Toward Ethical Treatment of Animals in Hawai'i's Natural Areas!

Human alienation from nature is evidenced by minimal understanding of interrelationships in the wild and an emphasis on individual wild animals. Different viewpoints (utilitarian, biocentric, and theocentric) about the natural world and the place of humans in it color ideas about management of natural areas and the species therein. Decisions about nature should consider a complex of human values including the economic, aesthetic, spiritual, ecological, and humane, along with a preservation ethic for the future. Control of introduced, or alien, animals in Hawai'i, where endangerment and extinction rates of native species are among the highest in the world, and where alien species cause severe degradation and disappearance of near-natural communities, has recently become controversial as a result of confrontational activities by animal rights activists. However, people who "speak for" animals in the world involve a wide variety of groups, including natural resource managers, hunters and fishers, scientists, agriculturists, conservationists, and humane and animal rights groups. An ethical system for wild animals must make good-faith efforts to protect all human values. A good-faith approach to conflict presumes that most groups have codes of right and wrong (ethics), even though some may not be as completely developed as others. We need to "outgrow" narrow views of nature by better understanding human relationships to it through meaningful participation (hunting, management, scientific study, obser"ation, etc.). Actions and nonactions must be governed by a holistic and flexible ethic practically applied to different conflict situations. considerations in the process of making decisions about natural systems and their components. However, we still suffer slow progress in search of a widely accepted "conservation ethic." Such an ethic should be, as Leopold recognized, an extension of sociai ethics, neither overriding nor replacing them (Callicott 1987). In Hawai'i, although about 15% of the land is legally "protected" from development (Holt 1989), species loss continues at a staggering rate, and funding for management and research is terribly inadequate to the task at hand. Despite heroic efforts to educate, manage, learn, and raise funding by a number of individuals and groups in Hawai'i, much of the public remains ignorant of, or resistant to, a conservation etfiietllat ·would truly consider preservation of biological diversity in decisions about economic growth, job opportunities, or a perceived increased standard of living. 98 I Manuscript accepted 27 April 1994. 2Research Scientist, National Park Service, Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, P.O. Box 52, Hawai'i National Park, Hawai'i 96718. ALDO LEOPOLD, THE FOUNDER of wildlife management in the United States, suggested that "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (Leopold 1962 [1949] : 224225). Leopold's land ethic did not preclude use of the land for human purposes, but was concerned more with an attitude that would affirm the importance of allowing nature to exist (Moline 1986, Callicott 1990), for present and future human well-being as well as for its own sake. He was also concerned with changing the status of humans from "conqueror" to "member" of the land community (Gawlick 1992). We need to integrate many Toward Ethical Treatment of Animals-SToNE The Extinction Crisis More native species have been eliminated from Hawai'i than anywhere else in the United States: an estimated 60o/~ of the flora is extinct or threatened with extinction; 50% of the 140 species of native birds known historically or from the fossil record are believed extinct, and an additional 30 species, 41% of all listed birds in the United States, are endangered. Some 75% of the nation's historically documented plant and bird extinctions have occurred in the Islands. An estimated 90% of dry forest, 61% of moist forest, and 42% of wet forest has been lost (Hawaii State Department of Land and Natural Resources, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii 1991), with much of what remains degraded through species loss, alien species invasions, and forest fragmentation. Small populations and single-island or even single-area endemism make many native species vulnerable to catastrophic events, stochastic processes, and the deteriorating effects of human-produced changes (Figure 1), particularly since these changes occur at rates that are far too rapid for biological adjustments. 99 For island ecosystems, alien species are an extremely important component of the problem of deterioration (Atkinson 1989, Diamond 1989). The flood of alien species in Hawai'i has accelerated native species loss and increasingly homogenized the landscape, so that much of it now is dominated by species spread by humans to other tropical and subtropical areas around the world. Feral pigs, goats, cattle, and sheep have degraded, fragmented, and eliminated large areas from sea level to timberline (Cuddihy and Stone 1990). Rats and mongooses; introduced insects, mollusks, and diseases; and some 86 species of invasive alien plants have caused ecosystem changes that are less noticeable than those caused by ungulates, but are perhaps more pervasive. In Hawai'i, conservationists are very aware of what is native and what is alien; children and adults are actively taught that invasive aliens are less valuable than natives and are in conflict with the preservation of native species and communities (Stone 1992a). Yet, natural area managers in Hawai'i are involved in a serious controversy with animal rights interests over the ethics of controlling mammals that eliminate native plants and animals, degrading HABITAT LOSS Degradation