But this battle was not over. Everyone now got into the act: the International Council for Bird Preservation, Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian, no less, and no mean aviculturist and ornithologist himself, and Dr Hardy, curator of the Department of Natural Sciences at the Florida State Museum. Dr Hardy wrote on behalf of the scheme to the director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington. Here is an extract from the reply he received, which shows the craft of gobbledygook raised to a new art form. My translation and comment on this bureaucratic dialect are in italics.
. . . Although your proposal raises some interesting possibilities, we do not believe hybridization of Duskies with similar seaside sparrows is warranted for the following reasons:
1. There is no assurance that hybridization will produce Dusky-like seaside sparrows that will accept the salt-marsh habitat used by Duskies, nor is there assurance that the hybrids will be fertile. (These crosses have never been tried, so obviously you don’t know whether they will work.)
2. Hybridization will result in a permanent dilution of the Dusky deme, which we consider undesirable. (‘Deme’ in the biological jargon means ‘a cluster of individuals with a high possibility of matching with each other’ . . . with only four males left, how can you talk about a deme, much less diluting it, much less comment on its desirability?)
3. There is little information available, which indicates that ‘back-cross’ hybridization is feasible and will produce almost ‘pure’ Dusky seaside sparrows. (Again, you haven’t tried and what is there to lose, anyway?)
4. We do not feel that the purposes of the Act can be extended to utilize hybridization as a conservation tool to recover listed species. (What I think he means is ‘We believe in doing nothing rather than something, because doing something may create a precedent and we might all have to work.’)
5. Approval of this project would set a precedent for hybridization, which we cannot support. (A precedent, once created, turns into a ravening monster, seeking whom it may devour. It is a Pandora’s box, better kept safely locked. Sparrows are expendable, bureaucrats are not.)
I regret that we differ on the approach to be taken in preserving the Dusky seaside sparrow. Nevertheless, we sincerely appreciate your proposal and hope that you can support the effort we have now planned. (The ‘effort’ was to keep looking for a female Dusky!)
Sincerely, etc. etc
One commentator described the situation even more caustically than I:
Reasons given for the denial involve the metaphysics of legal quibbling and fear of ‘setting a precedent’. Because extinction is a precedent setting event that lasts forever, we fail to appreciate or understand the legalistic jargon and bureaucratic stumbling of people (some of whom once were biologists and conservationists before they became ensnared in administration) who should know better. It is a bit ironic that the coup de grace to the Dusky seaside sparrow population has now been delivered by the very federal agency charged with the job of preventing it from going extinct.
Meanwhile, while the battle raged, the sparrows were getting older and dying one by one. Still the Fish and Wildlife Service remained blandly bureaucratic and budged not.
On 16 June 1987 the last Dusky seaside sparrow died. Thus a bird numbering over 6000 in the 1940s had, in forty odd years, vanished from our world through the rapaciousness and thoughtlessness of mankind coupled with an idiotic bureaucracy dictated to by that unpleasant species, the lawyer. An extremely good young journalist writing on the demise of this bird in the Orlando Sentinel ended on this note: ‘Like the canary who warned miners that oxygen was low, the extinction of the Dusky seaside sparrow sends a message to us: We are all in peril.’
So these are some of the situations we’ve encountered on the captive-breeding front in the conservation battle. Sometimes your enemy may be one small government department, sometimes just an individual (but this does not necessarily make your task any easier). On other occasions you find the conservation battle raging far and wide across the world involving so many different people and organizations that you begin to despair of ever accomplishing anything. The case which immediately springs to mind involves the international traffic in wild animals and wild animal products.
In the days when I had just started the zoo in Jersey, I was at a conference where I was introduced to a Dutch animal dealer, a man of great charm who spoke exquisite English but was utterly lacking in morals, as I suppose most dealers are. In those days, of course, there was no real public awareness (as there is today) of the plight of wildlife, much less international laws protecting wildlife. Of course, certain countries had what I have always called ‘paper protection’ for some of their native species, but the enforcement of this was, for the most part, desultory and, even when carried out with some attempt at vigour, was generally abortive owing to the lack of funds for the necessary manpower and equipment. Also, the dealers (like today’s drug smugglers) were constantly thinking up new and devious methods of evading the law.
Late at night at the end of the conference the Dutch dealer sought me out, for he had just discovered that I had started a zoo and wondered if he could sell me anything. To his disappointment he had nothing I wanted or could afford if I had wanted it. However, being a convivial fellow, he sat up into the small hours and became, under the application of alcohol, even more convivial and somewhat indiscreet. Needless to say, having a better head than he had, I hoped to gain knowledge and so plied him with more drink and innocent questions.
‘My dear Gerry,’ he said, for we had by that time reached the Christian name stage, and he was under the impression that we were blood brothers, ‘if you want me to I can get you any animal in the world, whether it is protected or not.’
‘I think you’re boasting,’ I said, smiling at him as if chiding a naughty child, ‘that’s too much for me to believe.’
‘No, no, is true, Gerry, I assure you,’ he said earnestly. ‘I swear upon my mother’s grave.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that your mother is dead,’ I said.
