© John CritchleySeveral decades ago, a friend called up, concerned about the fact that leopard frogs were being dissected in classrooms. “Can’t we,” she asked, “say they’re endangered?”[teaserbreak]
I snorted. “This is one of our most abundant of frogs; they’re everywhere. I don’t like it, either, but we can’t say that about such a common species.” Crossing a wet meadow, back then, I might see thousands of young leopard frogs.
But, guess what? The “leopard frog” has been divided into various “new” species and populations, including those that are, indeed, rare, threatened, endangered, or extinct due to a multiplicity of threats. I no longer see the huge numbers I encountered at the time my friend made that call.
The difference between abundance and endangerment is often very thin. Species like the northern cod and passenger pigeon once existed in staggering numbers, the latter the most abundant bird species in the world—but it is now extinct. The cod is recovering and, already, there are demands to restore the very commercial fishery that nearly wiped it out. We all know the story of the bison, which once darkened the plains. It’s been saved from extinction and is now a sought-after “big” game species. Hunters still want to shoot elephants and rhinos, their rarity apparently making them all the more desirable to kill.
Which brings us to one of America’s most powerfully magnificent animals of all: the brown bear, better known to North Americans as the grizzly. Once abundant, it was either completely extirpated, or reduced to endangerment, within the contiguous U.S., and even in western Canada and Alaska. When I was in Washington, D.C. last fall at a conference about large predators, the federal government was toying with the idea of delisting the grizzlies from endangered status, bowing to pressure from hunters. With the new Administration, there can be little doubt that it’ll happen.
For some people—a noisy minority—nothing has value if it doesn’t have immediate economic value. They don’t look to the future or consider science-based facts. They detest “regulations” that interfere with what they see as most important: cash-flow.
Some people in Canada have the same mindset. To them, grizzlies who can’t be hunted have no material value, thus no value at all. The value of organisms that can’t generate immediate dollars into pockets—from nitrogen-fixing microbes and oxygen-producing plankton to huge whales—are lost to such people.
Worse, maintaining protection of endangered species is seen as proof that the protection does not work. (Otherwise, why do they still need protection?) These people don’t take the long view—like children, wanting quick awards and rapid gratification.
Conservation can, and often does, work. But, let’s let it work before we give way to the lust that a minority of our species has for killing. They’re merely happy to pay big bucks for the chance to turn something as wondrous as a grizzly bear into an ornament in the den.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry