Preserve our natural treasures

GUEST COLUMN in the Albany Herald (22 April 2015)

   I almost missed Earth Day. It was the Google Doodle with the revolving earth that reminded me on Wednesday morning. In my defense, we are working on Saturday’s Earth Day event at Chehaw called Party for the Planet, so that is what I had on my mind. But still, April 22nd is the day we have set aside to inspire awareness of and appreciation for earth’s environment. This year marked its 45th anniversary. How could I have forgotten?

   Earth Day is a worldwide event, with festivals and tree plantings in Africa, trash and litter pickup at the Great Wall of China, and a climate summit in Europe. The issues we face are enormous and controversial. Global climate change is threatening to melt the polar ice caps, raise sea levels, and create dangerously unpredictable weather patterns. Our hunger for oil finds us drilling wells in sensitive ecosystems like the arctic tundra and virgin rainforests and it encourages oil companies to inject liquid at high pressure into the ground to extract every last ounce of oil and gas (fracking). In the American West, California is in the midst of one of its most severe droughts on record. The largest water reservoir in the United States, Nevada’s Lake Mead, is at its lowest level since the lake was filled by the Hoover Dam in the 1930s. We are also seeing record snowfalls in the north and massive hurricanes along the Eastern seaboard. The challenges are almost overwhelming and seem to defy solution.

   But, if you want to see the glass half full, there is much to be thankful for here in South Georgia, as we work to preserve our own natural treasures. Paddling a canoe from the Flint River dam through downtown Albany is an eye-opening experience. The beauty and serenity of that stretch of river is breathtaking. If you ever have the opportunity to take a mule-drawn wagon ride through the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway or any of the large quail plantations around our part of Georgia, you can’t help but be in awe of the abundant natural resources at our disposal.

   So, what can we do to preserve what we have? We could begin by supporting the work of the Flint Riverkeeper as this organization works to restore and preserve the habitat, water quality, and flow of the Flint River. The river is our most vital natural resource and it should not be taken for granted. Another group that deserves more support is Keep Albany-Dougherty Beautiful (KADB) as they work to change people’s attitudes and behavior toward littering, beautification, and the proper management of waste through recycling.

   And what of the next generation? What are we teaching them? The Flint RiverQuarium has a number of summer camps and other programs that are designed to promote conservation using their aquatic exhibits and other educational, entertaining experiences that interpret the unique ecosystems of the Flint River watershed. Chehaw Park also follows its mission of inspiring people to connect with nature and encouraging conservation action through positive recreational and educational experiences. Chehaw has well attended summer camps, is developing a new overnight camp experience for this summer, and continues to engage young people through its unique Junior Zookeeper Program.

   The importance of Earth Day to the next generation can hardly be overstated. The sentiment was best expressed in 1968 by a Senegalese forestry engineer named Baba Dioum in his presentation for the General Assembly of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), when he made the oft-quoted statement: “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”

The Genius of Animals

This poster came across my Facebook feed last week and it got me wondering. I can think of many humans with great minds, like Leonardo daVinci, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Miley Cyrus (OK – just kidding), but isn't the same probably true of animals? I know it sure seems true with my pets. With my first two dogs, Simba was the smart, intuitive one and Jana was what we politely called “sweet”. Our second pair of dogs turned out the same. The folks at the kennel where we boarded Bexley called her a clown in a dog suit. She was big, exuberant, and very smart. Chelsea, on the other hand, is not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. Our black cat, Binny, was probably smarter than anyone in the house, including my wife and me, but she never let on.

Objectifying Animals

Author Barry Lopez wrote in his award winning 1986 book, Arctic Dreams, that “we have irrevocably separated ourselves from the world animals occupy. We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects”. “[And] because we have objectified animals”, he goes on to say, “we are able to treat them impersonally.” If we could somehow appreciate animals as individuals, perhaps they would become more personal (and precious) to us.

I would love to find a way to test the intelligence of all of the African elephants on earth. Wouldn't it make sense that some would be smarter than others? I’ll bet some elephants are probably geniuses. Some are wise, some are “sweet”. Some are kind and some are mean. I know that sounds anthropomorphic, but I suspect there is more to this than we can possibly know.

Nut Cracking Crows and Tool Using Apes

Look at what we already know about crows. They are renowned for their ability to recognize individual human faces. The folks at the How Stuff Works website claim that crows living in urban areas are known to gather nuts from trees and then place them in the street for passing cars to crack open the shells. Then, after waiting patiently for the light to change, they return to the street to retrieve their nutty snack. Who was the first genius crow to figure that out – without being run over by a car?

