Richard Conniff's Blog, page 64

Early Space Hero

Space Sam, in training

 

I’ve been working through the files of my father, writer James C.G. Conniff (1920-2013) and came across a thick file from a story he wrote in 1958 about the prospect of travel in outer space.  It includes a lot of photos from the early U.S. Space Program, including some of the Mercury 7 astronauts, but this one caught my eye.

It’s Sam Space, a rhesus monkey and test pilot. On December 4, 1959, Sam flew on the Little Joe 2 in the Mercury program to 53 miles in altitude.

Here’s the text on the back.  That’s my Dad’s handwriting, but not sure about the news to which Sam was supposedly reacting.

Saving Wildlife: It’s Not Just About the Parks

 

Mountain zebra on community land in Namibia

My latest for Yale Environment 360:

When the United Nations put out its Protected Planet Report in 2012, it touted the news that national governments have designated more than 177,000 protected areas around the world for the long-term conservation of nature, covering an impressive 12.7 percent of the earth’s land surface. Just since 1990, the acreage under protection has increased by 48 percent.

But this encouraging news also masks a significant defect. Setting aside the question of how well officially protected areas actually protect anything, poor planning means these areas often completely omit critical habitats and key species. When a 2004 study in BioSciences looked at a representative sampling of wildlife from around the world, it found that protected areas included little or no habitat for about 90 percent of the threatened or endangered species in the sample. The list of outcasts included 276 mammal species, 940 amphibians, 23 turtles, and 244 birds. Even in parks specifically designed to accommodate certain species, moreover, climate change could make conditions far less accommodating in 50 or 100 years.

Hence the increasing recognition that what happens outside protected areas matters at least as much as what happens within. And that has led to a worldwide upsurge in management of critical habitats by the people who live in them. This movement does not come easy to either side. Park managers have typically regarded nearby communities as a source of illegal logging, poaching, and other problems, not as part of the solution. Local people in turn have often seen the parks as a threat to their crops and livestock, as well as a usurpation of their traditional land rights.

But two studies published in recent weeks suggest that community-managed areas, or areas managed by communities in collaboration with parks, can sometimes do better than traditional parks alone at protecting habitats and species.

The first study, in the journal Ecosphere, looked at the status of tigers in and around Nepal’s Chitwan National Park in the Himalayan foothills. That country has brought off one of the few tiger success stories, with a robust and increasing population, even as poaching eliminates tigers from traditional habitats in neighboring India. Nepal’s Chitwan district in particular has seen its population of adult tigers increase from 91 just four years ago to 125 today, says the study’s lead author Neil H. Carter, a conservation biologist at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center.

The human population in the buffer zone around the park has, however, also tripled over the past 40 years, and tigers now kill seven or eight people a year there. It sounds like the classic recipe for conflict.

Under the 1996 management plan developed by the community and approved by the park, says Carter, livestock grazing in the buffer zone has ended. But the community now determines how to allocate other forest resources there, for fodder and firewood. To understand the effects of that shift, he and his co-authors set out camera traps at 76 locations both inside the park and in a 25-square-mile community-managed forest in the buffer zone. They also used satellite imagery to measure changes in different habitat types.

To their surprise, they found fewer tigers and a decline in habitat quality inside the park. But habitat actually improved, particularly after 1999, on land where local communities had a say in the management. The camera traps revealed more tigers there, too. Top-down, exclusionary policies had failed to discourage local people from gathering fuelwood and fodder in the park, the co-authors concluded. But bottom-up involvement of local people had given them a sense of ownership in the community land. People were also “surprisingly tolerant” of tigers there, says Carter, though continuing growth in the tiger population might change that. The hope, he says, is that a corridor of community-managed lands might ultimately allow the tiger population to re-connect with populations in other parks.

The second study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at aboriginal hunting practices in Australia’s Western Desert. After the last nomadic hunters left the area in the mid-20th century, 10 to 20 species went extinct, and many more experienced sharp declines, according to Stanford University anthropologist Rebecca Bird and her co-authors. One possible factor was that the fires set by aboriginal hunters had averaged just 64 hectares in area, producing a mosaic of habitats. But with the hunters gone, the average size of lightning-caused fires leaped to 52,000 hectares by 1984.

That year, a group of Martu desert-dwellers returned to their traditional lands and resumed hunting. Bird and her co-authors set out with them to test the hypothesis that traditional hunting practices fostered diversity. They focused on the sand monitor lizard (Varanus gouldii), which is the chief object of the Martu hunt. The Martu hunters typically burn a small area of older-growth spinifex grassland, according to the co-authors, then search the area for fresh lizard burrows. Burning dramatically increases their catch — and the resulting patchwork landscape also provides better habitat for the lizards and other species.

“Paradoxically, V. gouldii populations are higher where Aboriginal hunting is most intense,” the co-authors write. It wasn’t human hunting that caused the extinction of small mammal species, they conclude, “but the loss of human hunting.”

The Martu now have a ranger system running in Karlamilyi National Park, in partnership with Australia’s Department of Environment and Conservation. But when asked if scientific advisers guide the process, Douglas W. Bird, Rebecca’s co-author and husband, just laughed. The aboriginal system of know-how, called Jukurr, is so ecologically detailed, the co-authors write, that the Martu are aware of “which species of skink returns to the same location to defaecate and which mouse prefers burnt spinifex.” The government, which has no staff on the ground there, has asked the Martu to participate in co-management of the park, but the Martu have insisted instead on full ownership and management rights. Elsewhere in the world, indigenous communities and community conservancies already control 40 percent of the land area in Namibia, 50 percent in Mexico, and 90 percent in Papua New Guinea. And the evidence increasingly suggests that they can succeed at achieving conservation goals. A recent analysis in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found that community managed forests in 15 tropical countries were actually more effective than traditional protected areas at reducing deforestation.

Community conservancies are never, however, an easy fix, says Philip Muruthi, chief scientist for the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). The habitat, the idiosyncrasies of the people and wildlife living there, and the political and economic context around them mean that community management structures must be worked out one case at a time.

“Our projects are science-led,” says Muruthi. “Before we go into it, we plan and talk about which are the key areas to connect.” For instance, Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya is too small for its elephant population. But the elephants have nowhere to go because of the growing human population outside the park. AWF believes community conservancies there have the potential to open a migratory corridor south to Mount Kilimanjaro and Arusha national parks in Tanzania, with tourism providing both economic benefits to local populations and the budget for increased anti-poaching patrols.

Business considerations also count, says Muruthi. One proposed conservancy may be large enough to make its own contract with a tourism operator, while another may prosper only by forming an alliance with neighboring conservancies. Due diligence is also essential, so a deal with a lodge operator doesn’t belatedly fall through when the conservancy turnsout not to own the land under negotiation. (It’s happened, he says.)

Any community management or co-management scheme requires a land-use plan with detailed prescriptions for habitat and species. It’s also essential to lay out a clear system of governance, both to enforce the rules and to share the economic benefits equitably within the community. “Otherwise people become disenfranchised and start disobeying the prescriptions,” says Muruthi. To ensure success, AWF typically remains on a local conservancy board for the first 10 to 15 years, “because the ecological benefits can take that long to appear.”

That careful process is likely to be repeated increasingly around the world, as park staffs and their neighbors learn to talk as collaborators rather than as enemies. The Indigenous Community Conservation Area Consortium, set up in 2008, is encouraging such conversations. So do schemes like the World Bank system of payments for ecosystem services, and the United Nations system of payments for avoided deforestation — that is, REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. (Another study out last month found that trained members of local communities can be as accurate as professional foresters at monitoring REDD compliance — and will likely be less expensive in the long run.)

“The reality,” says Jen Shaffer, a University of Maryland anthropologist who works in Mozambique, “is that we can’t conserve everything inside park boundaries. So how do we work with local people? What do they know that we don’t? And how can habitats benefit from encouraging those practices? What are they doing that harms the habitat? And how do we work with the community to improve or tweak those practices, so the community is benefiting and the biodiversity is benefiting?

“It might mean moving the fences in, in some cases, or moving them out in others,” she says. “But it involves understanding that landscapes have evolved with people, and that what people do is important.”

MORE FROM YALE e360

An African Success: In Namibia,

The People and Wildlife Coexist

Shortly after gaining independence in 1990, Namibia turned ownership of its wildlife back to the people. By using a system of community-based management, Richard Conniff writes, this nation has avoided the fate of most others on the continent and registered a sharp increase in its key wildlife populations.

READ MORE

 

Ancient Insects in Flagrante

Eternal love (Photo: Li S, Shih C, Wang C, Pang H, Ren D/Many Hands Snapshot Co.)

People always say it’s a good way to go.   But I’m pretty sure this happy couple didn’t expect to be together for 165 million years.  Hmm.  Yeah, it starts with casual sex and next you know you’ve been married forever.

Also, unusually for insects, they seem to be making the two-backed beast. I was thinking this was just an artifact of being buried in mud halfway through the act.  But apparently froghopper insects still do it this way.

Here’s the press release:

Scientists have found the oldest fossil depicting copulating insects in northeastern China, published November 6th in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Dong Ren and colleagues at the Capital Normal University in China.

