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Changing wild animals' behavior could help save them – but is it ethical?

Thom van Dooren, Associate Professor and Deputy Director, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, Catherine Price, Discovery Early Career Research Fellow, University of Sydney, and Daniel T. Blumstein, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, The Conversation on

Published in News & Features

When large and warty cane toads were first brought to Australia nearly 100 years ago, they had a simple mission: to gobble up beetles and other pests in the sugarcane fields.

Today, though, the toads have become an infamous example of a global problem: biocontrol initiatives gone wrong. The squat creatures have spread across the top half of the country, wreaking havoc on ecosystems. Cane toads are highly toxic, and consuming just one is generally lethal for predators like monitor lizards, freshwater crocodiles and the small, spotted marsupials called quolls.

But what if you taught other animals not to eat the toads? Could you – and should you?

Conservation behavior scientists are doing just that. One of the most exciting areas in this quickly evolving field is behavior-based management, in which an animal’s behavior is encouraged, modified or manipulated in some way to achieve positive conservation outcomes.

In Australia, scientists are working with Indigenous rangers to teach predators not to eat cane toads. Next door in New Zealand – or Aotearoa, in the Indigenous Māori language – researchers, including one of us, Catherine Price, have used fake scents to condition ferrets, hedgehogs and other predators to ignore endangered birds’ eggs. Other behavior-based management efforts include re-teaching lost migratory routes to birds in North America, preparing captive animals for life in the wild in Colombia and using deterrents like colored flags to keep wildlife away from sites where they might conflict with humans.

This research has significant potential to conserve threatened species and reduce animal deaths. However, modifying behavior may come at a cost to animals or the communities they live in.

 

We are scientists and philosophers who study conservation and the ethical dilemmas involved in modifying animal behavior. Working with colleagues, we have developed a framework to help researchers evaluate the ethical considerations of conservation behavior interventions against other options.

One important dimension of behavioral interventions is their potential to conserve species and ecosystems without shooting, poisoning or trapping animals that people view as problems, which has become standard practice in many parts of the world. This is particularly appealing in cases where the animal is endangered.

Elephants, for example, are often killed by accident or on purpose when they wander into human environments like farmers’ fields or railroads. In Kenya, farmers and researchers have built “bee fences” that use elephants’ fear of bees to keep them out of crops.

There are a growing number of other contexts in which it is impractical, publicly unacceptable or just undesirable to kill some animals in order to conserve others, or to achieve other wildlife management goals – like keeping seals away from salmon farms or coyotes out of suburbs. Behavioral interventions are increasingly viewed as a more ethical conservation and wildlife management possibility.

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