Tuesday 11 February 2014

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED?



As someone who is studying conservation, I found the news about the killing of the giraffe in Copenhagen and the lions in Longleat quite a depressing story.  Just like any member of the public, I felt saddened by these deaths, and as a scientist I wanted to know why there was the need to cull these creatures.

It was said that the giraffe was culled as he had reached 18 months old, and the zoo under guidance from the European Association of Zoo’s and Aquaria (EAZA) decided that culling was the only option as they wanted to avoid interbreeding at all costs.  This I can completely understand.  One doesn’t want to set out to conserve a species, and only serve to ensure the deleterious genes are represented by irresponsible breeding.  However, I would question why the animal was allowed to come into being in the first place.  If his genes are so well represented then why was the mating allowed, surely even if they want to avoid contraception to allow for as natural a setting as possible as the zoo states, then these animals must be separated, or in the next two years we could see this situation repeated.  I also have a problem rationalising with myself as to why the animal was not neutered and given to another institution if genetics was the overriding factor in his demise.  Then there is the question of his being dissected and fed to the lions.  This I don’t have a problem with as such, better that his carcass did not go to waste and that another animal benefitted from it, and you could argue better a giraffe that had a good life than an intensively farmed cow or sheep.  However this was a public dissection, and it seemed to attract a fair number of people, some of whom were young children; as a scientist I see the value of dissection, it is invaluable for teaching us the physiology of an animal and yes children do need to learn this in my humble opinion.   The way this was done however, seemed more a of a public spectacle of just dismembering the body to feed to the lions rather than a decent scientific look at the animal.   In this respect, I find myself questioning was this done really for the public good and education, or as a poorly thought out PR stunt to attract attention to the zoo.  What’s the old saying?  There’s no such thing as bad press.  Let’s face it, even the least cynical amongst us can see that Copenhagen is now going to be known all around the world as the zoo that killed a giraffe, and fed it in the most public way possible to a pride of lions.

Marius was culled because his genes were over represented. Copyright of the BBC.

As for the lions of Longleat, this seems to have attracted even more rage amongst the general public.  One neutered male, a lioness and her cubs were euthanised.   This was done during the closed season of the park, it is reported that the keepers from the park were angry, upset and confused as to why this happened.  21 lions is a big number of large cats to be held in captivity in a relatively small space compared to what a group like that would need in the wild.  It is also reported the male had to be put to sleep as he had been attacked and that they were concerned for the safety of the lioness and her cubs; so much so they put them to sleep too.  This again seems to be a problem with the breeding policies.  There were too many and they became violent is the reason that is given for this euthanasia of healthy animals.  The reports for this, unlike Copenhagen seem quite clandestine for the time being, and this makes it harder to really judge what is going on.  However, it still begs the question, why were so many allowed to breed to begin with and why was contraception not used to control it?
With both these cases one may look at it with what could be considered ‘rose tinted glasses’ where we want to have animals behaving as naturally as they possibly can be, going from well studied wild animals.  But these are not in the wild and we do have a responsibility to ensure that they are bred responsibly and with great care.  When they who make the decision to euthanise are worried about the safety of the sedation used as they might die, or that you take away the prospect of the gene pool having potential genes taken away or that the animal loses the will to procreate and therefore makes for a less happy animal, I feel I have to question these ideals.  If you are worried it will die from the sedation,  you surely wouldn’t decide to euthanise it.  If you are worried about losing potential genes, you would not euthanise the animal.  The only acceptable argument I can see is that castration/contraception may make the animal less natural and less happy.  But surely we have to look at other alternatives and not allowing over breeding.  If the EAZA has such strict laws then maybe they should be revisited and made more robust to stop animals from being bred surplus to requirements, so that other zoo’s that may not be part of the same breeding club can take on unwanted animals.