Fossil records of mating insects are fairly sparse, and therefore our current knowledge of mating position and genitalia orientation in the early stages of evolution is rather limited.

In this study, the authors present a fossil of a pair of copulating froghoppers, a type of small insect that hops from plant to plant much like tiny frogs. The well-preserved fossil of these two froghoppers showed belly-to-belly mating position and depicts the male reproductive organ inserting into the female copulatory structure.

This is the earliest record of copulating insects to date, and suggests that froghoppers’ genital symmetry and mating position have remained static for over 165 million years. Ren adds, “We found these two very rare copulating froghoppers which provide a glimpse of interesting insect behavior and important data to understand their mating position and genitalia orientation during the Middle Jurassic.”

Shu Li, Chungkun Shih, Chen Wang, Hong Pang, Dong Ren. Forever Love: The Hitherto Earliest Record of Copulating Insects from the Middle Jurassic of China. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (11): e78188 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078188

Twitter Rant Names Me World’s Laziest Journo

Mom would be so proud.

O.K., it’s a little odd, though entertaining, for me to be attacked by a group that calls itself the Endangered Species Coalition.  Odder still, they’re attacking me for my article describing the threat to endangered species from free-roaming and feral cats and dogs.

But, gosh, it sure makes Tweeting between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. seem like fun.  Is that “leagerly” or “Ieagerly”?

mitch merry ‏@mitchmerry 2h

I do research so @RichardConniff doesn’t have to, apparently. Ieagerly await his reply on his ridiculous TNR assertion.

mitch merry ‏@mitchmerry 2h

@NYTmag your contributor @RichardConniff says trap/neuter/release is just “animal abuse by a different name”. Do you agree?

mitch merry ‏@mitchmerry 2h

.@NatGeo Your contractor @Richardconniff is representing himself as your agent with his inaccurate piece about TNR http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/04/when-cruelty-comes-masked-animal-welfare …

mitch merry ‏@mitchmerry 2h

.@richardconniff is truly the laziest journo in the world http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/04/when-cruelty-comes-masked-animal-welfare …

4h

mitch merry and 3 others retweeted a Tweet you were mentioned in




4h:
We understand issues with feral cats but @ RichardConniff is irresponsible in suggesting that TNR can’t work. http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/04/when-cruelty-comes-masked-animal-welfare …

4h

ESC favorited a Tweet you were mentioned in




4h:
We understand issues with feral cats but @ RichardConniff is irresponsible in suggesting that TNR can’t work. http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/04/when-cruelty-comes-masked-animal-welfare …

ESC ‏@endangered 4h

We understand issues with feral cats but @RichardConniff is irresponsible in suggesting that TNR can’t work. http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/04/when-cruelty-comes-masked-animal-welfare …

mitch merry ‏@mitchmerry 4h

.@RichardConniff is wrong and too lazy to source good pieces: http://www.takepart.com/author/richard-conniff …

Living at Extremes: Tootsies and Tardigrades

Emperor penguins trying not to talk about the weather (Photo: Glen Grant, U.S. Antarctic Program, National Science Foundation.)

This is a piece I wrote a while back for The New York Times.  It’s a review of a children’s book, Extreme Animals: The Toughest Creatures , by Nicola Davies, and I thought you might enjoy it for the instances of strange behaviors (hers and theirs):

By RICHARD CONNIFF

Published: March 11, 2007

In the course of any literary or journalistic career, all of us at one time or another write something that’s utter poop. But few dare to make that word the title of a book, as this writer-illustrator team did in their last, much-praised outing together, “Poop: A Natural History of the Unmentionable.”

This time around, they take on animals that have evolved to thrive in the most extreme conditions on Earth, from the “frogsicles” that get through the winter “frozen solid and brittle as glass” to the high-jumping click beetles that manage to survive a 2,000 G-force without passing out (the way wimpy humans do at five G’s).

The authors bring just the right note of whimsy and scientific accuracy to their task. Nicola Davies, a sometime zoologist, is a writer, producer and presenter of radio and television programs in Britain. On her British publisher’s Web site, she reveals that she keeps sheep and trims them with kitchen shears. Also that “I’m expert at wringing chickens’ necks,” and, oh dear, that “I used to study whales in Newfoundland dressed in nothing but wellies (only on hot days).” Well, talk about hands-on! And what is going on with the weather in Newfoundland?

But this is a highly promising note for the sort of mischievous, nitty-gritty, unsentimental approach to nature that immature readers of all ages will love. The illustrator, Neal Layton, gets the right number of legs and eyes on his spiders, and does so with a suitable joie de doofiness. The title page shows extremophile bacteria “being BOILED alive in super hot mud,” saying “Yay!” and “Fab!”

