Background image

terug

Unnatural selection

Unnatural selection

Paul Evans

1    TWO stories to hit the headlines   
 recently make you wonder about
 our attitudes to wild nature and
 worry about the limits of conser-
 vation thinking.
2    A fierce debate, with furious
 letters in the Guardian, followed
 proposals to control rabbits on
 the Sussex Downs by gassing them
 with cyanide. The conservation
 argument against the rabbits,
 put forward by the local council
 and supported by the Wildlife
 Trust, -motto, "Putting wild-
 life on the map" - was that the
 rabbit population on the Downs
 has in-creased so much that it
 is damaging important areas for
 wild flowers through overgrazing.
3    Rabbit populations are extremely an act of terrorism, but the out-    conservation case against mink
 variable and can build up massively pouring of public sympathy for two is that it has almost wiped out
 with a heavy impact on the plants pigs that escaped from an abattoir the native population of water
 they graze, only to be decimated earlier this year did not extend voles. Though it is true that
 by myxomatosis in other years. to mink. Hundreds of fugitive mink mink mothers with hungry kits
 Trying to control them by gassing have been rounded up by volunteers, will gobble up all the surroun-
 seemed a brutal and very shortterm including the RSPCA, and returned ding water voles, it is not the
 solution. It also incensed animal to the misery of the fur farm. whole story. Overgrazing and the
 welfare groups. The Downs have Farmers and landowners are shooting removal of reedy river edges,
 seen the ebb and flow of grazing and trapping as many as they can. grubbing up hedgerows, drainage
 pressure for many centuries and The Ministry of Agriculture and and flood defence schemes and
 will adjust. Food sent in a hit squad. other developments have caused
4    In their fervour to protect native6    American mink were brought to the damage. The real villain is
 wild flowers, the more xenophobic Britain for the fur trade in 1929 not mink but agricultural inten-
 of the ecological chauvinists claimed and began escaping from the word sification.
 that rabbits were not native anyway go. It was not until the fifties8    Nature conservation is a cultural
 and were the result of human mistakes. that they began to breed in the project, and however it's dressed
 Many argued that it was only because wild, occupying an ecological up, the killing is done for
 the rabbit's predators have been so niche somewhere between polecats, cultural ends. If we are being
 persecuted that its numbers have stoats and otters. At that time persuaded to protect the nature
 expanded unchecked. polecats had been persecuted to we like from the nature we don't,
5    Then came a story about a predator near extinction by the gamekeeping we'd better have more of an open
 that no one seemed to want to frenzy of the late 19th century. public debate about it than we
 encourage. Animal Liberation Front Stoats, too, were a common sight do at present, and thorough
 activists broke into a fur farm in hanging on barbedwire fences. investigation into the attitudes,
 the New Forest to liberate thousands7    It is estimated that there are prejudices and values that are
 of captive mink. Perhaps it was more than 100,000 wild mink in being bandied about.
 because the mink are non-native Britain, and a similar number 
 predators that seemed complicit in suffering in fur farms. The Guardian Weekly