It is said that the EAZA and Copenhagen zoo have expressed some surprise that people are outraged, and likened the killing to farm animals being slaughtered for the table.  Here is where I feel that scientists working in conservation have got it wrong.  Yes most people will not really think about a cute pig when they are tucking into their bacon sarnie, or the doe eyed expression of a cow when they eat their steak, or the poor little male calves being slaughtered so that one may have that bit of dairy.  No they just won’t, because we like to block images out like that, we like meat, we don’t necessarily want to think about what it was when it was alive.  That’s part of human nature.  But when we sit down to enjoy our sunday roast, that animal was in all likely hood bred just for it’s meat and not as part of a conservation programme.  Yes, there are rare breeds that are bred to keep those breeds alive for the purpose of becoming food, but lets be clear when you put your hand in your pocket to go to the zoo, that is not what you think you are paying for.  When we as scientists become so blaze about genetics  in saying a space should have been left for an animal ‘genetically more important’, and that animals had to euthanised because they became too big a group.  It annoys the general public.  The very people that put much of the funding into conservation efforts in the first place.  In the couple of days since the killing episodes, there is now on line evidence to show that Copenhagen euthanises 20 to 30 animals per year, and that the EAZA have records of all recent euthanised animals from zoos because of breeding but they don’t like to publicise it.   This very notion of expendable animals because of their genetics is causing a backlash.  If for example a dog breeder or cat breeder euthanised various animals because it wasn’t good for their breeding regime there would be outrage.  Does a zoo really expect to be treated differently because they are housing exotic animals from around the world?  Of course culling will happen, of course breeding that you don’t want to occur could happen but it should be controlled as much as possible.  As should the PR around these issues.  Zoo’s need to show empathy and sadness if they are to be liked at all by their general public, and rather than belittling the sentimentality they should be wanting to soothe it as it’s exactly that sentimentality that puts the money into the zoo’s conservation coffers.  Even without the issue of money, as someone who wants to work in conservation, this PR nightmare has tarnished all people who work in conservation with a nasty brush and damages all the good work that zoo’s do do for those animals that rely on the help of zoos to continue to have a presence in the world.  One can only hope that zoo’s and the EAZA take on board the massive outcry these killings have caused and start to work together more cohesively and with much more empathy.

Wednesday 30 January 2013

One day you will miss me....

One day you will miss me.

You just don't know it yet.  Why would you, when you don't know about me or care about me?  You order your world with no thought or care about me or anyone else.  It is all about you.  How can you love anything beyond yourself when you have no interest or respect for anything else but yourself and your own needs?

One day you will miss me.

When bruised and battered flower petals litter the ground, ripped by the swathe of metal wreaking its first attack. Clods of earth over turned, never to be fertile again, not whilst you are here.  Greens, browns, purples, ochres and blues to be replaced by giant concrete and steel monstrosities.  My what a colourful world you are creating, sterility will be the order of the day from now on!

One day you will miss me.

Whilst you lounge in your characterless boxes, pumping out your filth and rubbish whilst sucking up every resource to fuel your warm bland interiors I have nothing.  My home, my forest, my trees; they mean nothing to you but money!  The grandeur of the tallest twisting bough and the life that lives therein escapes you and your myopic view.

One day you will miss me.

And one day it may be one day too late.  My world destroyed; your greed and lust for the inane insatiable. I have nowhere left.  You even fight with your own kind; rape, murder and to conquer is your mantra for all living things.  Honestly, how can you have love for other beings when you have no love for your own?

One day you will miss me.

And that day is now, for I have gone, never to return.  I join the prestigious ranks of the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon.  I am missed now, but I wasn't cared about when I was beautiful, vibrant and alive. Now I am just a specimen behind glass and in print for those to read about.  'Too late, too late!' will be your lament.  But, when your children and grandchildren ask you 'why?', what will your answer be?

Saturday 12 January 2013

How do you like your fur?


How much do you love your clothes?  Do you buy them to be part of the crowd, to be an individual, or just to keep covered and warm?  What about your shoes, trainers, boots etc.?  What do you look for in these? Do you wear cottons, wools, synthetics or leather and fur? 