Though I have often reported on the same territory of odd and extreme animals, this book still managed to surprise me. I didn’t know, for instance, that polar bears have black skin, the better to retain heat. Nor was I aware of the Sahara Desert ants that endure a body temperature of up to 128 degrees. (When I compared Davies’s account with the original scientific report on these ants, the only thing I thought she missed was the nice detail that they get to dine on the carcasses of other creatures that can’t stand the heat.)

Davies is clear and creative about explaining concepts like the cell (“the tiny, delicate building blocks from which all bodies are made”) and the “countercurrent mechanism” for keeping emperor penguins from losing body heat “through the tootsies.” But one term she never defines is “evolution,” which strikes me as an unfortunate omission.

Evolution is of course how all these creatures adapted to living in such extreme circumstances in the first place. That’s half the fun of the story: desert lizards that eat ants have to hide in the shade at, say, 126 degrees. So Saharan ants have gradually changed to take advantage of that toasty little free time between 126-128 degrees. Davies knows this process of natural selection as well as anyone. “Once upon a time,” she writes, “all living things were tiny, each made of just one cell, like bacteria. Then some of these single-celled beings started living together in colonies.” So far so good, especially when she adds that we humans have thousands of different cells in our bodies. But then she writes, “Living bodies are designed to … .” Yikes! Call me paranoid, but when the word “design” comes up these days in biology, it’s often a lead-in to “intelligent design,” the idea that a divine creator, rather than natural selection, cooked up all these quirky behaviors.

I suspect the word choice was just unlucky, not an attempt to give equal time. But in any case, “Extreme Animals” leaves parents to explain the concept of evolution on their own. Or alternatively, Mom or Dad can describe how God sat at the workbench to design, say, the tardigrade, so it could “survive being frozen, boiled, squashed and quite a few other trials besides.” (And what fun it will be answering those darned questions the kids will ask about a divine psyche with a penchant for putting creatures in such circumstances.) I prefer to imagine God busy with weightier matters, but now and then sitting back, feet up, to be amused and delighted by the strange ways the natural world has worked things out by itself.

That’s also how merely mortal readers will feel with this pleasant little volume in hand.

Richard Conniff has written about extreme animals for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, as well as in his book “The Natural History of the Rich.”

World’s Rarest Cat Caught on Camera

Bay cat prowling through its Borneo home.

Most readers visiting this blog today will be coming for my article about why housecats and dogs don’t belong in the wild. But here’s one wild cat they should be fighting for.  The bay cat’s forest home in Borneo is rapidly being logged, probably to make that inexpensive bedroom set you have your eye on, or those picture frames on sale at your local art shop. (I walk away now any time a wood product says manufactured in Vietnam, China, or Indonesia.)

This photograph is further testimony to the rapidly advancing value of camera traps in understanding what’s going on in the natural world.  (You can see my recent article on anti-poaching camera traps here.)

Here’s the press release describing why the photo made zoologists stand up and say, “Whoa!”:

The world’s least known cat has been caught on camera in a previously unsurveyed rainforest by scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Imperial College London.

Until now, the bay cat (Pardofelis badia) had been recorded on camera traps just a handful of times in its Borneo forest home and was only photographed in the wild for the first time in 2003. But more images of this animal have been captured than ever before, together with evidence of four other wild cat species, in a heavily logged area of forest where they were not expected to thrive.

This is only one of four forest areas in all of Borneo — the third largest island in the world — which has so far been reported to have all five species, including the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi), leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) and marbled cat (Pardofelis marmorata).

ZSL and Imperial College London PhD researcher Oliver Wearn says: “We discovered that randomly placed cameras have a big influence on the species recorded. This is something I was taught in school — I remember doing a project on which plant species were most abundant on our playing field, and being taught to fling quadrats over my shoulder in a random direction before seeing what plants lay within it, rather than placing it somewhere that looked like a good place to put it — the same principle applies here.”

Camera traps have transformed how information is collected for many species of mammals and birds, including some of the most charismatic species in existence, like tigers. Many of these species are exceedingly good at spotting, and avoiding, conservationists who spend time in the field seeking them. Camera traps, on the other hand, sit silently in the forest often working for months on end come rain or shine.

Oliver Wearn added: “The cameras record multiple sightings, sometimes of species which we might be very lucky to see even after spending years in an area. For example, I’ve seen the clouded leopard just twice in three years of fieldwork, whilst my cameras recorded 14 video sequences of this enigmatic cat in just eight months.”

