© Eric KilbyIt cost the city of Toronto $700 to buy a pair of greater capybaras, to be placed in a small zoo in High Park (400 acres of trees, ponds, fields, and trails). Oops… as they were being delivered on May 14, they slipped out and avoided capture for more than a month.[teaserbreak]
Media and the public cheered them on, naming them Bonnie and Clyde (after two famous Depression-era American gangsters who avoided capture by police until being gunned down in 1934). The semi-aquatic rodents fared better and were finally caught: at a cost to the city of $15,000.
Greater capybaras, weighing in at 35-65 kg (77-143 lbs.), are the world’s largest rodents. They are found throughout most of South America (with a closely related but little-known species, the lesser capybara, found from Colombia and northwest Venezuela north into Panama).
While hunted for meat and leather, greater capybaras are also easily captive-bred and “farmed.” The wild population is largely secure and occurs in significant numbers in many protected areas.
Elizabeth Congdon, an assistant professor at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, who is claimed to be the only biologist in North America studying capybaras, has raised alarms about capybaras in Florida (where, unlike here in Ontario, they can survive the winter). And, they do, having escaped from a Florida research facility in the 1990s. Her concern (which I share) is that the animals, with litter sizes of three to five, could spread across the state and consume crops such as corn and sugar cane.
She, like me, has no desire to kill them—and yet, that is what may inevitably happen if they become abundant and destructive to crops. At the moment, they seem to be confined to a state park, doing no real harm. “I love them,” Congdon reportedly said, “and they’re my favorite animal on the planet, but at the same time, it may be necessary to remove them from here.”
I’m delighted by her attitude and foresight.
Meanwhile, the capybara concerns inform us of the value of a position that organizations like ours have long taken: ban the import of exotic animals, or, at the absolute least, develop a “reverse listing” of animal and plant species which, if they get loose, do not pose an ecological or other problem.
Florida is already teeming with “exotic” non-native species. Some of which, like the Burmese python in the Florida everglades, pose significant threats to native wildlife and often result in extensive, and ultimately unsuccessful, programs of mass killings.
While the “threat” of “exotics” is often absurdly overestimated, the killing is real—and the best solution is not to have the problem in the first place.
Keep wildlife in the wild,
Barry