How Stuff Works also notes that lab rats find shortcuts, loopholes and escape routes in the laboratory experiments designed by the top scientific minds of our time, and cetaceans have a sophisticated "language" that humans are only just beginning to unravel. Dolphins use tools in their natural environment and can learn an impressive array of behavioral commands by human trainers. And I would love to meet the first chimpanzee who figured out that stripping the leaves off a twig and sticking that twig into a termite mound would result in a termite Popsicle treat?

Poopy Head

Early in my career as a zookeeper, one of my duties was to help walk five African elephants to their night-house and chain them up for the night – a practice that is, thankfully, no longer followed. Every evening, we lined them up and, as one trainer stood in front holding them steady, the other trainer went down the backside of the line placing a long chain around the back ankles. This gave them freedom to walk around in a certain radius, to eat and lie down, but not to get into too much mischief overnight.

On one of my first evenings chaining the elephants on my own, as I bent over to do the old matriarch Elke, something thudded onto the top of my head. It was heavy, soft, and a little larger than a softball. As it rolled off my head and onto the floor I could see it was a turd. When I looked up, my partner was laughing.

“If you stand off to the side,” he said helpfully, “that won’t happen.”

Right.

At that time, I imagined a big, dumb animal inadvertently pooping, and me being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as I look back and think about the above-captioned poster, I’m not so sure. What if Elke did that on purpose? She was the oldest and most experienced. She had seen lots of handlers come and go. She knew I was the new guy and didn't know to stand to the side. I wonder if she chuckled when she nailed me and her infrasonic communication rumbles caused a ripple of silent laughter from the other elephants, as well. I didn't think it was funny at the time but it sure would make me happy to think these elephants were having some fun at my expense.

There is something primal and powerful within us that wants to separate us from the animals, to make us special among all creation. But what if some of these incredible things animals do are not the result of millions of years of evolution and some deep-seated instinct? What if they are the result of an unusually smart animal – an Einstein of the animal kingdom – figuring something out and passing it along? Which brings me to this thought that is sometimes attributed to Einstein himself:

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

CBS spends 60 Minutes with Damian Aspinall

 I first learned about the CBS 60 Minutes piece set to air March 15^th, 2015 through the zoo directors’ list serve. The hard-hitting, TV news show was working on a story about zoos and they were working with Damian Aspinall – a well-known opponent of zoos. Great, that’s all we need. It was just 2 weeks earlier that a 60 Minutes piece on Lumber Liquidators claimed high levels of cancer-causing formaldehyde in some of their flooring products, sending their stock plummeting the very next day. And who can forget the effect of the documentary Blackfish on the fortunes of SeaWorld? In a society that is fed a steady diet of “reality TV”, I expected Monday morning pundits to be singing the praises of Aspinall’s heroic efforts to save animals and a damning indictment of the cruelty of zoos. But, as one of my favorite Saturday morning sports commentators likes to say – not so fast my friends.

DamianAspinall was born to a life of wealth and privilege on the 500 acre Wildlife Park that is part of his country estate in the English countryside. The operation was started in the 1970’s by his wealthy father, who was passionate about  keeping his animals in enclosures as close to their natural habitat as possible and keeping them in social groups that would replicate their behavior in the wild. The 54 year old Damian clearly has an affinity for these animals, as the videos of him playing tug-of-war with a tiger, patting down a black rhino, and wrestling with gorillas clearly show. He says the animals are part of his family – his equal.

The 60 Minutes story begins by asking whether endangered animals born and bred in captivity should ever be released into the wild. A conservation group called the Aspinall Foundation, the narrator says, is trying to find out. CBS Journalist, Lesley Stahl, began her interview with Aspinall by noting that zoos see their mission as not just displaying animals but also saving endangered species.

Zoo Gorillas Return to the Wild

“Zoos,” he responds, “are jails that lock up animals for life. If I could extinguish all zoos over the next 30 years, including my own, I would.”

Stahl makes the case for zoo animals as ambassadors and zoo education might encourage preservation, but he is shaking his head before she is finished speaking.

“Please show me the statistical evidence that zoos educate and that the education that they claim they are doing has helped animals in the wild. There is no evidence because it is a lie,” he claims.