All five cat species mentioned are charismatic and important components of the forest ecosystems, and predators of a wide range of other animals. They are also highly-threatened: four of the five species are listed as threatened with global extinction on the IUCN Red List. Almost nothing is known about the habits of the mysterious bay cat, but it is thought to be at risk of extinction due to widespread loss of its habitat on Borneo.

Dr Robert Ewers from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, leads the SAFE tropical forest conservation project in Borneo, where the bay cats were seen. He says: “We were completely surprised to see so many bay cats at these sites in Borneo where natural forests have been so heavily logged for the timber trade. Conservationists used to assume that very few wild animals can live in logged forest, but we now know this land can be home for many endangered species.

“Our study today shows solid evidence that even large carnivores, such as these magnificent bay cats, can survive in commercially logged forests,” Dr Ewers added.

ZSL and Imperial College London conservationists will continue to study the effects of logging on wildlife populations, looking more broadly than just the highly charismatic cats, towards other mammal species, both large and small. More detailed work aims to gather the information palm oil producers need to make their plantations more mammal-friendly, and assess whether saving patches of forest within such areas might be a viable option for saving Borneo’s mammals.

Oliver R. Wearn, J. Marcus Rowcliffe, Chris Carbone, Henry Bernard, Robert M. Ewers. Assessing the Status of Wild Felids in a Highly-Disturbed Commercial Forest Reserve in Borneo and the Implications for Camera Trap Survey Design. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (11): e77598 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0077598

When Cruelty Comes Masked as Animal Welfare

Cute but killers (Photo: Richard Conniff)

My latest for TakePart:

A few weeks ago I wrote an article, The Case for Culling Stray Dogs, arguing that one of the most important things we can do to protect wildlife is to get homeless dogs off the streets. The feral life is, of course, bad for the dogs and cats themselves. They often end up starved and sick, with painful, festering wounds.

But it’s even worse for other species. House cats alone have caused the extinction of 33 bird, mammal, and reptile species. Stray animals are also a threat to people. Estimates of the number of feral dogs worldwide run upwards of 200 million, and the World Health Organization says 50,000 people die of rabies every year.

Despite the outcry of concern from the animal welfare community about the treatment of strays, relatively few families step up to give these animals homes. (The outcry also generally doesn’t come from the poorer neighborhoods that often have to live with the problem.) That makes euthanasia the only practical way to protect ourselves and what’s left of our wildlife.

My article was about the campaign to control the stray dogs that are overrunning Bucharest, Romania—an effort that began after a stray mauled and killed a four-year-old boy out playing with his brother. The reaction to it was predictably colorful, and I got called some ugly names. Though this emotional response hasn’t changed my mind, I did hear one criticism that’s worth exploring.

A number of readers remarked that the methods used to catch and kill feral animals in Romania and many other countries are often brutal, including bludgeoning, gassing, poisoning, starvation, and even burning. If this is true, it’s inexcusable.

The response from decent people everywhere should be to push for the money, the training, and the anti-cruelty laws to change that. I phoned up Kelly Coladarci, a program manager at the Humane Society of the United States, to ask about that organization’s approach to the feral dog and cat problem.

She made a number of points I agree with: It requires mass media education campaigns to help people understand responsible pet ownership. That should include proper laws for licensing, vaccination, and humane handling. It also means proper sanitation for the entire community, so there’s no garbage lying around to attract and support feral animals.

To my surprise, though, Coladarci opposed creating shelters as an alternative to euthanasia. The campaign in Romania involves holding dogs for 14 days, so they have some small chance at adoption rather than going straight to euthanasia.  But Coladarci said those dogs often end up being starved and kept in isolation. I mentioned that actor Mickey Rourke has responded to the feral dog problem in Romania by pledging $250,000 toward a $2 million goal. He hopes to build a holding facility for up to 100,000 stray dogs.

“What’s going to happen when they’re there?” Coladarci wondered. Conditions will inevitably become overcrowded, and the dogs will be stressed. Judging from past experience, funding—and food—may run short. In such conditions, violence and even cannibalism are not unusual.

In the Humane Society’s view, euthanasia—the word literally means “a good death”—is a better last resort. The Society supports “euthanasia by injection” in certain circumstances. The accepted method is an overdose of phenobarbital, which anesthetizes the dog or cat, puts it to sleep, and then painlessly stops its heart.

But the Humane Society’s preferred alternative is trap-neuter-release (TNR)—a method that detains a feral dog just long enough to neuter it and give it the necessary vaccines. Then it goes back out onto the streets. If that approach can reach 70 percent of the feral animals in an area, Coladarci said, the population will begin to decline. Killing stray animals just creates a “vacuum effect,” she said, drawing in other animals to replace those euthanized.

