Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The ecologist or park manager faced with these problems, will therefore normally try to
simulate the role of predator. Culling large animals near the top of the food chain is the
easiest way of controlling what goes on in a wildlife park. Anything else can be very la-
bour intensive. It is true that there is a growing avant garde amongst nature conservationists
advocating that animal populations should be left to sort themselves out - as at Ostvaarder-
splassen Reserve in the Netherlands where ancient varieties of cattle are uncontrolled and
troversy about the wisdom of this approach, and some also about its disregard for animal
welfare: in the absence of predators, many animals die a painful and lingering death, unless
they are culled. And if they are culled, why not eat them? Culling is either hunting, or else
it is a waste of good food.
These problems loom even larger for ecologists in a vegan society, since vegans, by
definition, refuse to be predators. Vegans cannot cull - at least not with any degree of ease
or consistency. And there is a further problem to be faced: what to do about poaching?
Poachers present a problem for all managers of wilderness, but they present a more awk-
ward one for vegan wildlife managers for at least two reasons. A vegan society cannot buy
off miscreants with factory-produced meat; and if vegans cannot cull, the pressure to get
rid of nuisance animals rises.
So how would wildlife parks function in a fully vegan society? New animals could be in-
troduced, but only with difficulty could surplus animals be removed, by capturing and tak-
ing them somewhere else where they might cause the same problem. It is easy to imagine
that certain populations might grow, quite quickly, to the point where they started causing
damage, not just within the park, but outside it. How would the vegan park manager stop
wild boar descending from the woods to dig up gardens, squirrels in their hundreds crawl-
ing over nut plantations or destroying timber trees, badgers rolling neighbouring wheat-
fields flat, or herds of hungry elephants stampeding through cropland?
There are a number of courses that a vegan wildlife manager can pursue. One is to in-
troduce predators and hope that these - in conjunction with a dearth of food during cold
or dry seasons - will keep the prey population in balance. The might work in some cases,
but in others it might not. Quite a few pests - for example elephants, badgers, wild boar
and kangaroos - don't have much in the way of predators and, like rabbits and rats, have
long been controlled by the hand of the supreme predator, man. Whether that hand can be
removed in such a way that animals do not cause intolerable damage to our agricultural in-
terests is questionable.
A predator species can keep a prey species under check in relation to the available food
supply. But if that food supply includes not only the wildlife park, but adjacent edible cro-
pland, the predators will not stop the prey advancing into the cropland - indeed it is to the
predators' advantage to let them advance. In the absence of any pest control by the farmers,
