To Lose a Species Is Cause for Sadness
Thank you for your recent coverage of the state Natural Area Reserve System and the serious threat posed by introduced mammals to native Hawaiian species and ecosystems. I agree with Kathryn Wiese Gibson [letter, December 1999] that there is room on the Big Island for plants, forests, reserves, humans, and animals. I disagree with Gibson’s views on the control and eradication of introduced feral and game mammals, and the value she places on individual members of hardy, common species over entire suites of unique and vulnerable native Hawaiian species.
Maintaining introduced ungulates in native ecosystems is incompatible with species/ecosystem conservation, and ungulates continue to contribute to the decline and extinction of Hawaiian plants and animals. And while it is clearly not the animals’ fault because humans introduced these animals, it is up to us to prevent them from doing more harm than they already have.
If folks are opposed to hunting because it involves killing animals or because it is cruel, then they should make their concerns known to the governor and other elected officials so that these animals are permanently removed from the islands once and for all. If they are not against hunting but are concerned about ungulate control by resource management agencies, they must urge the governor and the Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources to separate incompatible uses on state land by removing ungulates from native Hawaiian ecosystems and creating game management areas in appropriate non-native areas.
While hunters, animal rights supporters, and others are vocal about the shooting of sheep on Mauna Kea or the snaring of pigs in remote Hawaiian rainforest, you don’t often hear people talking about the suffering of Hawaiian forest bird hatchlings when there is not enough food to support them because of the browsing of sheep and goats, or the slow and agonizing death of native birds infected with avian malaria or pox, spread by mosquitoes in wallows created by feral pigs – birds covered with lesions that eventually cause their bills and toes to fall off.
And what of Hawaiian plants? Are they more “expendable” than animals simply because they’re silent when they’re being eaten or trampled to death? Who speaks for them?
Neither the law nor our conscience allows us to sit back and watch these animals continue to destroy our unique Hawaiian plants and animals. As the late, great F.R. Fosberg said, “To lose a species, any species, is to lessen the quality of our environment, to impoverish, by that much more, the habitat of man. To lose any unique creation, be it natural or the handiwork of man, is a cause for sadness. To lose a product of a million years of evolution is a tragedy.”1
Marjorie Ziegler
Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund, Honolulu
1. Speech to the Hawaiian Botanical Society, April 1971.
Volume 10, Number 7 January 2000