‘She isn’t,’ he replied, dismissing the quibble, ‘but I swear on the grave she will eventually occupy. Go on, test me.’
I thought for a moment.
‘Komodo dragons,’ I said, knowing these, the largest of all lizards, to be strictly protected in their island homes by the Indonesian government.
‘Poof!’ he said, gulping at his drink, ‘can’t you think of something more difficult? Komodo dragons are no problem.’
‘Well, how would you do it?’ I persisted, genuinely interested.
‘You know,’ he said, wagging a long, beautifully manicured finger at me, ‘the Indonesian government has a launch that patrols the waters around the island of Komodo, eh?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s an anti-smuggling and anti-poaching patrol.’
He nodded and closed one large moist brown eye in a prodigious wink.
‘D’you know how fast she goes?’ he asked, rhetorically, ‘she goes at fifteen knots maximum.’
‘So?’ I asked.
‘So I have a friend on a neighbouring island who has a launch that does thirty-five knots. So we go to Komodo and my friend drops me there. Of course, we bribe the locals for they are terribly criminal people. Three days we catch dragons. My boat comes back and picks me up. Five times we have been chased by the customs launch, but they cannot match our speed. So, poof, dragons for Europe, dragons for America.’
He sighed with immense satisfaction and drained his glass.
‘All right,’ I said provocatively, ‘I’ll give you something more difficult. How about if I wanted a giant panda?’
I felt sure that this would prick the balloon of his conceit. He merely gave me a withering look.
‘Why don’t you ask me something difficult?’ he said, ‘not these stupid things. A panda is easy.’
‘
Well, how would you do it?’ I asked.
‘Simple. Catch your panda, dye it all black and bring it out legally as a bear. No customs officer would know the difference.’
I went to bed.
At the time of my conversation with the devious Dutch dealer, the international trade in wildlife was carried on with virtually no regulations, regardless of the paper or real protection for animals in their own countries, which in either case was inadequate and hard to enforce. The attitude to the fate of the various species involved was callous beyond belief. Tigers, spotted cats, crocodiles and sea turtles were threatened because the fashion trade relied on their skins. The numbers of monkeys and apes from the tropics dwindled because medical institutions in America and Europe wanted them for experiments, hundreds of thousands of birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish were being taken from the wild for the pet trade, few surviving the well-meaning but ignorant ministrations of their new masters.
However, since the early days things have got a little better. After ten years of research into the animal trade the IUCN proposed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). This was signed in 1973 by twenty-one nations, and to date over ninety countries have signed. The purpose of this Convention is to be able to monitor and regulate the international trade in wild plants and animals and their products – for example, ivory furs or skins – and to protect those species threatened by it. The point of the Convention is not to deny countries the foreign exchange which wise exploitation of their wildlife brings, but to make sure it is controlled efficiently and therefore sustainably. Thus CITES is better than nothing, but there are still loopholes through which unscrupulous traders and dealers can slip, and one of these is the fact that, though one country may have signed the Convention, it is possible that its neighbour (or neighbours) has not and this opens a conduit for smuggling, for an animal or plant coming out of a country not signatory to CITES cannot be impounded by the customs.
A complex situation arose from this very fact over the illegal trade in the golden-headed lion tamarin from Brazil. This minute and beautiful primate had been whittled down in numbers by capture for the pet trade and the fact that their forest homeland was being felled at a ferocious speed to make room for farmland and cattle grazing. Suddenly, to everyone’s astonishment, a Belgian animal dealer offered twenty-four for sale. These, it was thought, could have represented up to a quarter of the world population and to have them appear in the pet trade was appalling. Further investigations revealed more animals in zoos or private hands in Japan, Hong Kong, France and Portugal. Altogether, fifty-four tamarins were located. It became apparent that all these animals had been illegally captured in Brazil where they are fully protected, for Brazil is a signatory of CITES. Once caught, the animals were smuggled into Guyana and there sold by animal dealers. The fact that the animal did not come from Guyana and the likelihood of finding wild ones there was as probable as finding a colony of polar bears in the Sahara Desert made no difference. At the time, Guyana was not a signatory of CITES, nor was Belgium for that matter, and these countries could do what they liked. Thus possibly as much as half of the world population of this delicate little animal was in private collections or at zoos.
Immediately the forces of conservation set to work. To begin with it was unthinkable that such a high proportion of the world population of such a creature should be scattered about the globe in this fashion. Also, the animals had been illegally caught and smuggled out of their native Brazil. It was imperative that they were returned to Brazil if possible; if this could not be done, then the creatures should be kept together so that they founded the nucleus of a captive-breeding group. This was easier said than done. Jeremy was in the thick of all this since he has a deep and abiding love of the marmosets and tamarins. The first step was to get the animal dealer in Belgium to relinquish the animals in his possession. Not unnaturally, he was reluctant to do this since the animals represented considerable financial outlay for him and if he returned them to the Brazilian government he would get no profit. By this time the IUCN, the World Wildlife Fund, the Brazilian government, the Belgian government, the National Zoo in Washington and ourselves were all involved. We were all quite determined not to buy the animals (which we could have done) as this would have looked as if we were condoning and, indeed, encouraging the illegal trade in these creatures.
