Subject: Re: Albatross in the news
Date: Dec 22 10:10:16 1995
From: Don Baccus - donb at Rational.COM


Jerry Tangren:
--Do we base our decisions on what the individual or species is worth to
us?

This is precisely the question that drove debate over the years at
Portland Audubon. We got involved in rehab during a moment of
organizational weakness :) Before my time, of course. At the
request of folks at Oregon Dept of F&W and others at various public
and private agencies who were unindated by requests for help with
injured critters by the public. "Please help us handle these requests",
sayeth the agencies. Our moment of organizational weakness was reflected
by the fact that apparently no one asked "well, are you going to fund
us?"

But I digress. The problem from my point of view is that running a
rehab program is expensive - facilities, 1.5 FTE staff (mostly spent
organizing and training volunteers, dealing with public and press, etc),
food, utilities (washing machines are expensive to run full time!) etc
etc. The program's not self-funding. The public, though we ask
for donations and point out that the average cost of rehab is $25
per critter when we properly compute overhead falls on deaf ears.
We take in an average of $5/critter (last time I looked, which was
a couple of years ago). Everyone wants us to do it, no one will
pay for it. When we let the word out that we were thinking of shutting
it down, ODF&W, USF&W and the Zoo went bannanas, sending representatives
to our committee begging us not too, because then THEY'D have to
deal with the public and couldn't tell 'em to call us! Still no
money for us, though (not their fault, of course, it just ain't
there).

'Tween the proverbial rock and a hard place...

At least we no longer spend $25/bird rehabbing starlings and house
sparrows! No, of course this makes no impact on the population, but
it does make a big impact on our budget. We give vistors a choice:
fix 'em yourself or leave them here and we'll humanely kill them.

And the aggravating thing is that many, many members of the public
obviously think that helping out individual American Robins somehow
makes a real contribution to the ecological health of the planet,
and apparently go off content with their contribution to the
conservation of our resources. We try hard to use the rehab
center as an entree for public education, and think we do
succeed to a certain extent. And, I'm happy to note, many of
our most dedicated conservation and education volunteers first
met us via the rehab center.

On the other hand, spending the money directly on education or
conservation efforts would have a lot more impact on species
preservation than the rehabbing of individuals of mostly common
species.

Having said that, overall I think being involved in rehab has
been positive for Portland Audubon - though it has nothing to
do with the impact of rehab itself. It's a pipeline to the
public. Volunteers who are willing to scrub birdshit several
hours a week, to feed baby birds all night long, etc find the
notion of switching to teaching a couple of school programs
a week to be a downright relaxing thought! Rehabbers are
absolutely dedicated folks, and we suck a lot of that dedication
into other stuff. It also gives us a "happy face" public image
that, locally at least, kind of counters the "radical environmentalist
who hates humanity" image that extractive industries try to pin
on us every day. Folks who save baby birds are hard to paint as
being heartless satanic environmental whacko anti-American pinko
radicals.

And you can't fault people for caring about individual animals. It
is a healthy emotion. I only protest when people raise that emotion
towards the individual critter above the needs of populations as
a whole. I ran across a good example on Usenet earlier, where an
AR person was bragging that minks "freed" by AR activists in
the UK (where they aren't native) are doing "very well in the
wild, thank you", i.e. are becoming established and indeed may
well become a pest. Taking pride in saving individual critters,
when raised to that level, is simply sick IMO.

(I'm not trying to link rehabbers to such idiocy, just to make things
very clear).

I've said more than enough...it's a difficult issue, I think.


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>