I’ve been reading an article about hunting mortality, where the authors ask how we should arrange our hunting so as to mimic natural mortality. But they leave aside one very important question – why should we want to mimic natural mortality?
At first sight, it seems a reasonable thing to do. There are various arguments to suggest that this will be difficult to achieve, but we’ll set those aside. Instead, I’m interested in why we think this is goal is so desirable.
The reason seems to be the sense that we leave things unchanged, and hence they are more natural. But the fact we are hunting the population means that it is not in its natural state – mortality is higher, and bits of the population keep on getting attacked by a predator armed with guns1. So, the problem boils down to a more general one – what do we mean by”natural”?
I have been thinking about this problem in the context of conservation in places like the UK. Every so often a story appears on the BBC website about how farmland birds are ding badly we all think that this is terrible, and Something Must be Done. But on reflection, we could argue that the numbers are artificially high – birds that live on farmlands are, by definition, living in a habitat that is artificially maintained by man. So shouldn’t we be controlling these species, the way we do with, for example, rats and mice2? The problem is that we don’t see them as living in artificial habitats – we see hedgerows as natural.
I’m sure some cultural anthropologist has studied this in detail, but it’s clear that our notion of a natural environment relates to what we are used to, or perhaps what our parents were used to. This is culturally and temporally specific – the Finnish version of Natural is very different to the British (it involves more trees), and the “natural” British fauna does not include animals like wolves and badgers, but does include grey squirrels. The only way to find out what is truly natural is to get in a time machine, and set it for… when? 500 years ago? 1000 years ago? 10000 years ago? And even if we decide when Britain (or wherever) was natural, I bet the climate was different then.
So, back to the hunting. If “natural” isn’t natural, what patterns of mortality do we aim for? I honestly don’t know. The problem is not scientific, it is one of values – whether aesthetic, ethical, or just pounds sterling. Those sorts of issues are not ones we can solve as scientists – we can inform them through our knowledge, or say how any decisions might be implemented based on these vales, but the values themselves are societal. I can’t see how to begin to build these values – “natural” and “financial” are the only ones that seem to be based on something objective, but the former is difficult (as we’ve seen), and the latter misses much of what it means to be human: as Douglas Adams pointed out, we spend a lot of time trying to make the world a happier place by shuffling green pieces of paper around, which is curious because it’s generally not the green pieces of paper thatare unhappy.
So, having rejected values based on naturalness and monetary values, what have we left? I don’t know!
If anybody wants me, I’ll be hunting wabbit.
Richard Bischof, R., Mysterud, A., & Swenson, J.E. (2008). Should hunting mortality mimic the patterns of natural mortality? Biology Letters 4: 307-310. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2008.0027
1 Feel free to insert a Sarah Palin joke at this point. I can’t be bothered to think of one.
2 But not, of course, cats.