I tried out these ideas on Grant Sizemore of American Bird Conservancy, which is deeply concerned about the devastation feral cats inflict on bird populations.

The first problem, he said, is that no one in the real world manages to trap and neuter 70 percent of any feral animal population. So TNR never achieves the promised population decline. And if the “vacuum effect” is going to draw in replacement strays for animals removed by euthanasia, that’s no less true for animals dying naturally in a trap-neuter-release scenario. “We call it trap, neuter, and re-abandon,” Sizemore said.

Once they are back in the urban wild, he added, those feral animals return to their daily business of mayhem. It may seem as if they are doing what comes naturally. But early this year, researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute analyzed the numbers just for feral cats in the lower 48 United States. They calculated the deaths caused by both feral cats and free-roaming cats (i.e., those that irresponsible owners let wander outside). Those cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion individual birds, along with 12.3 billion mammals, 478 million reptiles, and 173 million amphibians each year. It’s a feline silent spring.

The birds and other creatures they kill die out of our sight. They also die without our direct intervention. That makes it easier to pretend it isn’t happening. But for the victims meeting bloody, agonizing deaths at the tooth and claw of predators we have introduced into their world, this is no comfort whatsoever. For the good of the wildlife, the stray animals, and ourselves, animal welfare activists should work to get proper methods for prevention and control—including humane euthanasia—into the hands of the people struggling to deal with this problem around the world. The alternative of simply refusing to take feral animals off the streets isn’t animal welfare at all.

It’s just animal abuse by a different name.

Standing up to the Anti-Wolf Hooligans

This story came to me by way of  @PVineski.  It’s from The Jackson Hole (Wyoming) News & Guide, and was written by Todd Wilkinson, who seems to be a hunter himself.  Unlike some hunters, he understand what’s ethical and what’s not.  (He is also author of “Last Stand: Ted Turner’s Quest to Save a Troubled Planet.”)  I usually resist the attempt to make analogies between our treatment of animals and the Nazis, or the Ku Klux Klan.  But this time, the wolf mob brought it on themselves:

Who dares confront the anti-wolf mob?

“The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob — not the mob itself.”— Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg

Just for the sake of argument, pretend that instead of this being 2013, it is 1963. And suppose for a moment that our tristate region is Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, not Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

Imagine that Ku Klux Klansmen — “anonymous” townsfolk with hoods on their heads — are brazenly partaking in violence against African Americans and white civil rights activists.

The question is: Back then, would you, or I, or any of us, intervene knowing that speaking out isn’t socially popular and brings with it certain risks? Would we have the moral resolve to do what’s right?

Many people in the day, including weak-spined law enforcement, politicians and clergy, looked the other way, necessitating federal intervention to protect fellow citizens from the racist mob and to uphold laws of the land.

In recent weeks, our region has witnessed some truly sickening acts of personal behavior coming from individuals masquerading as so-called sportsmen. Their target: wolves.

If you find the KKK analogy offensive, then know it was actually invited by a group of Wyoming wolf-killers on the Bridger-Teton National Forest who donned outlaw masks remarkably similar to the hoods worn by Klan members 50 years ago in the Deep South.

In a monumental gesture of dumb thinking, they circulated a picture of themselves on Facebook, white sheets concealing their faces as they posed with a dead wolf and clutched an American flag.

Bragging on social media, they attracted swarms of kindred hate- and expletive-filled rants (punctuated by poor grammar), directed threateningly at the federal government, environmentalists and wolf-loving tourists. Implicit were vows that more wolves would be killed by vigilantes.

This follows another episode in which a Wyomingite recently shot a wolf south of Jackson, strapped the bloodied carcass to the rooftop of his vehicle and parked the rig on Town Square to shock horrified onlookers.

His guide and publicity agent, who notified the News&Guide, is a man who had his outfitting license revoked for poaching a bald eagle because it was eating trout in his pond.

The Town Square incident comes in the wake of at least 10 Yellowstone National Park wolves — enormously popular among tourists and important for science — being shot dead when they crossed the park boundary into Montana and Wyoming where “sport” hunters were waiting.

There’s also the Montanan who posted instructions on the Internet for how to poison wolves. And the Idaho trapper who proudly circulated a picture of himself smiling in front of a live, injured and terrified lobo cowering behind him in a trap. Back in Wyoming, who can forget the snowmobilers who chased down a wolf until the animal collapsed from exhaustion and then drove over it for good measure?

These are just a few of many brutish examples. What’s revealing is that no elected official, member of law enforcement or game warden in the three states has said a discouraging word.

Lack of public condemnation of these despicable acts could be misinterpreted as condoning, and condoning resides on the same slippery slope as being complicit.