This exchange sets the tone of this story. Zoos, Aspinall claims, are bad and he is determined to return his animals to the wild – beginning with his gorillas.

As they talk about the plan to send his gorillas to Africa, Stahl notes they are fragile and questions whether it is too dangerous for zoo raised animals to go to the wild. But he brushes the question aside, suggesting that man underestimates animals.

Aspinall crates-up 10 gorillas, a male, 5 females and 4 young, and ships them to Gabon in West Africa, where he has purchased 1 million acres and turned it into a park. The gorillas are released onto an island to acclimate. One year later, as the 60 Minutes cameras roll, they tentatively step across a bridge from their island to the mainland in what appears to be a triumphant release from captivity to a life of freedom. But the joy is short-lived. One month after the gorillas crossed the bridge to freedom, the team found all five females and one of the babies dead. The others probably suffered the same fate, but crawled off into the jungle to die. Aspinall had earlier acknowledged the possibility of failure but brushed it aside. Those who wanted to prove him wrong can take no joy in being right.

Can zoos be animal sanctuaries?

In one of my very first blogs, in August 2013, I recalled a 1989 trip to Africa where my wife and I observed “biodiversity in its natural state”. As we sat at a waterhole in central Africa, we watched a female sitatunga antelope cautiously step out into the open and make her way to the water for a drink. It was not a remarkable scene until someone pointed out two female lions lurking at the forest edge nearby. We watched as they split up and were mesmerized as one lion chased the antelope into the waiting jaws of her companion in a remarkable bit of teamwork. The antelope never had a chance. We didn’t know whether to feel sorry for the sitatunga as she was suffocated by the lion’s strangle hold on her throat or cheer for the lions and their remarkable bit of hunting. You could argue that these lions are better off in the wild because they get to hunt antelope for dinner, but I am not so sure about the sitatunga.  

In December of 2014, I wrote a two-part blog entitled Amnesty for Animals that looked at the concept of the repatriation of captive animals back to the wild. If we are going to repatriate wild animals and move them out of zoos, aquariums, and marine parks, I wondered, to what wild will they be humanely returned? Accredited zoo and aquarium facilities are getting better and more humane while enlightened and loving caretakers learn new techniques to ensure that animal welfare is a top priority. A large, diverse zoo habitat might be a perfectly good, permanent home for some wild animals.

It is a sad fact that zoos have allowed the perception (not entirely undeserved, unfortunately) that some captive situations can be traumatic. Zoos also stand accused of wantonly breeding animals to produce the cute babies which make them money at the gate. When the babies grow up they become surplus to the zoo’s needs. Sanctuaries have been rescuing these “unwanted” and “surplus” zoo animals for decades. If zoos are going to survive, I believe they need to step up their game and become the sanctuaries to which people refer.

Contrary to Aspinall's claim, people are positively influenced by the collective conservation message of zoos and the animals that live in them. The University of Warwick, in England has just provided evidence evidence that zoos and aquariums do more than just entertain us. The largest study of its kind suggests they also raise awareness of biodiversity and how to protect animals and their habitats. Would these zoo animals better-off in the wild? They might be if humans had not evolved to dominate every corner of the planet – but here we are. And how do you define better-off, anyway? Aspinall’s gorillas are certainly not better off.

Chehaw Park in Albany more than just nature's playground

   On a recent drive through a remote, 200-acre portion of Chehaw property that we call “the back two-hundred,” I came across three Albany State students. One was holding a GPS device while the other two peered down a gopher tortoise burrow. One of the students was conducting a senior project mapping gopher tortoise burrows for her science class using Chehaw as an outdoor lab. The other two, judging by their smiles, were having a good time helping her.

   Much is made our deficiencies in education, especially in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). But when it comes to the science portion of STEM, our community is fortunate to have a unique facility with 750 acres of natural ecosystems, abundant wildlife populations, and an accredited zoo. Chehaw is so much more than just a field trip destination. It is an outdoor lab for our local students. Natural populations for potential study include gopher tortoise, Mexican free-tailed bats, and white-tailed deer. In the zoo, students can work with such exotic animals as cheetah, rhino, and meerkat.

   Chehaw education programs are carefully designed to meet Georgia’s Common Core Curriculum standards for all grades from elementary through high school. Park educators also work with college students from Albany State University and Georgia Southwestern State on project-based programs that meet their requirements for class assignments. And the park recently renovated one of its unused residences into a home for visiting zookeeper interns. The five-month program hosts college graduates from as far away as Wisconsin and New York.

