Over the past couple of days I’ve been reading up on the controversy surrounding the plans to cull ravens in Perthshire earlier this year. Scottish Natural Heritage, the public body with responsibility for maintaining Scotland’s natural diversity, issued a licence to the Strathbraan Community Collaboration for Waders to cull the birds over five years, with up to 69 to be killed in the first year. The justification for this was to study what effect that it would have on populations of lapwings, curlews and oystercatchers, as some claim that predation by ravens is driving declines in these species of wading birds.
There was an outcry, as there often is when culling of any kind is involved. In the case of the ravens, Chris Packham was the public face of the campaign after sending an email to the SNH, that was also published online, attacking the proposed cull. The RSPB also opposed the scheme and a crowdfunded legal challenge spearheaded by the Scottish Raptor Study Group was lodged. This prompted SNH to commission a review of the methodology of the study cull, which found that it lacked the ability to provide robust scientific conclusions. Just a few months after the licence was issued, the project was voluntarily suspended until at least the end of the year.
I’m not going to get into the argument about the morals of culling in conservation here. Instead, reading over the material put out by organisations on both sides of the argument, there is something that irritated me about some of the points being made. This is epitomised by a quote from the Scottish Countryside Alliance, an organisation that has the aim of ‘promoting and protecting rural communities and the rural way of life’. In their response to the issuing of the licence, the director of the organisation was quoted in an article on their website as saying ‘Culling any species is controversial, but the conservation of our beleaguered waders is too important an issue to be decided by emotive campaigning. Any approach needs to be grounded in science, and that’s why we welcome this research licence’. The thing that irked me was the appeal to science used here and in articles about conservation all the time. Decisions like these are supported because they are ‘scientific’ or objected to because they aren’t.
I am not saying that conservation science is useless. Far from it. I study conservation science for my PhD and it is vital if we are going to preserve any vestige of the biodiversity on this planet. Without understanding the natural world, how would we hope to stop the destruction that we are seeing? But science can only do so much. Science provides information, but it does not tell you what you ought to do when you have that information. Proper science shouldn’t do that and has never claimed to. In the case of conservation science, it can, for example, tell us what is causing the decline of certain species and what interventions may help tackle this, but it cannot tell us whether we should implement these interventions. There are other things to consider. Economics, the effect on other species and local communities, and whole range of other things introduce trade-offs and affect how we conduct conservation.
This is why appeals to science that diminish and belittle the role of ethical, social and monetary considerations are misleading. Ravens and all the wading bird species mentioned are protected and all of them have populations far below what they have been historically. It may be the case that raven predation is contributing to the decline of waders, although this is heavily contested. Just say that scientific evidence put it beyond all reasonable doubt that ravens are a factor in these declines. This does not in any way tell us that we should cull them. It merely tells us that if we do, the populations of waders may increase.
Saying that science tells us we should cull ravens misses out a few v
ital steps in the argument and is disingenuous. It ignores the discussions where the decision about what the proper course of action is should be made. We have to explicitly say what we mean. One of the ways to argue for a cull would be to say ‘we value wading birds more than ravens so are willing to cull ravens to save waders’. Alternatively you could say ‘our ultimate aim is to prevent extinction. The cull won’t put the ravens at risk of that but not culling them may put the waders at risk of it’. On the other side of the argument, it is perfectly legitimate to argue against a cull even in the face of evidence it would boost wader numbers by saying ‘as a free-living and intelligent species, we do not think that a cull is acceptable under any circumstances and we must find another way to protect waders’. These arguments contain value statements, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as they are supported. We can use science to provide evidence to support these arguments but we cannot use it to circumvent them, which often happens in conservation. Even with invasive species such as rats, which have contributed to the extinctions of many species of seabirds on islands, there is a value statement in saying ‘it is important to stop this endemic bird species going extinct so we are willing to kill thousands of rats to do that’.
We cannot limit our arguments in favour of conservation to just science. We have to be willing to state our values and defend them. It can be difficult, and any statement that says ‘I believe nature should be saved’ is a hard thing to say as a scientist. But it is necessary, and we should not shy away from it.
Featured picture: Pixabay/public domain