Are these the values that we in the region are trying to teach our young people and is it behavior that should be emulated or denounced?

Let’s be clear: This is not how real sportsmen act. Nor does it reflect the spirit of ethical hunting in which wildlife is respected and valued, a lesson taught to our children who are required to take state hunter safety classes.

Still, elected officials, tourism representatives and community leaders (especially multigeneration “native” citizens of our states) remain meek and mum. Through their silence they embolden the mob mentality, fueling more abominable behavior.

How can governors and congressional delegations act bewildered when citizens in the rest of the country have little faith in the ability of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana to be sound wildlife guardians?

Some may claim there are no parallels between the violence carried out against civil rights activists 50 years ago and the boorish vigilantism of certain wolf killers. But the similarities of ignorance and hateful actions are striking.

They make all of us look bad.

That Puppy Love–Is It Mutual?

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. (Photo: Rekha Garton/Reuters)

My latest for TakePart could make dog owners a little nervous about their attachment style:

A lot of things in this world don’t go exactly the way we might like. And then there are dogs. You may lose your job. You may lose your romantic partner. But you can always count on your dog for unconditional and uncomplaining love.

As the Bill Currington song puts it:

He never tells me that he’s sick of this house

He never says, “Why don’t you get off that couch?”

He don’t cost me nothin’ when he wants to go out

I want you to love me like my dog

But, hey, did anybody ever ask the dog? Is he really so uncritical? Even when we come rolling in drunk and stupid? Or when, with no justification whatsoever, we take out our frustrations at his expense? Or does he sit there thinking, “Oh, man, you didn’t just do what I think you did.”

How do dogs really feel about us after all?

That’s the challenging question taken up by a Scandinavian research team for a new study published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, under the title “I like my dog, does my dog like me?”

Their conclusions may not be quite what you were hoping to hear. ”There was no evidence to support the view that because a person has a strong emotional bond to their dog, their dog is similarly attached to them,” wrote Therese Rehn and her co-authors.

But we’ll get back to that shortly. What’s interesting about the study is that it bothers to consider the dog’s point of view in the first place. Most previous studies have looked exclusively at the human side of the relationship (and doesn’t that just about say everything?). Some studies have focused on how peoples’ personalities and patterns of forming attachments correlate with the way they bond with their dog. Others have relied on questionnaires, which puts the dog’s opinion at something of a disadvantage.

Rehn began with a questionnaire (for the owners) asking, “How often do you hug your dog?” and whether they agree or disagree with propositions like ”I wish my dog and I never had to be apart” or “My dog costs too much money.”

Then, to get the dogs’ side of the story, the researchers employed Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure, originally developed to measure the degree of attachment between human toddlers and their parents. The test procedures generally involved putting a dog alone in an unfamiliar room, then reuniting him with his owner, or introducing him to a stranger, and seeing how these different situations changed the dog’s behavior.

It turned out that, when the human test subjects had indicated that they spent a lot of time playing and otherwise interacting with their dogs, the dogs made a bigger deal of the reunion. But that “may be merely a reflection of a more owner-dependent dog who is not as used to being left alone,” the researchers concluded.  They also looked at whether dogs played independently more when in the presence of their owner, rather than a stranger, meaning the owner served as a secure base for exploration. But those same “owner-dependent” dogs actually stuck close to their owners, leading the researchers to detect a resemblance to “the ‘clinging’ behavior of children with an insecure ambivalent attachment style.”

So everything you thought was good about your relationship with your dog seems a little sketchy to these researchers.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this is a conclusion few dog owners will want to accept.

But for the skeptics among you, it may be comforting to know this study, like all studies, has limits: It reported on just 20 dog-human pairs (larger studies are in the works). Sixteen of the owners were women, who may tend to differ from men in how they relate to dogs.

When I phoned her, Rehn pointed out that an insecure attachment style isn’t necessarily a bad thing, even in humans. “It would maximize survival chances, because you would get the most out of your parents,” she said. A dog’s feelings are shaped by what it has experienced with its owner, and insecurity may be a natural response to smothering love. Farmers who use their dogs for herding, Rehn suggested, probably encourage a more independent relationship, because they need their dogs to work at a distance.

The takeaway, said Rehn, is that what you do with your dog matters more than how much affection you show him, and what you should be doing instead of hugging him is challenging him with problem-solving tasks. Dogs need affection, of course, but also mental stimulation. Obedience training. The chance to get out and sniff around in the local park. Learning tricks—“even dumb tricks.” Rehn herself keeps a German shepherd at her apartment in Uppsala, Sweden, and hides treats around to keep him engaged. Kenzo has to think and sniff his way through the challenge.