   Education professionals have broken learning down to three basic types, and Chehaw excels at all three. Formal learning, which occurs in a structured and organized environment, might include classes taught to schools both at the park and in the school. Informal learning occurs during daily activities. It is not organized or structured and it is not intentional on the part of the learner. It is learning by accident and it is, perhaps, what we do best. Simply walking through the zoo and gazing at an exhibit or an animal results in learning, even if the learner is just there to have fun.

   Somewhere in between is something called non-formal learning. This is learning that is intentional on the part of the learner, but it is part of some type of daily activity that is outside the formal learning environment. Non-formal learning includes all types of education programs with no specific curriculum, such as tours, informational signage, exhibits/interactive displays, and demonstrations. It might also include junior zookeeper programs, docent organizations and overnight experiences.

   One of the park’s newest non-formal learning programs will begin this summer, thanks to a generous, five-figure donation from the Darcey foundation. If parents want to send their children to a unique, week-long, overnight summer camp, they will need to travel no further than Camp Chehaw

   Those Albany State students have discovered that quality learning can take place outside the classroom, especially with a resource like Chehaw Park – a place where nature comes alive, one student at a time.

http://www.albanyherald.com/news/2015/jan/12/doug-porter-chehaw-park-in-albany-more-than-just/  (from my Guest Column in the Albany Herald - January 12th, 2015)

Amnesty For Animals – Part 2

The December 3^rd Seattle Times headline read “Scuffle at zoo board’s meeting on where to send elephants”. It seems that dozens of activists showed up at the Woodland Park Zoo board meeting to protest a plan to close the zoo’s elephant exhibit and send its two animals to another zoo. The activists were “demanding its two elephants be sent to a sanctuary rather than another zoo”. They were blocked from attending due to lack of space in the meeting hall, but, after police were called, tempers subsided – at least for the moment.

In November, the zoo had announced that it would phase out its elephant exhibit, saying its two remaining Asian elephants need “a larger social group”. The move was coming after several years of criticism over the zoo’s small, aging exhibit and the quality of the elephants’ lives in captivity. Officials were looking for a zoo that had a stable elephant collection that was free of disease and had an active conservation program that would highlight the threat to elephants in the wild. It sounded like a good plan and a responsible thing to do except for one thing. Activists, according to news reports, said relocating the elephants to another zoo would mean more of the same. “The elephants,” the activists said, “need to go to a sanctuary. They've been in captivity since they were taken from their mothers as babies. They deserve to be off exhibit to heal from the trauma of captivity.”

It is a sad fact that zoos have allowed the perception (not entirely undeserved, unfortunately) that some captive situations can be traumatic. Zoos also stand accused of wantonly breeding animals to produce the cute babies which make them money at the gate. When the babies grow up they become surplus to the zoo’s needs. Sanctuaries have been rescuing these “unwanted” and “surplus” zoo animals for decades.

If zoos are going to survive, I believe they need to step up their game and become the sanctuaries to which people refer, and that will begin with a renewed focus on welfare. At Chehaw Park, for example, the zebras and antelope call a 40-acre pasture home. The cheetahs regularly lie atop a mound watching the world go by, much as they would in the wild. And Bogart the camel appears to enjoy his time interacting with people during his outings as Chehaw’s animal ambassador. Chehaw is a good home for these animals and is an example of a zoo that is also a sanctuary. But animal rights activists would close down even the good zoos and return animals to the wild.

As suggested in a previous post, instead of trying to repatriate all wild animals, I think we need to find ways to allow some of them to live in our midst – a kind of Amnesty for Animals Program. Abolishing zoos, marine parks, and circuses is not the answer. It is these institutions that have developed the ability to live with animals. Granted, there has been plenty of abuse in the past, but times have changed. We need to talk about living together in a global community of zoos, game parks, marine parks and, yes, even circuses. We need to give animals their rights, take them out of the hands of those who will not or cannot care for them, grant them protection under the law, and assimilate them into our lives and into our societies.

Amnesty For Animals – Part 1

I like to think of myself as an optimist – one who sees the glass half full. I am happy with where I am and what I have (although I wish I could do more for my children and grandchildren). But as a conservationist, I can’t help but feel a little gloomy.

