Early next year, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service plans to send sharpshooters to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their target: barred owls, whom they will lure into range with electronic calls and then kill—the opening salvos of a slaughter that is expected to continue for 30 years and claim 470,000 lives. The reason for the carnage? To protect endangered spotted owls outcompeted by their barred cousins.
The plan has been years in the making, with its latest announcement issued on July 3, a day typically used to bury unpopular news before the Independence Day holiday. Nevertheless it made headlines. Barred owls are no less special for being common, and to kill them for the sake of spotted owls—if it even works, which is by no means assured—is something that few people welcome.
There’s the fear of being accused of anthropomorphism. Of being soft, a bunny-hugger.
The owl dispute is perhaps the most high-profile such conflict to date, though it’s hardly unique. Conservation in the fragmented, ecologically degraded landscapes of the early 21st century frequently involves killing species considered invasive or overabundant in order to protect other species they displace or consume. In Australia and New Zealand, such programs are already massive and routine; they’re fast becoming more common elsewhere. In the U.S., they include the killing of: tortoise-predating ravens in the desert southwest, mammal-eating boa constrictors in the Florida Everglades, fast-proliferating Asian carp in the upper midwest, salmon-eating sea lions in the Columbia River, and on and on.
With the killing comes controversy. Were those animals merely biological automatons, as conventional science once held, it might not be so objectionable—but scientific research on animal intelligence has buttressed arguments for considering the well-being of individuals as well as species in our moral equations. Yet while some people argue that the killing is unethical, others counter that it’s unfortunate but necessary, the harms outweighed by the good of the species and ecosystems being protected.
It’s a profound, polarizing, and extremely complicated dilemma. In Meet the Neighbors, my recent book on animal personhood and nature, the subject of conservation killing arises but is not central; the topic was so massive that it deserved a book all its own—and that book is Hugh Warwick’s The Cull of the Wild, published earlier this year.
“When we humans have unleashed a new species on an unsuspecting fauna, when we have transformed ecosystems so that previous balances become undone, how do we fix the problem?” Warwick asks. “Should we fix the problem? Should we play god, or should nature be left to take its own course?” An ecologist, conservationist, and animal lover as well as a writer, Warwick talks to dozens of people from all perspectives, encouraging readers to challenge their own biases and find common ground. “We deserve an honest conversation,” he writes, though there are no easy answers.
In our conversation, I talked with Warwick about what he learned and how he thinks through these life-shaping questions.
First off, I really appreciated how you called animals “who.” So many writers—or maybe their editors—are still reluctant to use personal pronouns for animals, and that sense of each animal as a someone is mostly missing from conservation discourse. You certainly can’t talk like that in scientific journals.
The difficulty is, coming from a scientific rather than a literary background, there is the fear of being accused of anthropomorphism. Of being soft, being a bunny-hugger.
The first animals I really started studying—hedgehogs—all remained numbered. I was only 18 or 19, doing my degree project. Later on, when I was radio-tracking them and seeing them time and time again, it became a joke that I’d given them names instead of numbers. My supervisor at the time said, “You can’t give them names.” And I said, “Jane Goodall gave her chimpanzees names. Why can’t I give hedgehogs names?”
In Cull of the Wild I talk about how the language you use to talk about anything else colors how you treat them—whether that’s people or other species of animals or plants or anything. You can transform the way that thing is treated by the words you call it.
I walk down the garden to my shed and I talk to the birds I see. I have no woo in me, I like to think; I’m an atheist, I believe in an evidence-based system of thought. But I still talk to the animals as I go past because we’re sharing the same space, and that feels important.
Some of the best-known examples of conservation culling involve eradicating rats on islands that host seabird colonies. And whatever misgivings I feel, I can see the case for it. The before-and-after is so strikingly different. These enormous colonies are delivering nutrients to the surrounding waters; nearshore ecosystems flourish because of them, and the killing is of a limited duration. It’s feasible to kill all the rats on the island. It’s not going to go on forever.
But sometimes the rationale for protecting species can seem very fuzzy. You write about the killing of grey squirrels to protect red squirrels in western Europe. Nobody’s saying that red squirrels are going to go extinct. They’re being replaced by grey squirrels in part of their range. It seems to me like the killing is a matter of aesthetic preference. It’s not about ecosystem function or whether there will be a forest at all—yet the justification is often portrayed as ironclad. I feel uncomfortable with that.
The main issue we’ve got in the United Kingdom is that we will eventually have the extinction of red squirrels in this country. The issue isn’t direct competition between the two species. Rather, grey squirrels carry the squirrel pox virus to which they’re immune but the red squirrels die horribly.
You can very easily drift into an almost ecofascist narrative that only the natives can be here, which is clearly nonsense. The main thing is that you’ve got one species, which is the interloper, which kills the other species by carrying this virus. And we as a society are making a choice as to whether we want to retain or give up on the native species.
I’m certainly not suggesting that people continue controlling grey squirrels forever. I write about Craig Shuttleworth, who kills grey squirrels on the island of Anglesey but says there’s no point doing what is essentially harvesting, where you go out every year and wait for more grey squirrels to be born and kill those. The only reason he did what he did and killed 7,000 grey squirrels with a truncheon is because it could be done as an act of eradication. Before writing the book, I hadn’t really thought through the difference between “control” and “eradication.” Now I see control as a really dirty word. It just means that something is going to go on and on.
You can very easily drift into an almost ecofascist narrative that only the natives can be here.
In the various checklists—requirements to meet or before killing is done—I’ve collected in The Cull of the Wild, that is one of the central tenets. If you want to start killing, it has to result in the eradication of that species in that area. Otherwise you end up controlling. It becomes a different sort of thing. That seems to be one of the most important differences that wildlife managers often forget.
As I say that, I realize that what goes on with deer in the U.K. is always going to be control. We’re never going to get rid of all the deer. But in that instance we’re replacing the predators who used to be there. We’re trying to maintain a balance that used to exist and is now out of kilter.
I think people who make the argument for killing are sometimes a bit disingenuous in invoking examples of true eradication on islands to support what are really control programs on mainlands—and that standard of not killing indefinitely is often not met.
You might have a situation where you’re not going to get all the raccoons—or whatever species it may be—off an island, but if you don’t do the work of control during bird breeding season then the birds will stop breeding there, and you’ll have altered that ecosystem enormously.
There is an argument for letting nature take its course. Other species will come along and fill the vacant niches. But that’s a little bit like being at the Louvre and seeing art on fire and going, “Yeah, but we’ll get more art. That’s fine.” And I think there is something to be said for protecting what you’ve got, especially when the reason the fire has started is because we lit it.
But sometimes it seems like the fire, so to speak, isn’t really a fire. For example, in the northeastern U.S. there is a panic about spotted lanternflies. People are encouraged to go out and squash as many flies as they can—which isn’t going to make a difference, and the narrative of lanternflies wreaking havoc on trees is speculative and now looks to be overblown. And in my book I talk about an ecologist who defied conventional wisdom on supposedly invasive feral donkeys and showed that they can actually play vital ecological roles.
There is a tendency to go for this New Zealand approach of killing first and asking questions later. It comes down to framing: how you enter into the questions about these things. If you enter through a New Zealand frame, as it were, it’s actually quite difficult to then look at the situation through another lens. If you enter through another door, you may look at it completely differently.
What I’m trying to do is to step back and say, “Actually, there are lots of different doors into this story. Let’s be careful about choosing one of them. Let’s maybe peek through each of them rather than just going in.”
You also write about non-native ruddy ducks and native white-headed ducks in western Europe. It’s not like one species is replacing the other. They have very similar ecological niches and are interbreeding. Same thing with spotted owls and barred owls in the western U.S.
This is what the animals are choosing for themselves, right? And the offspring are successful. Killing ruddy ducks really does feel like an aesthetic preference—not in the sense of aesthetic as visual, but in the sense of wanting things a certain way—rather than ecosystem function or what’s objectively good or bad.
