(Really fascinating)
The Long History of Those Who Fought to Save the Animals
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William Temple Hornaday, the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist,
helped restore the nearly extinct bison herds that used to roam North
America by the tens of millions. Here he is with a baby bison.
William Temple Hornaday, the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist, helped
restore the nearly extinct bison herds that used to roam North America
by the tens of millions. Here he is with a baby
bison.Credit...Smithsonian Institution
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ByErnest Freeberg
* NYT, April 14, 2021
*BELOVED BEASTS*
*Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction*
By Michelle Nijhuis
A recent study warns that 500 species of land animals face extinction
over the next two decades, while another predicts that climate change
may wipe out a third of the world’s variety of freshwater fish. As
Michelle Nijhuis writes in “Beloved Beasts,” news of this existential
threat reaches most of us as “a jumble of tragedies and emergencies.”
Through a series of richly drawn biographical portraits, she introduces
us to the men and women who have been working for more than a century to
rescue endangered species from extinction. They are a sometimes flawed
but fascinating group — sportsmen, bird lovers, zoologists and
activists. Without their efforts, our bad situation would be so much worse.
While some early naturalists found evidence in the fossil record of
animals becoming extinct, until the 19th century most observers
considered extinction a physical and even theological impossibility.
Overhunting and extermination campaigns had clearly caused
micro-extinctions, and there were animal populations that scattered
before the advance of human settlement. But the destruction of an entire
species was unthinkable, a smashed window in the mansion of God’s
perfect design.
By the mid-19th century, however, humanity’s power to vandalize creation
could no longer be denied, nowhere more clearly than in the decimation
of America’s vast bison herds. In 1874, Congress tried to curb this
slaughter, but President Grant vetoed the bill, supporting the military
strategy of pacifying the Plains tribes by destroying this foundation of
their economy and culture.
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A decade later, when the Smithsonian zoologist and chief taxidermist
William Temple Hornaday surveyed the museum’s collection he found no
good examples of the American bison. While he was planning an expedition
to harvest specimens, his Western correspondents informed him there were
only a few hundred left, and they were disappearing fast. After weeks of
searching in the Montana Territory, Hornaday found and shot 20 of them.
“I am really ashamed to confess it,” he later admitted. By his
estimation, he had just killed a tenth of all the bison remaining from
the herds that had once numbered from 20 million to 30 million.
ImageMichele Nijhuis
Michele NijhuisCredit...Darcy Hunter
Hornaday’s skill as a taxidermist meant he spent “much of his
professional life up to his elbows in animal innards.” Back in
Washington, he mounted these sacrificial victims in a diorama that
evoked the bison’s life on the prairies. The display fascinated the
public and rallied support for his fresh determination to save what
remained of the wild herds. Thanks to a successful breeding program he
created at the Bronx Zoo, a small herd of bison produced enough
offspring to repopulate Western reserves, a saving remnant that would
expand over time and is still thriving today.
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Hornaday’s success gave hope that extinction was not inevitable for
those species being ground under the wheels of progress. He devoted
decades more to the cause, adding his prestige to the “feather wars.” In
1886, an ornithologist walking on New York City’s sidewalks found
fastened on ladies’ hats the brilliant fragments of 40 different
species. From hummingbirds to herons, millions died serving this market,
pushing many species down the passenger pigeon’s road to extinction.
The National Audubon Society, incorporated in 1905, won federal
protections that ended the plume trade and provided sanctuary for
songbirds. But along the way, the campaign exposed a gendered double
standard. Though many of conservation’s most loyal supporters were
women, bird advocates blamed the female of our species for their
heedless vanity, even though the trade’s profits went to male hunters
and milliners. In turn, those defending the free market in feathers
ridiculed all conservationists as effeminate sentimentalists.
That charge was hard to sustain against Rosalie Edge, the conservation
movement’s “hellcat.” Edge came to the cause in middle age, an affluent
and well-connected amateur bird-watcher who had developed political
skills fighting for woman’s suffrage. Though a loyal Audubon member, she
ambushed the society’s annual board meeting in 1929, denouncing its
leading men for failing to protest the open season against eagles, owls
and other raptors. To many sportsmen and poultry farmers, eagles were
undesirable vermin, and Alaska even offered a bounty on them.
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Image
In partnership with a respected zoologist who shared her views but not
her freedom to agitate, Edge founded the Emergency Conservation
Committee. “Mrs. Edge takes the view that all conservation movements
except her own are limited and discriminatory,” The New Yorker quipped
years later, “and she puts in her best licks for creatures that many
naturalists wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.” A passionate
pamphleteer and an incorrigible lobbyist, her protests helped change
Audubon’s leadership and its policy on birds of prey. In 1934, Edge
learned of a mountain in Pennsylvania that was a favorite spot for
hunters to shoot raptors. Horrified, she bought the mountain, hired a
caretaker, and transformed Hawk Mountain into a preserve that continues
her legacy today.
Among the visitors to this sanctuary was the wildlife biologist Rachel
Carson. There she found evidence of a precipitous decline in the annual
eagle migration, one clue in a puzzle she assembled in her
groundbreaking 1962 book, “Silent Spring.” Carson showed that pesticides
were doing more damage than an army of hunters, not only driving eagles
toward extinction but poisoning creatures up and down the food chain,
humans included. Her work inspired Stewart Udall, interior secretary in
the Johnson administration, to push for legal protections that
culminated in the landmark 1973 Endangered Species Act, an imperfect but
“indispensable bulwark against extinction.”
Tracing key turning points in the development of conservation biology,
Nijhuis shows that the growing threat of extinction provoked an
intellectual revolution in the way scientists think about the very
meaning of/species/. Each animal came to be understood as an essential
piece of a dynamic, interconnected web. While public sympathy is easily
stirred to rescue “charismatic” animals, conservationists came to focus
as much on the preservation of habitat. No longer just protecting
animals from bullets, they expanded their mission to save “shrubbery and
wetlands from bulldozers.” As the conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold put
it, the only way to stop extinction is to first save the organism he
called “land.”
Leopold preached the essential value that apex predators play in keeping
ecosystems healthy, while others joined his pioneering efforts to
preserve wilderness. In the 1980s, E. O. Wilson captured the evolving
insights of ecological science by framing extinction as an assault on
“biodiversity,” a loss of genetic possibility that threatens all life,
humans included. Others worked to overcome the conservation movement’s
origin in white supremacy and European colonialism. Africa’s first
game-protection measures were imposed by colonial masters determined to
protect their sport of trophy hunting. More recently, transnational
organizations have defended wildlife by supporting African communities
as stewards of their own environmental inheritance, a strategy both more
just and more successful.
Nijhuis is an engaging storyteller as well as a self-described “lapsed
biologist,” weaving this history with firsthand accounts of those on the
front lines of species preservation today — from the Blackfeet tribe’s
restoration of a bison herd in the Northern Rockies (descendants of
Hornaday’s rescue operation), to park rangers in Namibia who defend
rhinos and elephants from poachers. She acknowledges that her story
offers no reason for great optimism concerning the fate of so many
species now facing extinction, but she reminds us of the very real
accomplishments of these “passionate experts and passionate amateurs”
who devoted their lives, and too often gave their lives, to protecting
our fellow species from ourselves.
Ernest Freeberg is a professor at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, and the author of “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and
the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement.”
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