Save the Great Apes!

Sometime before the end of this month, the Spanish parliament is scheduled to consider supporting the Great Apes Project, which would give the great apes certain human rights. No, I?m not joking. This apparently means that gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos would be recognized as having the right to life, liberty, and freedom from torture. Wild-caught apes would have the right of repatriation to their countries of origin, while captive-bred apes could remain in zoos or reserves. They would be able to have guardians to look after their interests in the same way as mentally incompetent humans. Britain declared badgers an endangered species in 1973, when they were indeed threatened with extinction. But it has failed to undeclare them now that their numbers have reached pest level and they are a reservoir for bovine tuberculosis. Infected dairy cattle must be slaughtered. To avoid culling badgers, TB-reactor cattle are killed instead, and their numbers have risen from 5,000 in 1998 to 24,000 in 2005, imposing a steep bill for taxpayers to compensate farmers. An alternative solution, a multimillion-pound project to vaccinate 100,000 badgers, is now being field tested (see http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22862 http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22862 ). Mink farming began in Britain in the 1920s with animals imported from the United States. Since then, the striped fur-bearers have been escaping and breeding in the wild. The situation was aggravated several years ago when animal rights activists freed large numbers of mink from farms. The result has been that the indigenous bank vole, the mink?s preferred prey, has been driven to the verge of extinction. One might ask: "What about the bank vole?s rights?" Concurrently, otters prey upon the feral mink voraciously, so what good is liberty to them if it just means freedom to be eaten by otters? Perhaps the animal rights people should go after the otters - and send the surviving mink back to the United States. A 2001 study by the Mammal Society estimated that pet cats in Britain are responsible for 275 million wildlife deaths per year. Nobody appears to mourn the 80 million mice in that total, but surely it?s a sad thing to find songbirds like the robin, blackbird, and thrush, and once again, the hard-pressed bank vole, among the dead. I must admit to a pang when my cat triumphantly brought home a jewel-like hummingbird, although I had to admire its expertise in catching such a fleet flyer. Fortunately, when the cat dropped it, it flew off unscathed. A study published in 1993 from Wisconsin, estimated that feral cats (as opposed to pets) kill 19 million songbirds there annually. Furious cat-lovers denounced the study and even sent death threats to the researchers. I am bracing myself for a spate of flaming E-mails for merely reporting the above facts - no blood sport is as popular as shooting the messenger. But as biologist C.J. Mead has said, "Any bird populations on the continents that could not withstand these levels of predation from cats and other predators would have disappeared long ago." Consider the following: Cats are predators; that?s what they do. Humans were also hunters long before we became farmers and livestock breeders, and humans are animals too. Yet we are conflicted about our predatory heritage; we feel that what is OK for cats is not OK for us. Evidently, as George Orwell had his pigs declare in Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." We have double standards about the right to life of different species, depending on a variety of factors ranging from similarity to ourselves (the great apes) to cuddliness (dogs, cats, badgers, fur-bearers). How differently we would react to them if rats had cute furry tails and squirrels had naked ones. If foxes had rat-like bare tails, would we care so much about them being hunted with dogs? I have a theory that naked, scaly tails remind us of snakes, for which we have an instinctive revulsion that can only be overcome by touching them and finding that they are warm and dry, not cold and slimy as feared. We need to face up to our prejudices. Jack Woodall is director of the Nucleus for the Investigation of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Institute of Medical Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. jwoodall@the-scientist.com

Save the Great Apes!

Should we repatriate wild-caught animals? And are some animals more equal than others?

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