We’re moving on to the issue of purity. It gets quite nasty quite quickly. How pure is pure.
Another example is the Scottish wildcat, one of the most endangered feline carnivores in the world. The biggest threat they face is through breeding with feral cats. The result there is you get a hybrid cat. And yes, they’re doing what they do naturally.
If you have enough wildcats, females do not go near domestic premises. They do not go seeking out feral mates. There’s none of that crossover. It’s a choice they’re only making because there’s no other choice. Do we want to have wildcats? I suggest wildcats are a good thing. Not only are they aesthetically very pleasing; they add an element of wild to the countryside. They’re the size of a big tabby cat, but they’ve got attitude, and they’re very different from a domestic or feral cat.
Do we then go to the trouble of trying to protect those? What’s interesting there is how you’re defining what is truly the original character—and thereby is a really sorry tale of conflicts between morphological and the genetic appreciations of these cats. There’s an argument that the genetic type specimen used to measure Scottish wildcats might already have been a hybrid, which would lead to pure-bred wildcats being killed because they didn’t match the hybrid.
That argument is important. And the owls—we’ve created a situation where two owls are together who didn’t used to be. Can we relax into accepting this? I think you just need to be pragmatic about these things. There’s no point fighting against something which is inevitable. You’ve got to be sensible about it. The wildcat situation, I think, is salvageable. Your owls are destined for a mixup, and let’s embrace that.
For me the embrace isn’t about saying concepts of species or nativity are meaningless, but that sometimes one needs to let go and put one’s energies elsewhere. There’s also a critique that killing offers a deceptively simple solution. When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
You write about Tony Martin, who is working to eradicate invasive mink responsible for the collapse of water vole populations and the simplification of riparian communities. Martin is admirable in many ways: He doesn’t enjoy killing mink, and says that if there were an alternative, he’d do that instead. But there’s evidence that restoring river otter populations can dramatically reduce mink numbers. Restoring beavers also helps, as water voles survive better in beaver ponds than in channelized waterways.
I look at that and think, there are other ways—but all I’m hearing about is killing.
The problem there is simply one of time. We’re getting beavers back into the landscape slowly, and that’s fantastic—but to allow beavers to do their work, to allow otters to do their work, is going to take decades. There will be no water voles left. It’s down to time.
I mentioned the checklists earlier. To begin with, is the problem really a problem? Can we do something else to stop the problem? Can we alter human behavior? If at the end of all that there’s no option, then you can kill—but you need to run through that systematic checklist. And that’s great in theory, but some of those things may be decades or centuries in the making and it really does require investment. There isn’t going to be the time or the money. We’ve got a window to act—so what are we going to do?
How do you feel about the killing of cats and foxes in Australia, where there’s very limited appetite for restoring of dingoes, their top predator, to the landscape? In Great Britain people are bringing back otters and beavers—but in Australia it’s just continent-scale killing forever, right?
The Australian story is very challenging. There are these bite-sized marsupials, all roughly the size of bunny rabbits, who are particularly tasty to cats and foxes. There’s some evidence that in areas where dingoes haven’t been controlled they have regulated cats and foxes, and reduced their impact on marsupials. That has not been well replicated, though. There hasn’t been the money put into research to see whether that’s something which is scalable.
There’s a question that interests me perhaps more about that. I write a description in the book of 1080 poisoning. 1080 is the poison of choice for killing cats and foxes in Australia. The symptoms are dramatic. That’s part of the story—but if you’re looking at your spreadsheet, there isn’t a column for cruelty.
That’s like being at the Louvre, seeing art on fire and going, “Yeah, but we’ll get more art.”
Going back to Tony Martin, he’s extremely concerned for the welfare of mink, yet at no point when he conducted rat eradication on South Georgia Island was the cumulative distress and pain caused by the death of millions of rodents by anticoagulants part of the spreadsheet.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been done. He presents a compelling case that there was no alternative. But I feel that we—as a society who is supporting in some form or other the killing of these animals—need to take ownership of the suffering that our desires are causing.
