In search of harmony between human progress and wildlife welfare

This essay discusses some aspects of the interplay between human progress and animal welfare, with a particular emphasis on free market environmentalism.

Image source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

Introduction

When my wife (@lisa.palmer) and I bought our house, one of the most attractive aspects of the home was not even something that we were purchasing. The house had about 15 acres of undeveloped land out back, and percolation tests of that land had failed, so unless public water became available, that land was going to stay unoccupied. As a result, during the last 17 years, we have enjoyed a sort of a defacto nature preserve right on the other side of our back yard. We have frequently observed deer, fox, raccoons, groundhogs, and other wildlife wandering from the woods into our own yard.

However, fortunately for the property owners - but unfortunately for us - human progress happens and public water became available. So, during the last week, we have watched most of that forest bull-dozed by a developer's construction equipment preparing the land for home construction. Now, directly behind our home there is still about an acre of woods that has a different owner, but the other 14 or so acres have been leveled.

Original photo, by me. LG-G4 camera, Nov 17, 2017. View in new tab to see the deer.

It's sort-of funny how the mind works. I know that this sort of development happens all around the world all the time, but seeing it happening every time you look out the window gives you a different perspective on it. Of course, there's no comparing displaced wildlife with human lives, but it is reminiscent of the quote that's frequently attributed to Stalin: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." It makes me sad to think of these newly created wildlife refugees, and especially to see the now homeless deer congregating in our back yard at night time, when the construction crews have left.

Ironically, this is happening at the same time as the Internet blew up with news that Trump allowed, then disallowed elephant trophy imports, so the topic of wildlife conservation has been on my mind frequently in recent days.

It would be nice if there were black and white answers to the questions of wildlife preservation, but there are so many competing interests that it turns out to be quite complicated. In particular, two of the values that I prize, human autonomy and property rights can often seem to come into conflict with the well-being of wildlife.

I wrote about this topic last year in, Making Wildlife Conservation Fun and Profitable, but today I thought I'd take another look at it. First, I will briefly revisit the ideas in that article; Next, I will express my thoughts about the interplay between property rights, human autonomy, and wildlife preservation; and finally I will discuss some innovative and encouraging real world concepts that I have read about in the year since I wrote that article.

Section 1: Turning Wildlife Conservation Into a Game

Image Source: Pixabay.com, licensed under CC0, Public Domain

In the card game of Concentration the player is challenged to pick up a deck of cards that are laid face down by remembering the position of the cards, and identifying matching pairs from memory. In my article last year, I imagined a scavenger hunt sort of activity that would harness the same sort of matching incentive to pair property owners and tourists in a lottery style photography game. The property owner could post online photographs of animals found on their property, and the tourists could try to take matching photos. The game application would validate the matches and pay out "bounties" to the owner and tourists based on the scarcity of the matched species and/or other criteria. The game developer could even go on to sell the photos and share revenue with the game players.

The idea here is that the property owner would have an incentive to preserve endangered species on their own property. Care would have to be taken, however, that the incentives did not encourage the killing of animals in order to increase scarcity. As I said in the article, the whole concept winds up being sort of a combination of Airbnb, Project Noah, and Pokémon Go.

In my opinion, for preservation efforts to be effective, they need to be sustainable. And this means that they should not depend on a particular set of government policies that are subject to revocation at the next election or on philanthropic contributions that might dry up during an economic down turn. This game was an attempt to imagine a sustainable system of incentives that would naturally and voluntarily lead to the preservation of wildlife.

Section 2: Animal Rights and Human Rights

Image source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

I can't remember who posted it, but I recently came across a Facebook post where someone posted something like this (paraphrasing):

To those who say that animals have rights, do you feel remorse when you step on a bug?

It should be apparent to nearly anyone that this argument is a logical fallacy (perhaps the "straw man" or "black or white" fallacies). We can quickly move from that example to the examples of dog-fighting or cock-fighting for pretty convincing examples that animals do, in fact, have some rights.

The subject of animal rights is something that I've thought long and hard about, yet I still can't say that I've came to any conclusions, except that it's a hard question. I don't accept the arguments at either pole of the spectrum, either that animals should be entitled to legal representation - as if they were human, or that animals have no rights at all. But I also don't know how to identify the exact rights that an animal should be entitled to.

