My last two blogs have been about the horrific plan by Ontario’s newly elected Progressive Conservative government (although it is anything but either progressive or conservative) to wipe out as much as possible, and certainly most, of the province’s population of double-crested cormorants (read these blogs here and here) by allowing holders of small-game licenses to kill up to 50 of the birds per day from March 15 to December 31. As a colonial nesting species, the cormorant is extremely vulnerable to extirpation – it has happened before – and the whole idea is predicated on concerns, which have been repudiated by scientists many times over, that the birds are damaging to the environment.
The whole concept of this hunt is wrong on many different levels and for many different reasons, including the hideous cruelty of leaving an unpredictable number (certainly in the thousands) of orphaned baby birds to die of dehydration and other forms of exposure. This is an exceptionally ill-conceived notion by a premier, Doug Ford, with an authoritarian mindset, who has been called “thuggish” and “bullying” by pundits, but like his apparent role model, U.S. President Donald Trump, he does not seem to care. Authoritarian mindsets tend to be blind to unintended consequences.
I get that the less informed among those who hunt and fish tend to see predatory animals as their competitors who need to be killed. They neither know or care about the importance of apex predators within healthily functioning environments. And, I realize that cormorants, like wolves, sharks, and other predators, can evoke irrational levels of fear, hatred, and loathing. If such attitudes did not lead to cruelty and destruction, I’d pity the people who have them, cut off, as they are, from the joy that comes from knowledge of the intricate interactions of the web of life within the ecological whole; a web that humans seem so eager to destroy.
As my friend, Buzz Boles, points out:
“In 1934, J. A. Dymond, Acting Director, Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology and Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology, University of Toronto, reacting to loon hunting he observed on Ontario’s Rideau waterway pointed out that Sir Arthur Thomson, an eminent British biologist of the day, related the following story that is indicative of killing cormorants and destabilizing a lake and river system.
“‘In Australia, on the Murray River swamps, several species of cormorant use to swarm in the thousands, but ruthless massacres, based on the supposition that the cormorants were spoiling the fishing, reduced them to hundreds. But, the fishing did not improve; it got worse. It was then discovered that the cormorants fed largely on crabs, eels, and some other creatures that devour the spawn and fry of desirable fishes. Thus, the ignorant massacre of the cormorants made for the impoverishment, not the improvement of the fishing. The obvious moral is that man should get at the facts of the web of life before, not after, he has recourse to drastic measures of interference.'”
Sadly, we never seem to learn.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
