Jim, Jamey Lee and All;

I initially brought up the topic of wildlife immunocontraception (W.I.) not
because it presents a fascinating hypocrisy among many animal rights groups
and supporters (esp. with the use of PZP), but because I FEEL that it both
in theory and practice is fundamentally wrong. Chewing on the issue helped
me understand why I possessed these feelings, and I was very curious if
others had dissimilar or similar concerns - or no concerns at all.

My unease with wildlife immunocontraception is at the heart of my original
question, "What does this (wildlife immuno.) say about our relationship with
nature?"

This question has nothing to do with hunting or animal rights, but rather
the extent to which (and how) we control and manipulate nature to suit our
whim. Just as state-sponsored predator control systematically eradicated
coyotes and wolves because they were a threat to our economic and aesthetic
priorities, W.I. uses biotechnology to alter deer populations to minimize
their perceived threat to our current priorities. People don't want any deer
related vehicular accidents in their backyard, neither do they want deer
eating their prized rose bushes. They want to see enough deer to feel they
are in "the country" but not so many that they're viewed as rats with
hooves. When they do want to see deer, the deer should be fat 'n happy, not
undernourished and diseased. They don't want to see or know about deer being
killed.

To sum up, people want the Disneyfied Nature(TM), not the one they can't
control. W.I. gives the people exactly what they want, and that scares me.

By no means am I an expert on environmental ethics, that's why I posed the
question to you all. What would the great environmental thinkers (whoever
they are) say about all this? I brought up the Amory quote as an example of
anti-environmental thought (or lack of thought) on the topic.

Thoreau, who vacillated between outright disdain for hunting and hunters and
stating, "perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted,
not excepting the Humane Society." (I'll send THAT one to HSUS), captured my
concerns nicely when he wrote the better known line, "...in wildness is the
preservation of the world."

As Jim points out, W.I. is one giant step towards the domestication of
wildlife. If Thoreau was right then our acceptance of W.I. is a lunge
towards destruction of the world, merely because we're uncomfortable with
that messy death thing.

Hey, look at that...I didn't even make one Star Trek reference!


Live Long and Prosper,

-Josh



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Tantillo [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2000 10:55 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Ethics of immunocontraception?
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I was interested to read Josh Winchell's emails about immunocontraception,
> and my thanks to Josh for trying to get some discussion going. While I'm
> not much of a Star Trek fan, the Cleveland Amory passage Josh quotes
> strikes me as a coldly dispassionate statement in a Mr. Spock kind of way,
> but also as anti-environmental (whatever that is) to the extreme as well.
>
> Josh quoted:
> >Cleveland Amory apparently wasn't too concerned about rights issues when
> he
> >stated, "Prey will be separated from predator, and there will be no
> >overpopulation or starvation because all will be controlled by
> sterilization
> >or implant."
>
> Not that I wish to start the hunting discussion going again, but one
> virtue
> of hunting is that at its best, it teaches a sense of humility in the face
> of natural processes like death and predation. Hunters are reminded time
> and again that we all must die, human and nonhuman alike, and that death
> isn't some fantasy show on television or a video game in an arcade. The
> proposed view from Amory that we should simply and totally control
> wildlife, and that we should *want* to control wildlife, to the extremes
> of
> circumventing predation and putting all animals on birth control, strikes
> me as arrogant and anti-wildlife. One could argue (not that I am,
> necessarily) that the widespread adoption of immunocontraception in lieu
> of
> lethal control measures like hunting and trapping would signal the
> beginning of the end of WILD-life, and turn all animals into domestic
> stock
> to be managed as such.
>
> Taking deer as an example: it is my understanding that the side effects of
> PZP on deer are fairly substantial. The drug suppresses much of the male
> sex hormones in adult deer, with the result that adult males rarely reach
> 100 pounds (sorry, don't know kilos) as opposed to the 200+ pounds they
> would weigh otherwise. Nor do they grow antlers. Questions of animal
> reproductive rights aside: do we really want herds of emaciated,
> emasculated deer running around instead of a normally healthy and sexually
> viable population? (And go ahead, gender trenders: have a field day
> psychoanalyzing the emasculation comment. . . . <smile> ) Do we really
> want deer at all, if it has come down to this? Wouldn't the logical
> extreme of a Cleveland Amory view of the world simply eliminate animals
> entirely so as to avoid the messiness and pain of death and suffering in
> the wild?
>
> Now, to be sure, as Jamey Lee West wisely noted in another response, the
> problems with side effects may be and probably will be reduced in the
> future: "Just as human contraception used to be fraught with many side
> effects, with time and willingness to work through the problems, it would
> be become less traumatic for deer populations."
>
> But I'm afraid I disagree with Jamey's assertion (or at least I question
> it): "Painful, inconvenient, frightening might any form of contraception
> be, but certainly better than a bullet in the head or an arrow embedded in
> the abdomen." Why is this so?
>
> Is contraception--implying years of emaciated (and yes, emasculated)
> living--better than a bullet in the head, to a deer? Why? How do we know
> this? is it because death is feared, in animals as well as humans; and
> that existence is to be preferred to nonexistence? Well, again I must ask
> why? These are philosophical issues that require thought--not simple
> givens in an animal rights position statement. Why is it that we feel
> comfortable extrapolating from humans' experience to that of animals, as
> in
> the following statement:
>
> >I venture to say that most humans, and deer alike would
> >rather render some degree of choice in how many dozen offspring we
> create, in
> >order to preclude a situation where we would be killed because there are
> too
> >many of "our kind".
>
> I don't think we should be so quick to attribute an anthropomorphic
> "choice" to deer on this issue. In the far-off, far out future brave new
> world of Cleveland Amory et al., a potential population of unhunted and
> perfectly birth controlled deer would lose all wariness around humans.
> Such deer would be as tame as those found in any animal petting zoo,
> and/or
> as tame as pigeons and squirrels in New York's Central Park. Is this what
> we want deer to be? Is this what we want for ourselves?? As always,
> these
> are aesthetic questions, as well as ethical ones.
>
> Josh Winchell helpfully asked: "What does this say about our relationship
> with the natural world?" I'm not sure immunocontraception is the
> perfectly
> humane panacea the animal rights community so desperately wants it to be,
> nor is it an environmentally sound foundation for a totalistic approach to
> wildlife management, the views of Alan Rutberg and the late Cleveland
> Amory
> notwithstanding.
>
> Just some quick thoughts on a Wednesday morning.
>
> Jim Tantillo
> [log in to unmask]


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