©Born Free USA/Barry Kent MacKayDon’t feed wildlife—I know. But, at Lynde Shores Conservation Area, east of Toronto, everyone does. Children (and adults, like me) invite chickadees and nuthatches to land on open hands for a peanut or sunflower seed. If you don’t mind a jabbing thrust or mild pinch, such “game” birds as wild turkeys and Canada geese will also take food from the hand. Last week, a friend and I encountered a three quarters-grown brood of five raccoons—amazingly healthy in appearance (two of them are pictured to the right)—who stood on hind feet and ever-so-gently accepted peanuts, taking them in their front paws.[teaserbreak]
That’s not how wild animals are “supposed” to act. Or is it?
I fondly recall, from the late 1960s, my first morning in the Galapagos Islands, having a mockingbird tug at my shoelaces. The famous Darwin’s finches alighted on my hand for seed, the endemic large-billed flycatcher tugged at my hair for nesting material, sea-lions swam up to our boat to play tug of war with a hawser, and I walked through colonies of marine iguanas as they calmly sunned themselves.
Wild animals who evolved in regions where humans are rare or absent often show little or no fear of humans. I’ve had boreal and black-capped chickadees alight on my head. Many other birds of the boreal forest allow close approach. Other species, from mule deer to mallards, will lose fear of humans if not persecuted.
Records of early explorers show that they’d encounter fearless foxes and other wildlife on uninhabited islands, with a large number of such species going extinct when hungry sailors battered them to death.
The vast majority of wildlife coexists with, and knows to fear, humans. My theory, put briefly, is that the animals’ fear serves a deep psychological need found in many humans. Such folks need to feel superior to “the lesser animals” and to dominate them. Hunters seem to me to need to believe the “game” they slaughter are wary, that it takes skill to outwit a turkey with a brain the size of a walnut. Many seem to me to need the rationale of thinking they are “controlling” populations of wild, dangerous animals and see compassion as a dangerous weakness derived from an unrealistically anthropomorphic view of nature inspired by fairy tales and Walt Disney.
Following unusual weather, there has been a plethora of calls among the local underground wildlife rehab community for assistance with some very late baby squirrels and other mammals.
“Underground?” Yes. Here in Ontario—and in provinces and states across North America—there is a community of wildlife rehabbers below the radar of onerous regulations and Draconian persecution by government licensing authorities. And, in part, I think that’s because wildlife management policy requires that we remain isolated from wildlife, behind a barrier of fear. The last thing the wildlife management and hunting community wants to see is respect for wildlife, and the kind of fear-free coexistence that can occur when compassion enters the animal/human relationship.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry