Wolves fall prey to Canada's rapacious tar sands business. Wolves are routinely, baselessly and contemptuously blamed for the demise of everything from marmots to mountain caribou in western Canada.
Given that attitude, we at Raincoast Conservation Foundation are appalled, though not surprised, by Canada's proposed strategy to "recover" dwindling populations of boreal forest caribou in northern Alberta's tar sands territory. Essentially, the plan favours the destruction of wolves over any consequential protection, enhancement or expansion of caribou habitat. Clearly, the caribou recovery strategy is not based on ecological principles or available science. Rather, it represents an ideology on the part of advocates for industrial exploitation of our environment, which subsumes all other principles to economic growth, always at the expense of ecological integrity. CBC News: The National. Scientists dispute ethics of Alberta study using wolf cull data. Scientists raising questions about the ethics of Alberta’s wolf cull are calling it cruel and unnecessary.
Conservation biologists have published a letter in a scientific journal about the program, which has killed hundreds of wolves in an attempt to help caribou numbers in west-central Alberta. The letter says university and government scientists who used the cull to gather data on its results violated professional ethics. But a government biologist says there’s no other way to keep wolf numbers low enough to help caribou other than by shooting the predators from helicopters or poisoning them.
Dave Hervieux says stopping the cull would doom the herds and he makes no apology for using the information it generated to gauge how successful it has been. That research showed that killing wolves has stabilized caribou numbers, but barely. It concludes the cull won’t stop herds from disappearing if their habitat isn’t protected from the energy and forestry industries. Wolf Matters - Home. Stop the Brutal Slaughter of Wolves in Alberta and B.C. An inhumane slaughter of wolves is occurring at the hands of the Alberta government.
This unscientific and unethical wolf cull is a consequence of oil and gas development, and industrial logging, which have endangered woodland caribou. The Alberta government and resource industries have transformed the caribou's boreal habitat into a landscape that can no longer provide the food, cover, and security these animals need to survive. Rather than address the real problem, i.e. the destruction of life sustaining caribou habitat, Alberta has chosen to scapegoat wolves, many of which are now using an extensive, industry-generated network of new roads and corridors to reach dwindling numbers of caribou.
For a decade now, the Alberta government has hired biologists, along with the equivalent of hit men, to kill more than 1,000 wolves via aerial gunning from helicopters, poisoning with strychnine, and strangling with neck snares. Snares are the most inhumane legally allowed traps in use. On Killing Wolves and Other Animals: Should Only Trained Ethicists Weigh In? News about the massacre of 890 wolves in Canada by a team of researchers "in the name of science" has reached a global and eclectic audience.
Numerous people around the world who have never gotten involved in protesting such "research" have weighed in with incredulity and outrage. I agree with their sentiments, and it made me think about how the killing of Marius, a healthy young male giraffe at the Copenhagen zoo, served to mobilize people who were outraged by his death. Marius was killed simply because he didn't fit into the zoo's breeding program ( please see "The Marius Effect: A Giraffe, Food, and Invasive Research" and links therein). I was recently informed that a discussion on the "Canids List" ( I don't know how the discussion went, but a number of people sent me the response posted by David Mech, widely and rightfully recognized as one of the world's foremost wolf experts.
The two sides of science and advocacy: Science is neither value-free nor ethics-free. Researchers Kill 890 Wolves to Learn About Them: There's Something Very Wrong I've written a number of essays that have centered on the question, "Should animals be killed in the name of, or under the guise of, conservation?
" The basic foundation of the rapidly growing field of compassionate conservation, "First do no harm," maintains that the lives of individual animals matter and that killing in the name of conservation should not be done (see here). Just recently this question arose once again when the Canadian Journal of Zoology (CJZ) published a research article by Dave Hervieux, Mark Hebblewhite, Dave Stepnisky, Michelle Bacon and Stan Boutin titled "Managing wolves (Canis lupus) to recover threatened woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in Alberta" that presented the outcome of an "experiment" in mass killing in which 890 Canadian wolves suffered and died using aerial gunning, trapping and poisoning with strychnine.
The strychnine also killed other animals who were not part of the study. Furthermore, This essay was written with Dr.