Emma Marris Are wild animals really wild TED
Transcriber:
So, human relationships with animals
can be pretty weird.
We put them in categories
based on how we see them.
So there’s pets and they’re, like,
members of the family.
And then there’s farm animals
and they’re often very similar to pets
in terms of their cognitive abilities
and their emotional abilities.
But of course, we eat them.
And then there’s wild animals.
And I’ve been wondering
what wild animals even are anymore.
Like, you can get a degree
in wildlife management,
but if you’re managing them,
are they really wild?
I started thinking about this
in the context of wolf reintroduction.
So when wolves were first brought back
to the American West in the 1990s,
they were pretty heavily managed
and they still are today.
A lot of them wear collars,
they have GPS trackers,
they have their DNA on file,
they have names and numbers.
And if they get a taste for livestock,
then we haze them
with rubber bullets or air horns,
or sometimes those, like, floaty guys
that you see in used-car lots.
And of course, if they don’t get
the message, they can be shot.
So how wild are they really
if they’re being this carefully managed?
It’s occurred to me that a ground
squirrel or a city robin
is in some ways wilder than these wolves,
because although
they might live in a city,
no one is managing their day-to-day life.
But of course, they are living
in a human world.
A world that’s been shaped
by massive influences
like conversion of land to agriculture,
extinctions, domestications,
movement of species across continent.
And we’ve rerouted rivers.
And of course, there’s climate change,
which means that every animal,
no matter how distant
from a human settlement,
has some influence of the human world.
So if every animal lives in a human world,
does that mean that we somehow
owe them more than we used to?
I think it does.
So take polar bears, for instance.
Some populations of polar bears
are struggling to live on the sea ice
in the summer.
There’s just not enough sea ice
for them to go hunting for seals,
which is what they’d normally eat.
So I think we should consider feeding them
for at least part of the year.
Now, there’d be a lot
of logistical challenges with this
we’d have to work out.
And certainly we would want to make sure
that the Inuit who have lived
with these bears
and hunted them for millennia
would be on board with any plan.
There might be other ethical obligations
that supersede our obligation
to care for the bears,
like, we’d have to think pretty hard
about where we get the meat
that we feed them,
or if it’d be possible to feed them
some kind of plant-based polar bear chow
that would meet all their requirements.
So these are not easy questions,
but I think we should
be thinking about them.
On the other hand, if we really
want to see animals happy,
we need to start asking
what that full happiness looks like,
what does it mean for an animal
to really flourish?
So this would go beyond
just being well-fed and healthy
and it might include
something like freedom
or at least the ability to make
your own choices day-to-day.
A few years back in Washington State,
there was this dog
that ran away from his home
and joined up with two wolves
and they formed a little pack.
And wildlife managers
were very nervous about this
because they didn’t want the dog
impregnating either of the wolves
because any puppies would be hybrids.
They would be neither domestic nor wild.
They wouldn’t fit into either category.
Regulating them or figuring out
what to do with them would be a nightmare.
So they tracked the pack down
and when they found that one of the wolves
was indeed pregnant by the dog,
they ended her pregnancy.
So in that case,
the sort of purity of the wolf,
or the genetic wildness of the wolf,
was deemed to be more important
than its actual autonomy.
I’d like to say that there’s
some sort of algorithm
that I could give you
that would always help you
decide what to do in any given case
with wild animals.
But I bet you saw this coming
when I tell you that there aren’t really
any easy answers to this.
The tricky thing is that sometimes
we’re having to compare things
that are not in the same currency,
so to speak, right?
So what I really struggle with
are situations where biodiversity
trades off against animal welfare
or the well-being of individual animals.
So there’s actually a lot more of these
conundrums than you might think.
Like in New Zealand, for example,
tons of iconic animals like the Kiwi
are threatened by introduced predators,
including stoats, which are, like,
this cute furry little weasel.
So do you kill the introduced predators
to save the endangered species?
