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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