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The end of last year, I posted a review of an important paper in Science on the return of large carnivores--wolves, lynx, and brown bears—to Europe despite its dense human population. It was thought that such a recovery would be impossible because the sort of large contiguous spaces that they were believed to require were no longer to be found in Europe. They have succeeded in living among people in no small measure because they are not hunted. Despite the European success, the world is facing the extirpation of 60 percent of its large terrestrial megafauna—and to slightly misquote the Grateful Dead: "Nothing's gonna bring them back"—not even genetic sleight of hand, because when they fall, they will bring whole ecosystems with them.
That is the most dramatic conclusion of two exhaustive surveys of the status of the world’s largest herbivores and carnivores (links below), not including those aquatic and avian species that are also imperiled, by William J. Ripple, director of Oregon State University’s Trophic Cascades Program, and two different groups of leading ecologists. When collapsing fisheries and marine mammal losses are factored in they make a bleak situation truly grim.
In January 2014, Ripple and thirteen colleagues published in Science, a review called, “Status and Ecological Effects of the World’s Largest Carnivores”—thirty-one mammalian meat-eaters: wolves, African wild dogs, dholes, maned wolves, red wolves, dingoes, Ethiopian wolves, Cape clawless otters, sea otters, giant otters, spotted hyenas, brown hyenas, striped hyenas, leopards, Snow leopards, clouded leopards, Sunda clouded leopards, jaguars, pumas, tigers, lions, Eurasian lynx, cheetahs, American black bears, Andean black bears, Asiatic black bears, brown bears, sloth bears, sun bears, giant pandas, and polar bears.
These are the last remaining heirs of the guild of carnivores who stalked the great herds of ungulates toward the end of the Pleistocene and Last Glacial Maximum about 22,000 years ago. Among them was a weapon- wielding naked biped whose descendants now threaten all who remain, directly through hunting, indirectly through land grabs for ranching and farming and through depletion of their ‘wild’ prey by hunters killing for sport or trade in body parts.
“Current ecological knowledge indicates that large carnivores are necessary for the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem function,” the researchers say. “Preventing the extinction of these species and the loss of their irreplaceable ecological function and importance will require novel, bold, and deliberate actions.” To that end, they propose “a Global Large Carnivore initiative to coordinate local, national, and international research, conservation, and policy.”
Ripple concludes on behalf of his colleagues: “[H]arnessing the positive effects of large carnivores while (i) minimizing their impacts on humans and (ii) getting humans to adapt to large-carnivore presence, represents a major sociopolitical challenge….It will probably take a change in both human attitudes and actions to avoid imminent large-carnivore extinction.”
But time is running out for them and us.
Large carnivores arguably are nothing without their prey, except, perhaps, scavengers or livestock thieves courting death. Yet the plight of the large herbivores—those weighing more than 100 kilograms—might be more bleak than that of the large carnivores who rely on them for survival.
Of the 74 species of large terrestrial herbivores left in the world today 44 or roughly 60 percent are threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN (12 critically endangered or already extinct in the wild). More than half have declining populations. Most of those in danger are found in Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. Many of them are little known to science or the general public.
There is no way to sugar coat the situation the world faces. Ripple and a second group of prominent ecologists do not try in an article in the May 1, 2015, issue of Science Advances. “Only eight terrestrial megafauna species (≥1000 kg) exist today as opposed to more than five times that number (~42) that were present in the late Pleistocene,” they say. Of those species of elephants, rhinos, and hippos, three are threatened, and four are critically endangered.
By what they eat and excrete, as well as where and how they move, these largest of herbivores affect the vegetative character of their territory, which in turn draws other herbivores and the carnivores who prey on them.
Thus, even thought they might not be prey themselves, they create landscapes that host the plants and create the habitats in which those species who are prey, make their homes. Predators follow.
Risks to large herbivore existence are similar to those that threaten large carnivores: hunting, habitat fragmentation and loss, and expansion of livestock ranching. Unlike carnivores who are killed for hunting livestock; herbivores are killed to eliminate competitors for forage. Rhinos are killed for horns for use in traditional medicines in China and Vietnam and elephants and hippos are slaughtered for their ivory.
Sadly, there is little new about this slaughter. In the 1800s, sport hunters shot tens of thousands of specimens of whatever animals (called appropriately “game”) they stumbled across. So profligate was the slaughter that some states began to regulate hunting and fishing, so some would be left for future generations of hunters. Of course, they wished only to preserve certain animals and so slaughtered the rest.
Still, the latest reports from Europe and elsewhere confirm a simple truth: If these animals, even the large carnivores are spared from hunting, they will figure out a way to live with humans and survive. Humans just have to leave them be.
Stopping poachers with automatic weapons, GPS trackers, helicopters, light planes, and major financial and political backing—rhino horn fetches $30,000 an ounce on the black market--is difficult at best without equal or superior arms and equioment. Those are seldom available.
Faced with a continuing extinction crisis that threatens any fantasy anyone ever had of biodiversity and may affect whole regions of the world in ways that cannot yet be fully seen and surrounded by solid evidence that if you do not hunt these animals, they most likely will come back and live among people willing to make some adjustments on their own, the international development arm of the World Bank, that bastion of failed capital projects, made a grant to Mozambique to develop hunting in its national preserves.
On May 27, 2015, Tom Bowker reported for Bloomberg News that the International Development Association made a $4-millon grant to Mozambique in November 2014 to improve its conservation programs. Included was $700,000 to promote hunting in protected areas. That grant went to a nation that watched its elephant population drop by half from 20,000 to 10,300 over the past five years. Its preserves provided no protection.
The Guardian newspaper has reported that 4 out of five rhino poachers in South Africa are from Mozambique. They don’t need more hunting; they need less. The question is whether the developed nations want to pay more for people not to kill than to kill. The larger question is whether humans can take collective action to save these animals from humans?