The other takeaway is that dogs aren’t just the living equivalent of stuffed animals, a means for you to feel unconditional, uncomplaining love. Dogs are individuals, with personalities. They respond with a full complement of emotions to the treatment we give them.

So have a little respect for your dog. Ease off on the cuddling and the baby talk, ramp up the challenges and the problem solving. Remind yourself that there are two very different individuals in this relationship, neither completely transparent to the other. “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend,” Groucho Marx once wrote. And then he added, with more wisdom than he probably intended “Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

The Magic of Bats: Not Just for Halloween

A Rodrigues fruit bat just hanging out. (Photo: Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters)

 

My latest, for TakePart:

When it comes to bats, a lot of people go a step beyond Ronald Reagan’s notorious remark about trees. They think that if they’ve seen one bat, they’ve seen one too many. And let’s admit up front that some bats aren’t much to look at it, unless you are partial to hairy carbuncles, scrunched-up noses, and needle-sharp teeth. Bats tend not to get much public love, except around this time of year, and then only as one of the little horrors of Halloween.

But the recent discovery that bats use a kind of natural megaphone to amplify their voices reminds me that amazing and often ingenious behaviors seem to be a bat specialty. This probably shouldn’t be too surprising. The 1240 bat species described so far represent about a fifth of all known mammals, meaning plenty of diversity. Their fossil record also dates back more than 50 million years, meaning lots of evolutionary time to develop strange behaviors.

Let’s start, for instance, with that megaphone behavior. Naturalists already knew that in New World rain forests, Spix’s disc-winged bats like to make their homes in the furled leaves of Heliconia and Calathea plants. These bats get their name from the little suction cups on their wrists and ankles, which enable them to stick to the leaves (and also to your fingernails, a juice glass, etc., says one bat biologist who has studied them).

The leaves have an annoying habit of unfurling, with the result that the bats must frequently relocate. When they arrive in a new home, these bats make a call to help strays find their way back to the group—and it turns out that the trumpet shape of the leaf amplifies this call by 10 decibels. Researchers at North Dakota State and the Universidad de Costa Rica hope to find out next whether these bats select real estate based on amplifying power, or if they modify their calls according to the acoustic qualities of the leaf.

Echolocation—the ability to fly by night through tangled forests and precisely target insect prey—would of course also rate as an amazing bat behavior. But it’s old news, and we are jaded. Likewise is the discovery that certain moths put out signals to jam a bat’s radar so it cannot find and eat them.

Bats have, however, also evolved in this aerial arms race. Barbastelles are medium-sized European bats that live by hawking for their insect prey by night, and they specialize not just in moths, but in moths with ears—moths that should normally be able to hear them. So barbastelles actually reduce the intensity of their echolocation call, making them less efficient at finding pretty, but also much harder for their prey to detect. In one experiment by University of Bristol researchers, a moth could spot a conventional bat approaching at a distance of 33 meters, leaving time to begin evasive maneuvers. Barbastelles, on the other hand, could sneak up close enough—1.9 meters—to whisper “gotcha” in the ears of their oblivious prey. They have invented “stealth echolocation.”

Another adaptation to insect defenses isn’t really fair play, old man, but a bat has to live. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute spent four years studying houseflies and Natterer’s bats in a cowshed near Marburg, Germany. The problem for the bats was that houseflies hardly ever fly by night. Instead, the flies hang around on walls and ceilings, where the massive background echo masks the faint echo of the houseflies, preventing the bats from zeroing in on them.

The bats, already hungry and a little annoyed, soon realized that the houseflies were not only lounging about, but also having sex. And it was noisy sex, at that. The fluttering of wings. A burst of broadband click-like signals. What sounded to human ears like a low-frequency buzzing. You know the kind of thing. So the bats began to eavesdrop. They also realized that they could target this sound, hover just above the happy but distracted couple like demons in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, then pick them both off and gnash them between their teeth, all in one quick swoop. The result was that 26 percent of flies engaged in sex were attacked by bats. Or as the researchers (who were, after all, German) put it: “Sex kills.”

But let’s end on a happier note, and an even more colorful behavior. Chinese researchers were studying the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx), in which a single male frequently lives with a harem of females. When the male mounts a female from behind, she apparently wants sex to last for a reasonably long interlude.

To their astonishment, the researchers realized that she was keeping the male engaged by performing oral sex. Acrobatic oral sex, at that, since she had to bend over and lick the base of the male’s penis as he was copulating with her.  But as long as this was happening, the male continued happily copulating.

The scientists go into way too much detail about how and why this might be so. There’s even a video. For the purposes of this article, let’s just say that bats are wonderful.