I don’t particularly have a problem with people wearing anything they want; however, I do have an issue when obtaining that piece of clothing comes at the welfare expense and the outright suffering of an animal for it.  When you are buying your little silver fox fur coat or wrap are you in the know about where that fur came from, and more importantly, how the animal was euthanised and skinned. 

We talk about, and with good reason too, the importance of fair trade and ensuring those in less fortunate countries are paid an honest wage for honest work.  But what about the animals?  What about their welfare?  When figures revealed recently that the illegal trade in animals reached $19 million per year, you have to start questioning where these animals are going, and more importantly why is the trade becoming so lucrative. Too many times over the last five years have I seen pictures and videos of animals being skinned alive, left to bleed to death afterwards.  Can you even begin to imagine the tortuous pain that must be?  Think of how bad it hurt when you were a kid and grazed yourself, or if you have ever had an accident where you’ve cut yourself.  Now imagine someone deliberately removing your skin.  It doesn’t bear thinking about does it?  It is cruel and abhorrent. Yet, how many actually think about that?  Those knock off cheap suede ugly boots you wear, the ones all furry inside, well it has been shown that often the fur comes from animals that have been subjected to just this sort of violence.  Nice, huh?  Please, I urge you, do take a moment to watch these video’s, just type in animals skinned alive and you will find them I assure you.  Watch as they cut the skin and rip it off the animal that is screaming and writhing in agony; watch as it looks on afterwards with nothing but eye lashes framing beautiful pain filled and bewildered eyes as blood oozes out of its body; it’s very life draining from it as it shivers in pain.  Then when you next go shopping, I want you to remember that video, the pain of that animal, the beauty of that animal and ask yourself is the money you are paying out really worth it? 





But it doesn’t stop there.  There are those that want traditional Chinese medicines that use parts of animals, which are mostly endangered.  Things like tigers testicles, or bear bile.  Yum yum!  Then there are those all-important ornaments.  Roll up, roll up, get your ivory here!  The ivory trade last year had a record number of cases.   Not just from living animals either, the want for ivory has been so high that ivory has been stolen from museums.  In fact the zoological museum in Cambridge replaced the ivory of it’s specimens with replicas and put the real items away for safe keeping.  There have been record numbers of elephants and rhinoceros being poached for their ivory and one has to wonder what on earth is wrong with us to keep doing this.  Are we really that stupid and learn nothing?  Even the most greedy must understand supply and demand and that you have to keep a stock if you want to keep that market…so why the sudden increase?


Why, and I am trying my level best to not insert words of a cursing nature here, do the governments of these countries not step in to stop these horrible things happening?  Why do we continue to help prop up this trade by not doing much?  We can’t just stick two fingers up at the countries doing this, as we wouldn’t be able to monitor the situation.  Clearly the highly publicised glamorous campaigns by PETA aren’t getting the message across well enough; and when our own governments don’t even seem keen on putting money into stopping what is a growing amount of illegal animal products being imported into this country, they have yet to decide on funding for the National Wildlife Crime Unit.  Only 6 Conservative MP’s even voted in favour of protecting the environment and biodiversity.  Does that not shout that our government isn’t bothered?  Maybe next time we go out and vote we should boycott the main parties for those that are actually committed to doing something positive for the future; but in the meantime to make any difference we need to get the message out to people that this trade is NOT acceptable and will not be tolerated.


Friday 11 January 2013

Bring Old School Biology Back!

So I have just finished my exam for Mammalogy.  I have to admit I took this module having not done much on vertebrates previously, in fact I've more or less been more specialised to invertebrates and botany until recently.  I have surprised myself at how much knowledge I have gleaned this last few months.  I now know about animals around the world, the weird, the wonderful and everything in between.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't completely without knowledge about mammals before hand, being someone who is interested I have done a fair amount of reading in my time, as well as watching the great god that is David Attenborough many times on the idiot box.

However,  when talking to people in general conversation it shocked me how much general lack of knowledge there is about mammals.  There are those that think birds are mammals and that bats are birds!  This isn't as unheard of as you may think.  And, given the fact that these days most children will walk out of school never having dissected an insect, let alone an amphibian, reptile or mammal, and that these same students will if capable go to university and if they study biology again will probably never physically do a dissection of an animal, it isn't all together surprising.

