted within the context of ethical considerations, as the present conflict will likely never transcend the deeply entrenched inflexible stances.
In his paper, Environmental Ethics and Trophy Hunting, Alastair Gunn states that “Nowhere in the (scientific) literature, so far as I am aware, is hunting for fun, for the enjoyment of killing, or for the acquisition of trophies defended.”
Many who are outspoken advocates of grizzly hunting do not recognize, or choose not to recognize, that it is a moral matter. They feign that hunting grizzlies is amoral when, in fact, it is not.
They pretend the trivial value of hunting grizzlies somehow outweighs the much greater harm done to the bears.
In Ethics and the Environment, Dale Jamieson writes of the problematic nature of deciding to “choose amoralism and opt out of morality. The very ties that bind us to a society entangle us in a morality. Morality is ubiquitous; amoralists are rare.”
The compulsion to kill these intelligent, powerful and beautiful animals in order to “bag a trophy,” as opposed to simply observing and fully experiencing an encounter of two inextricably linked species, is something poll after poll has shown the average British Columbian cannot fathom.
Doug and Andrea Peacock address the human-bear connection in their book The Essential Grizzly:
“The concurrent colonization of North America by brown bears and humans is a remarkable story. Both men and grizzlies . . . lived together for thousands of years, and perhaps travelled the same route south to the continental United States. Genetic evidence indicates a single invasion for both grizzlies and humans . . . ”
Grizzly bears are primarily shot and killed for gratuitous reasons. They are targeted by trophy hunters and guide outfitters for entertainment or for profit, with approval by government authorities who sanction this activity as a legitimate management tool.
Michael Nelson and Kelly Millenbah have stated in their recent paper The Ethics of Hunting that “To the degree the wildlife community begins to take philosophy and ethics more seriously, both as a realm of expertise that can be acquired and as a critical dimension of wildlife conservation, many elements of wildlife conservation and management would look different.”
Imagine a scenario in which wildlife managers and the politicians they must answer to were required to incorporate ethical considerations into the decision-making process for the grizzly hunt.
The debate would no longer be limited to metrics such as population estimates, kill quotas, harvest-able surpluses and other strictly mechanistic arguments which lend themselves to endless stalemates.
According to Paul Paquet, a former member of the B.C. government’s grizzly bear scientific panel, the fact that we can hunt grizzly bears does not mean that we ought to hunt them.
Further, while science provides information, it does not give us permission to do things. In other words, the statistics that have been generated ostensibly to inform, but in actual practice to justify, the trophy hunting of grizzlies do not contain an intrinsic approval to do so.
Unfortunately, B.C. is saddled with a policy framework for wildlife conservation and management in which ethical considerations simply do not exist.
Large carnivores, in particular grizzly bears, pose a threat not so much to human “life and property” rather to human self-conceptualization. They challenge our imagined “rightful place” in the world, primarily our hegemony over nature and its non-human inhabitants.
It is this mindset that blocks us from extending ethical considerations to grizzlies, for instance, both in the way we govern our society’s interactions with such animals and in how we wield power over bears given our technologically based supremacy (high-powered hunting rifles, jet boats, helicopters).
To evolve B.C.’s relationship with large carnivores, we could start by placing greater emphasis on examining the ethics and morality of the very concept of hunting for recreation and entertainment, as opposed to elevating trivial values like trophy hunting grizzlies above the welfare of the bears themselves.
— Chris Genovali is the executive director of Raincoast Conservation.
By Chris Genovali, Special to the Victoria Times Colonist,
January 21, 2010
A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia. The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting controversy. Both sides are stuck in a continual expert-driven argument in which both camps claim science supports their positions. (more…)
By Judith Lavoie, Victoria Times Colonist
Predatory behaviour of humans is causing some species to shrink at an unprecedented rate, says a Victoria research scientist whose study has been deemed one of the top science stories of last year. (more…)
Focus Magazine, January 2010
Re: A climate of denial (Dec 2009)
All the credible evidence vetted in countless scientifically peer-reviewed papers shows the primary cause of climate disruption is anthropogenic. Further, the scientific community agrees that global warming poses severe risks to humanity and requires immediate action to limit carbon emissions. (more…)