Representations were made at top level. The Belgian authorities were asked by the Brazilian government to use their good offices to get the animals repatriated and the Duke of Edinburgh, as President of the WWF, also wrote to the Belgian authorities. At length, to our relief, this public pressure had its effect and the animal dealer reluctantly agreed to send all but eight of the animals back to Brazil. Following this good example, the specimens in Japan were also sent back to their homeland and the titles to at least some of the animals held elsewhere were given back to the Brazilians. Then another problem arose, for the Brazilian authorities – not being versed in the complexities of conservation – could not understand why we did not simply release the animals which had been repatriated back into the nearest piece of forest. Of course, to release animals used to captivity back into a strange forest area would be tantamount to killing them. We at last persuaded the Brazilians that the animals should go to the Primate Centre at Rio de Janeiro to become the foundation of a captive-breeding group. This was duly done and in due course two further groups were founded, one in Washington and one in Jersey. While all these colonies are flourishing, we are making strenuous attempts with the aid of the Brazilian government to save some remnants of the forest so that, when the numbers in captivity are sufficient, a reintroduction scheme can be worked out for the species as has been done for its relative, the golden lion tamarin, a story I take up in Chapter Five.
CITES is an enormous step in the right direction – one it would have been unthinkable to propose twenty-five years ago – and yet the volume of wildlife trade, both legal and illegal, has reached astronomical levels. In the five years after CITES was established the so-called legitimate imports of wildlife products to the USA alone rose from four million ‘items’ to 187 million ‘items’. Just three years later that trade was worth a billion dollars! Over twenty million butterflies are exported from Taiwan each year to end up as dried and desiccated specimens ‘enhancing’ the beauty of suburban walls all over the world, and hundreds of thousands of sea creatures are killed each year so that their shells may gather dust on suburban mantelpieces.
The world’s inexhaustible appetite for ivory has devastated the African elephant and, because the horns of the rhinoceros are worth their weight in gold, the numbers of this wonderful antediluvian creature have dwindled to a pathetic few thousand. It is big money which urges on the rapacious exploiters, as in the drug trade. If the coat of an ocelot fetches $US40,000, what use are the creatures except dead? Nine birds of prey recently smuggled into Saudi Arabia were sold for $US200,000. Faced with this sort of money being legitimately or illegitimately earned from wildlife, the sums put into its conservation seem pitifully small, and the heart of the conservationist falters. Given the volume of trade and the economic pressures felt by some countries, it is no wonder that the CITES loopholes are gaping wide open.
Even if a country signs the Convention, it is in no way legally bound to obey the legislation which may be proposed by other countries: it can declare exemptions to the legislation in its own interest. Another point is that harassed customs officers are not supposed to be zoologists and so have difficulty in spotting the illegal species on the Convention’s list. Furthermore, in some cases an extremely rare creature can look very like a common related one, so that only an expert could tell them apart. Another major problem is what to do with the animals if they are discovered by customs and confiscated? They cannot simply be sent back to the country of origin and released, and generally in the country of origin there are few, if any, people with the expertise for looking after these cr
eatures. So what do the customs do? Almost inevitably they have to send them to a zoo or similar institution. We were asked to help in a problem of this kind a few years ago.
Madagascar has several different species of tortoises, all rare and all given at least paper protection. Of these one of the largest and most handsome is the radiated tortoise. A full-grown specimen measures about two feet long and weighs about forty pounds. On the honey-coloured carapace is a vivid black star pattern. We already had a number of these handsome reptiles in Jersey and they were breeding at several other places in Europe and America, so the species seemed to be safe in captivity, but not in the wild. In spite of being protected, it is still eaten by some Malagasy people and of course the terrible fires (man-created) which decimate Madagascar’s remaining forests take their toll of slow-moving creatures like tortoises.
We were somewhat ill prepared and taken aback one day to receive a telephone call from a senior officer in the UK Wildlife Division of the Department of the Environment. What, he enquired; did we know about radiated tortoises? We said they came from Madagascar and that we kept and bred them. He said this was excellent news as he hoped we could help out in a little problem he had. He had been contacted by the customs authorities in Hong Kong who had spotted some radiated tortoises being smuggled into the colony and had quite rightly confiscated them. But now they had the problem of nowhere to put them, and could we help out? Slightly dazed, we said we would certainly try to help and how many tortoises were there? Sixty-five, said the man with relish. They had been smuggled out of Madagascar and were destined for Chinese kitchens, to be turned into savoury stews, casseroles, pies and similar delicacies. Having said we would help, of course we had to, so we cleared out a whole room in the Reptile House. Sixty-five radiated tortoises duly arrived, some only the size of a saucer, some like footstools. Most of them were in good condition but some were suffering from malnutrition and general ill treatment. Four died within a few days of arrival, but the rest flourished. It was an arresting sight to open the door of the room and see the floor literally cobbled with the shells of these lovely reptiles.