I do not like the needless killing or suffering of animals.  No sane person who reveres the natural world we live in would.  However to understand the processes and the physiology of an animal, and to even begin to relate that animal to being similar to you and I, we must look at revisiting some of the odd school biology.  I have even been questioned on my ethics of using pitfall traps or ethanol to kill invertebrates quickly to later be able to reliably identify them (some have to be dissected, so that you can identify them by their genitalia).  This worry about dissection is because of peoples sensibilities about killing an animal.  How many of these people will only wear leather shoes, eat a nice fat steak, or enjoy a weekly roast meal on a Sunday?  Are these people ever leaving their homes, driving a car, riding a bike?  How many poor little ladybirds are squished on the motorways in these peoples daily commutes?  We have to use common sense.  If we want people to know about mammals and the welfare of them, the workings of them, then we need this in schools again; rather than having a culture where we become ever more divorced from the animals that often end up on our plates or on our backs.   Ask a young child where milk comes from, and you are most likely to be told it came from a well known supermarket; many children have never been to a working farm and as we are at an age and economic climate where it becomes a necessity for parents to work more and more hours the family discussions suffer, and these issues definitely become something for the back burner.  Before you condemn me I am not talking about mass murder of lots of animals for dissection purposes, but you know there are plenty of rats and chicks bred, gassed and frozen to feed snakes, owls etc, why not have a few given to a school once a year so that young people get a real idea of science, and not just what they see in a book or more likely a youtube video.  Ask a kid where the pancreas is, or the liver or spleen and see if they know?  Or what their functions are.  Learning it from a book just doesn't give it the context you need to make it concrete in your learning.

Biology should be fun, it should be practical with lots of hands on experience; if we want to be leaders in this field then we have to be realistic about the subject, and make it something that is tangible to all that study it.   Maybe then we will become more interested in the species around us, and feel more closely connected.




Wednesday 2 January 2013

Evolution is real and the world is actually round.

I have friends of many religious back grounds and many more that are atheist or agnostic.  I have my own personal beliefs that I feel do not fit in anywhere and really I don't feel anyone needs to have them inflicted on them.  What really gets my goat though, is when people use their beliefs to 'justify' trashing science.  It also irks me when people use their religion to OK their behaviour.  I will talk more about that later.

But first why have I started this particular blog?   I came across an image on a social networking site that I regularly use.  It was posted on a page that I regularly receive updates and images of wildlife and sometimes domestic animals in many different guises. The image that was loaded yesterday was this:

My word, rather than this image getting the reaction it deserved such as 'damned right' (in my opinion), it had reactions such as 'language!', 'it would be okay if it didn't contain that awful word', 'this is disgusting, you should remove it' and the worst of all 'if evolution exists why haven't we evolved anymore, because we didn't in the first place'.  WHAT???!!!!  This provoked me to respond and point out that we have been changing over time, but I guess this moron expected us to all have grown two more limbs and have the ability to teleport across time and space just by rubbing our left ear, by now.

How can people seriously question the science of this?  Why do some people think that other species evolve but we don't?  Where is the sense in that?  I know plenty of religious people who can reason evolution and see that their religions, or in particular their books, are not necessarily all fact.  How can they be if they are written by different people.  Take for example the Last Supper.... wasn't the accounts of this all slightly different, because if even that event did take place we are dealing with human perception of said event. How I perceive something isn't necessarily the truth or how another would perceive it.   Just because a book said the world was created in such and such time does not make that book true.  Just because JK Rowling said there was a magical game of quiditch does not mean I am about to try and fly on a broom stick out of my bedroom window in the hope that I can make the team.

