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eNewsletter |
November 2001 |
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IWMC
World Conservation Trust |
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Minus of Conservation
Too Cute to Manage, Too Sad to See
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When
bad things happen to cute animals, everyone feels terrible. Sometimes, those
closest to those animals feel the worst, because they see them every day and
feel great responsibility for their welfare. The welfare of the cutest animal in
the world, the koala, is now the focus of attention in South Australia, where a
population of these cuties was moved to Kangaroo Island, helping to make it a
major tourist destination. Thousands of people derive their daily livelihoods
from koalas and other marsupials on Kangaroo Island, because of tourism. Cruise
ships, restaurants, souvenir shops, hotels, food vendors, car rentals, and other
service oriented businesses, all depend on koalas as a symbol of what is
attractive and memorable about visiting South Australia. So naturally, people
there are very aware of the international repercussions that they fear would be
inevitable, should anything bad happen to koalas.
Unfortunately, something very bad has been happening to the little icons for
the last five years, and no one has had the courage or the foresight to do
anything about it. The original 5000 koalas have been enjoying their habitat and
each other so much, that they have now become 33,000 koalas. What do koalas eat?
They eat the leaves of the manna gum tree, a species of eucalyptus. If the manna
gum tree loses a significant proportion, say eighty percent, of its foliage, it
dies. It can not recover and reflourish if it is stripped of its leaves. Then
the koalas will starve. But the koala is not the only species affected. The
brush-tailed opossum will also starve. Certain birds and bees that depend on the
blossoms and the shelter of the tree will suffer and disappear.
This unique habitat is certain to be destroyed, unless the excess of koalas
stops eating the leaves of the manna gum trees on Kangaroo Island.
A local professor of wildlife management has plainly stated the obvious; a
large number of koalas must be culled (killed in one way or another) for the
good of the colony and the habitat. He cited the case of a similar population
out of control on nearby Mud Island in the 1950s, when the animals over-ate the
habitat so severely that the trees died and the animals were found lying dead
under them.
What are the Australian people and their government officials saying about
this terrible dilemma? No one dares to advocate that the difficult choice be
made, and quickly. The Australian government will absolutely neither permit nor
carry out a cull of the animals. Others have agreed that a cull should be out of
the question, calling instead for a mass sterilization program, to halt the
population growth. But the animals have to eat, regardless of their ability to
reproduce. There is no place to take the excess. They have to have hundreds,
nay, thousands of mature manna gum trees that are not already supporting koalas.
There is no such place. Band-Aid solutions are not the answer.
One might ask, why the Australian people are not demanding that the
appropriate measures be taken immediately so that this problem can be humanely
solved. Is it because the country has no record of culls of problem wildlife?
No. That's not it.
Hundreds of thousands of kangaroos, wallabies and other marsupials are culled
in Australia every year, because there are more of them than Australians want.
They compete with the sheep for grazing land, or they are culled for other
reasons having to do with habitat problems. The fact is, the Australians are
afraid to cull the koalas because they depend on them for their livelihoods.
They are afraid that the outside world and its media will condemn them for
killing something as cute and famous as the koalas, and that tourism will suffer
a deathblow. But, what is the alternative? If they do not reduce the population
dramatically immediately, the trees will be dead within twelve months. Then all
the koalas on Kangaroo Island will die, tourism will die, and the world will
blame the Australians for not having taking appropriate and timely measures.
Australians are afraid for themselves, not for the koalas. Those in the
tourist industry are presently demanding that something be done, and that the
government pay for it. The government is demanding that koalas not be killed,
but sterilized, and that the tourism industry pay for it. They are all afraid of
television cameras watching koalas be shot or otherwise euthanized, because they
are cute, and it makes for poignant news coverage.
We are deeply sympathetic whenever an imbalance reaches such a crisis. IWMC
has always advocated that on-going, science based professional wildlife
management be carried out everywhere to prevent such sad emergencies, and all
the usual media attention and controversy. This is about koalas now, but it is a
very old story with a very familiar ending. It has been told over and over
around the world, with urban white tailed deer in the US, moose in Scandinavia,
harp seals in the Atlantic, and elephants in southern Africa and India. It makes
no sense to sterilize koalas now. It is too late to plant more trees. It is time
to just do it, immediately, with no non-professionals present, and no television
crews. The public will hear about it, and be saddened, and when it is all over
they will be back with their dollars, their Euros and their yen, to once again
enjoy the cutest animal in the world. Only, we hope, most of those cuties will
have been sterilized by then, to ensure this never happens again. 
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