In questions like these,
I don’t think there really
are “right” answers.
I think we just have to do the best
when we’re comparing apples and oranges,
a species versus the welfare
of many individuals.
All we can do is our best,
working together
and trying to act with humility.
We’ve really changed the world
and all of the animals that live in it now
are basically living in our world.
I think this gives us
new responsibilities.
In this world we’ve created,
it’s time for us to take
those responsibilities
to other species seriously.
Thanks so much.
David Biello: That was excellent.
Thank you.
And I know it was a short talk,
so I want you to expand
upon it a little bit.
You talked about our ethical obligations
to these wild animals.
What do you think those specifically are,
after the journey of writing this book?
Emma Marris: Well, I do think
that because we have created this world,
that because there’s
so much human influence,
that we do bear some kind
of collective responsibility,
especially in situations where we can
clearly see that animals are suffering
or not doing well
because of our influence.
So there’s a sort of a very intuitive
ethical relationship there.
If you actually knock
someone over in a crowd,
you feel like you have the responsibility
to pick them back up.
So I think there’s
a kind of a parallel there.
But I also think that if we have
obligations to wild animals
that go beyond just letting
nature take its course,
then I think we have to learn
more about them
to figure out how to best serve them.
And I think that includes figuring out
what really makes them flourish.
And I do think that
that kind of flourishing –
And this is the word that you see
in discussions about Aristotle, right,
like, the flourishing of a human –
But to think about a flourishing
of an animal is a little more complicated.
But I do think that for many animals,
especially animals that are close to us
on the taxonomic tree of life,
like chimpanzees and other large mammals,
that being able to make your own choices
is part of that flourishing.
So that means we want
to balance our intervention
with our respect for their autonomy.
And I think that’s
really tricky sometimes.
DB: So let’s turn to some
audience questions.
Starting with Kim,
who I feel may have read your recent
op-ed in “The New York Times.”
“How do you feel about zoos
or sanctuaries for wild animals?”
Is there a better way to protect them?
And is there a better way
to spend time with animals,
which is what zoos offer,
and have them accessible to humans,
but also be sure that the animals'
kind of flourishing comes first?
EM: Right. Thanks, Kim.
I did write a piece about this recently,
and the piece is sort of
drawn from the book.
So if you enjoyed that piece,
there’s more goodness in the book.
But I do think –
After researching zoos and the sort of
happiness level of animals in zoos,
I came to realize that there’s a sort of
a problem with the business model of zoos,
which is that the very animals
that are most likely
to get people in the door,
are the ones that do
the worst in captivity.
So there’s a real problem there,
which is that if zoos got rid
of all of the animals
that tend to show kind of behaviors
that show they’re unhappy,
like pacing or rocking
or repetitive behaviors
or other kinds of behavioral problems,
they’d be left with animals
that aren’t as much of a draw.
So I think that puts them
in an awkward position.
I do think that zoos should stop
breeding animals
that aren’t a part of a sort of
a legitimate conservation breeding program
that has a real chance of going back
out into the wild someday.
So I think it’s a lot easier to ethically
justify breeding animals in captivity
if they or their grandchildren are someday
going to taste freedom again.
But if you’re just breeding tigers
and elephants over and over again
just for display in captivity,
I don’t think that’s great.
Every time I see the birth announcement
of some new adorable gorilla baby,
my heart breaks a little bit
because I know this gorilla baby
is never getting out.
That’s not like, you know,
this gorilla is going to spend its
formative years at the such-and-such zoo
and then it’s going
to return to the jungle.
That’s not happening.
Sanctuaries are a different proposition.
So sanctuaries don’t breed their animals.
They just take care of animals
that can’t return to the wild
for one reason or another.
So I think that they’re at a much
better place ethically.
Oh, but let me address the question
of how you then see animals, right,
if we remove these breeding populations
of fun animals from zoos,
how do you have that experience?
Well, first of all,
there is an amazing ability
for us to virtually interact with animals
through nature documentaries,
which are better than ever.
I actually wrote about them recently, too,
but their filming can get you
closer to a wild animal
than you would ever be wise to do
in the real world.
But I also think that we need to sort of
reshift our thinking a little bit
around the animals that exist
in our own ecosystems,
even in our city ecosystems, right?
You can see a surprising diversity
of bird life, insect life in some case,
and mammal life
inside even very busy cities.
And realizing that those animals
are really awesome, too,
and just because they aren’t elephants,
we’ve forgotten to take pleasure
in encountering them.
I think a perspective shift there
can be really helpful.
DB: Now, Catherine and Gordon
want us to take this to the sea.
How does this all apply to sea creatures,
which are obviously in a far different
position than the land animals?
But there are more of them, right?
EM: Yes, great question.
First of all, I think that many
of my critiques of zoos
apply to aquaria as well.
And, you know, certainly
there has been a real public discussion
about the captivity of whales
and other marine mammals.
So I think the tide is turning on that.
I did read, while I was
researching this book,
I read a book that I recommend
by Jonathan Balcombe
about the secret lives of fish,
which really did blow my mind
in terms of the cognitive
abilities of fish.
And I think that many of us
have grown up with this idea
that fish are somehow dumber
than land animals
or that they don’t, you know,
that they don’t feel pain,
is a common thing
that people have said about fish.
This is not true.
So I think that much of this
applies to, you know,
to the marine world as well.
And in the book, I talk about, you know,
what can we do for wild animals?
And honestly,
one of the biggest things we can do
is try to address climate change
and habitat destruction.
That’s really the biggie,
because then we’d have fewer
of these confusing conundrums
where we have to decide
whether or not to intervene
in these complicated ways.
If they have more space
and they have a more stable climate,
they can do a lot
of flourishing on their own
and we don’t have to get
into as many moral dilemmas.
So honestly, if you find
these ethical pickles uncomfortable,
the best way to avoid the ethical pickle
is to create a lot of stable
habitat for non-humans.
DB: So you mentioned the Inuit earlier
and their special relationship
with the polar bear.
Is there a way that we could better,
kind of, steward wild areas,
Lynn wants to know,
and perhaps the folks who have been living
alongside those wild animals the longest
could be paid or hired in some way
to be caretakers of that wild environment?
EM: Yeah, I think that is kind of how
the conservation movement is trending,
honestly, I think indigenous
protected areas
are the sort of hot new topic
in conservation.
They’re getting set up
in different parts around the world.
Canada has just announced quite a few
of them over the last five years.
There was a paper that came out recently
that got a lot of attention,
showing that in Australia,
Brazil and Canada,
indigenous protected areas have higher
levels of biodiversity than parks,
suggesting that, yes,
those management approaches
that are millennia-old
are really effective in keeping a kind of
a multi-species-community going.
So I think there’s a lot
of interest in that,
a lot of hope that could be a way forward.
In the book, I talk about going
to the Peruvian Amazon,
where there’s a big park called Manu,
which is one of the highest biodiversity
parks probably on Earth,
and they have people living inside of it,
the Machiguenga,
and some more sort of
old-fashioned conservationists feel
that the presence of the Machiguenga
in the park is a problem
because they hunt there.
But it seems pretty clear
from the research I read
and from my time that I spent in the park
that they’re actually acting as de facto
biodiversity managers and guards.
And yes, they’re hunting,
but they’re hunting in a sustainable way.
So, yeah, I think that this is honestly
the best way forward, right,
because it marries the sort of
justice cause of indigenous sovereignty
with the pragmatic cause
of getting the people
who are best qualified
to manage landscapes on the job.
So, yes, I agree with Lynn completely.
DB: Amazing.
Well, thank you again
for this wonderful talk and conversation.
And it truly is a great book.
Best of luck with with everything.
EM: Great. Thanks so much.
DB: Goodbye and thank you.
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