What worries me most about this thinking, and in particular when faced with the picture above, is most people are more worried about bad language, or that you know, us scientists are lying to the masses about evolution.  They don't see the message, they concentrate on the wrong things.  We HAVE FUCKED UP.  No doubt about it.  We are still doing so!  Until we get our heads out of the sand and stop worrying about trivial inane nonsense then we will continue to do so.  What is really sad is that above post was indeed removed.  People felt more strongly about the word 'fucked' than they did the actual message.

When people start to recognise that there is evolution at work, that when we intervene in a bad way like habitat destruction just so we can have those nice little homes or those big fat juicy heart attacks on a plate bugers, that 'God' isn't going to just wave a magic wand and it won't just be okay; only when we start to recognise this will progress be made.  That we are and have responsibility to protect.  We need to move on from the line of thinking that the planet is indeed flat and that we can do as we please; as a born again Christian once told me 'I can be as much of a jerk as I want and it's okay 'cause god will forgive me.'  We can't be jerks anymore, we have to be responsible for our actions and be grown up about it.  We have to accept that evolution is indeed part of our life and stop trying to pretend that Santa Clause hid the bones in the earth as some big trick to play on us.

Monday 31 December 2012

Happy 2013, may it be a year for conservation and common sense.

As 2012 draws to a close, what have we learned?  How do we go forward in 2013 in a way that is beneficial to not just us humans but to the world in which we inhabit.  When we hear of many countries wanting to exploit coal reserves and pump more Co2 in to the air, do we give up the ideals of reducing our own carbon footprint?  Do we go ahead and plunder the ice of the arctic in the ever urgent quest of oil, when we already have problems maintaining oil rigs safely in areas far less dangerous?  I know it won't happen but in my ideal scenario, us, the ones with the buying power would boycott those that don't give a damn about the earth and her many beautiful creatures.

And about those creatures?  I would dearly love to see a concerted effort by the governments of the world to actually push for conservation more.  We are still loosing UK wildflowers at an astonishing rate, bees are declining and our birds too.  We in the UK have one native feline predator on the brink of extinction.  Where are the adverts for it?  Why are we pushing for the survival of say Tigers and Pandas' when most people in this country have never heard of let alone seen a scottish wildcat.  Is it so ludicrous to want to save one of our native species?  It was once feared to be at less than 400, latest estimates put it at a dire 35.  What are you going to do about this?  Are you prepared to get involved and push for the survival of this species and the re-wilding of Great Britain?

We need to be strong in 2013, we need to stay the course and change courses of animals and plants and find a balance that redresses the fact that anthropogenic change has caused considerable damage.  We have one earth, we need to look after her and all her inhabitants.

With that, I wish you all a happy new year, and pledge that as a resolution I will continue to do all I personally can to push for the conservation of species here in the UK whilst raising awareness of other species world wide.

Sunday 30 December 2012

First posting

So this is my first blog on here.  I've been out of the blogging sphere for quite some time..  but here goes nothing!

Today on a well known social networking site I came across a picture of two orang-utans, presumably mother and infant.  The infant was kissing the mother who appeared to be smiling.  It struck a chord.
I have recently been reading lots of literature after studying a module on mammalogy (which was hard work!).  The more I read and learn the more I find myself questioning the use of primates in animal testing.  I understand the need for animal testing to a degree, and understand that primates naturally are closer in their genetic makeup to us than say a rabbit.  But, I wonder, how much do these primates such as chimpanzees, orang-utans etc suffer for the greater good of us Homo sapiens.
Why is it okay to test on innocent primates?  Why is the choice not offered to those that are serving life sentences?  There isn't an easy answer.
People may even question that why should any animal be tested; what makes a primate worse to test on than the humble rat?
I myself as a training scientist have collected and killed various insects so that I may study them and their distribution better.  Some might argue that this is no better than testing on animals.  However, for me a short death by an invertebrate that doesn't have a brain and the complexity of a mammal or bird and is available in their millions is somewhat different to inflicting sometimes deliberate suffering on a mammal.  As a scientist it is one of the features of science I find a bitter pill to swallow.  It is one that I hope one day we can move on from, and employ better methods of testing the suitability of medicines and cosmetics.