This sense of individual animals and their experiences—their suffering—as morally important often seems missing from conservation. Here I’m thinking of the Tule elk controversy in Point Reyes National Seashore in California, where much of the land is used for ranching and a small portion fenced off for elk. It’s not nearly enough for them and their population easily grows beyond what their reservation can sustain.
A few years ago, during a drought, the elk were dying from thirst and malnutrition; people moved by their plight started bringing them water, but the National Park Service tried to stop that. Neither did the NPS want to try managing the elk with contraception, though it would have been feasible in that contained space. The solution had to be killing. There was no room for a sense of care for individuals.
As you go through scientific training that’s drummed out of you. You’re not supposed to drift into anthropomorphism. And the other part of it is that if you’re willing to accept the consequences of your actions, if you’re willing to take ownership of them, then unless you’re a psychopath it has an impact. So you do your best to create language barriers to obfuscate and distance yourself from the reality of what these things actually mean.
I’ve also recognized that when I talk about hedgehogs, people tend not to talk about love. Because if you cross the line between liking nature and loving nature, you’re immediately stepping into the grief that comes with loss.
I think this is so important. We are terrified of love because we know the consequences when we lose what we love. I think that’s a really big part of it. Subconsciously there may well be many wildlife managers who’ve gone into this because they love nature, and they’re stuck with a very small toolkit presented to them by people who wear suits and probably don’t love nature. So then they are going to create barriers because otherwise they would go mad.
There was a great paper in Conservation Biology a few years back in which the authors argued that killing for the sake of conservation may sometimes be necessary—but when it is, the appropriate response is grief. That the end is justified doesn’t wipe away the tragedy.
It really resonated with me. We don’t want to be the sort of people who can kill without feeling. Yet I’ve rarely encountered someone who supports killing for conservation expressing grief for those deaths.
When I lecture on trophy hunting here at Oxford, I’ll often ask my students, “Do you think it matters what level of enjoyment the person doing the culling gets out of it? Is it better that the person who does it is giggling with glee every time they kill something? Or that they shed a tear?” For me this is a really profound question.
I worry that killing will make people callous and drive kind-hearted people away from conservation. Or that it could have ripple effects: In the book you mention kids in New Zealand playing with the dead bodies of possums and dressing them up. It’s widely understood that cruelty to animals is a symptom of deep disturbance—yet as conservationists we’re tacitly approving that mentality in some places. Do you think there’s a danger in that?
I think there is less danger now because conversations are being had. People are thinking about it.
How can we get to a place where killing is truly a last resort?
The problem, as I said earlier, is that in many instances there’s a real serious time factor. And conservation is so far down the list of social priorities that by the time they’re given the resources to do something, it’s already too late. There’s a temptation to point a finger at those conservationists—but they’re working within a system which is fighting against them the entire time. They’re in a field of study that has so little respect yet is so staggeringly important.
As Patrick Galbraith wrote in a review of my book recently, “We are a brilliant and terrible species who messed it up a long time ago. And that means we have to do things we don’t want to.”
But the cost is never borne by us, right? This is what I keep coming back to. We talk about how we’ve done something terrible and need to take responsibility for it now—but ultimately the cost is being heaped entirely on the poor animals being killed, right? That just seems wrong.
It does. But if you don’t have any killing at all, you cannot then avoid your responsibility for the death that occurs because you decided not to kill. That’s what it comes down to, time and time again: the potential for life that’s gone because we wouldn’t step up to remove the principal cause for a population’s destruction.
Do you think we could have much less killing? Not none, but less.
Of course! We need to invest creatively in alternatives. At the moment, because ecology is irrelevant to the powers who hand out the money, that work isn’t done. 
Lead image: LaVonna Moore / Shutterstock
Brandon Keim
Posted on July 22, 2024
Brandon Keim (Substack | Instagram |Twitter | Mastodon) is a freelance journalist and contributing editor at Nautilus. His new book, Meet the Neighbors, explores what the science of animal intelligence means for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us.
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