When a question is complex, and I don't know the answers, I tend to think that the market is usually the best way to sort it out. The question doesn't really have to be a human's rights vs. an animal's rights. Instead, it can be a question of enforcing property rights.

Problems with a political solution include the fact that policy is always subject to revocation, and second, that by attempting to use government coercion to impose my will on the use of someone else's land, I would be denying that person their own self-determination, autonomy, and property rights. I may not know what rights animals have, but I'm certain that I don't have the right to do that to another human.

Philanthropic solutions are part of the market process, and I don't object to them, but it is my experience that they are often unsustainable. For example, my wife's great-uncle owned a sizable piece of land for many years that he diligently kept away from developers in order to protect the wildlife that lived there. However, when he passed away, that land was divided among a number of heirs. I am fairly sure that it's now just a matter of time until that land gets developed.

So, to me, it seems that the best way to balance human rights and animal rights (whatever they are) is to let property owners each enforce their own versions of animal rights on their own properties (subject to limits for abusive cases like dog-fighting) and to construct sustainable incentive systems that will continue to protect the wildlife well into the future.

Section 3: Real World Innovations

Image source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

A few years ago, I learned of the concept of Free Market Environmentalism from the web site, perc.org. I can't honestly say that I've read as much about it as I'd like to, but superficially it strikes me as steps in the right direction. The example I discussed in Section 1 was inspired by this concept. In this section, I'll discuss some other examples of Free Market environmentalism that I've learned about recently. These include Pennsylvania's Hawk Mountain Bird Sanctuary, the Welgevonden Game Reserve in South Africa, and Namibia's Community conservancies.

Section 3.1: The Hawk Mountain Bird Sanctuary

In 1933, Rosalie Barrow Edge attended a NY meeting of the Hawk and Owl society, where she was motivated into action to stop the widespread slaughter of hawks by hunters of the day. In the midst of the Great Depression, she was able to raise enough funds to buy 1400 acres in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania. At the time, hawks' propensity to eat chickens had them widely regarded as vermin.

Four score years later, the site continues to operate with funding from membership dues, visitors fees, and charitable donations. It is now one of the world's premier hawk watching sites, hosting approximately 70,000 visitors and 18,000 hawks each year.

I have visited Hawk Mountain many times, as a child and as an adult, but it was only recently that I associated it with the concept of free market environmentalism.

Section 3.2: The Welgevondon Game Reserve

According to Business Insider, The Internet of Things is putting poachers on the endangered list. The article describes how the Welgevondon Game Reserve is using IoT technology from IBM to detect and deter poachers.

They found that animals react in different ways to different types of perceived threats, and that by fitting the animals with collars, they could detect poachers by monitoring animal movement. The really interesting thing about this is that the initiative is to protect the endangered white rhino, but the collars get fitted to other species of animals, so even the game reserve's workers cannot use the monitoring to track the actual rhinos.

I didn't spend a lot of time on the Game Reserve's web site, but the 37,000 hectare property seems to be funded by tourism revenues. My only concern after reading the article is that collaring these other species might also turn them into targets for poachers, so we'll have to wait and see how that turns out.

Section 3.3: Namibia's Community conservancies

In African animals need to be owned to survive, Karol Boudreaux tells us about the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) techniques that Namibia is using to fund wildlife conservation with tourism. In addition to protecting wildlife, this is providing economic opportunities for the citizens. Although she has mixed results to report, Boudreaux writes,

Putting local people in charge of wildlife management, and giving them a real stake in the protection of these animals has shifted their incentives: they are much less likely to poach animals and much more likely to protect them. The results have been a steady increase in income for rural communities and, at the same time, a rise in the numbers of wildlife.

Conclusion

As someone who values both human progress and wildlife conservation, I have long observed that these values can seem to be in conflict, and searched for ways to resolve that tension. At the moment, the construction that's happening a few hundred yards from my back door is making me painfully aware that I have not been completely successful, but my search for intellectual balance between human rights and animal welfare always seems to find itself centering on the ideas of free market environmentalism.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

Thank you for your time and attention.

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

Steve is a co-founder of the Steemit's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.

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