Human populations in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to double in the next forty years while the killing of African wildlife for ivory, horns, bush meat, and as a result of warfare continues to escalate in spite of worldwide outrage. A fifth of the vast Amazon rainforest has been destroyed in the last thirty years despite government crackdowns and in 2013 deforestation actually increased by almost one-third.

In Indonesia, nearly nine million acres of forest have been lost to oil palm plantations in the last twenty years. The Orangutan Land Trust's scientific advisory board estimates that some three thousand orangutans are lost each year to habitat conversion and hunting. And if all that is not bad enough, there is global climate change to worry about. Polar bear habitat is literally melting before our eyes.

People who lobby for “animal rights” are also lobbying for the repatriation of captive animals back to the wild. Repatriation is a term that was bandied about in the first half of 2014 with regard to children who were illegally pouring across the U. S. – Mexican border. The term literally means to return someone to his or her own country. But repatriation, in this case, was not a straightforward issue because these children were not from our neighboring Mexico. They were from hundreds of miles away in Central America, fleeing crime, gang violence, and grinding poverty in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. They had no homes to which they could be humanely returned. 

If we are going to repatriate wild animals and move them out of zoos, aquariums, and marine parks, to what wild will they be humanely returned? Does anybody really think we can stem the tide of human population growth and the resulting destruction of animal habitats in wild areas? We may need to accept the fact that the people of Africa, Asia, and South America have a right to expand just as we did in North America and Europe, and that global climate change is going to continue into the foreseeable future. Tying the fate of wild animals to the future of their natural habitat might be ensuring their extinction rather than preventing it.

So here is a glass-half-full thought. Perhaps it is time we recognized that zoos, marine parks, and yes even circuses may hold the answer. It is these institutions that have developed the ability to live with animals and it is to these environments that most wild animals have been able to adapt. Facilities are getting better and more humane while enlightened and loving caretakers learn new techniques to ensure that animal welfare is a top priority. A large, diverse zoo habitat might be a perfectly good, permanent home for some wild animals.

Instead of trying to repatriate all wild animals, we need to find ways to allow some of them to live in our midst – a kind of Amnesty for Animals Program. If we really want to stir up an interesting partisan debate, maybe we could expand our already controversial immigration reform policies to include wild animals from around the world. It puts a whole new spin on the concept of illegal aliens!

Animal Welfare and the FBI

According to a recent article by Sue Manning for the Associated Press, the FBI is turning animal cruelty into a Top-Tier Felony. For years, according to the article, the FBI has filed animal abuse under the label "other" along with a variety of lesser crimes, making cruelty hard to find, hard to count, and hard to track. The bureau announced this month that it would make animal cruelty a Group A felony with its own category — the same way crimes like homicide, arson and assault are listed.

This change will help the FBI track crimes nationally and should boost efforts at the State level, as well. In Georgia, cruelty to animals is a misdemeanor and is defined as “when [a person] causes death or unjustifiable physical pain or suffering to any animal by an act, an omission, or willful neglect”. It is something we see all too regularly on the evening news, but seldom with any consequences for the perpetrators.

Animals might not have rights, at least not as we understand “rights”, but why shouldn’t they have some protection under the law, including international laws. In June of 2006, the United Nations General Assembly approved a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This declaration, before the world, was intended to impart worth and dignity to those people who have no representation in the United Nations. It affirmed that indigenous individuals “have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct peoples”.  The Declaration also affirms that all people “contribute to the diversity and richness of civilizations and cultures”. These individuals have no economic power, no military power, no standing in the world community. They are just people – and they have rights and protection.

I wonder if some groups of animals don’t deserve some similar protections. Why couldn’t we say, for example, that elephants “have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct creatures” or that beluga whales “contribute to the diversity and richness” of our planet?

Author Barry Lopez wrote in his award winning 1986 book, Arctic Dreams, that “we have irrevocably separated ourselves from the world animals occupy. We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects”. “Because we have objectified animals”, he goes on to say, “we are able to treat them impersonally” and, I might add, cruelly.

There aren’t many things on which I would like to turn back the clock. I really like my indoor plumbing and my air conditioned home, but it is a shame we can’t reclaim that personal connection to the natural world that was enjoyed by our ancestors. Being cruel to animals is just plain wrong. We shouldn’t need the FBI to tell us that. But I do like the idea that if someone is cruel to animals they might find a black SUV in their driveway, and two agents in dark suits and sunglasses knocking on their door.