Hi Tweets,

Dennis Paulson writes (with various snips):

>This is just a note to thank Jack Bowling for responding to my incendiary
>post in a calm and collected, as well as kind, way. I got carried away a
>bit myself, for which I apologize, but you can tell I have sensitive areas
>just as Jack does. Obviously both of us are guilty of trying to influence
>all of you who are reading these posts, but I guess that's normal human
>behavior.

Both were passionate points of view, passionately put, and need no apology,
in my opinion, as both are part of the much wider debate about human
alienation from Nature. I'm not even sure the Nazi references were entirely
inappropriate, given that it was a extension of the principles of scientific
inquiry that led to Nazi human experimentation, even if their applications
were monstrous and served in part to indulge the doctors' personal sadisms.
Those applications, further, did not spring from nothing, and however much a
parodic perversion of scientific enquiry they may have been, they *did*
arise out of a very widely-accepted eugenics movement in an otherwise mostly
sanctionable context of European medical and biophysical research, and were
an extension of it, not apart from it. That said, and I may be putting words
into Jack B's mouth here, but the intellectual point I *think* he was trying
to make with those emotionally-charged references is that once alienation
from nature achieves a certain degree, scientific research and callous
and/or psychopathic cruelty become indistinguishable in their effect upon
the experimental subject, and constitute an individual and/or
institutionalised abuse of power. Is that a fair read of your point, Jack?

>The reason for my sensitivity is easy to explain. I'm not doing laboratory
>research on live animals, but I am the director of a natural history
>museum, and the pressure to stop using animals in research is paralleled by
>a pressure to prevent scientific collecting (=killing) by museums. I
>consider this sentiment entirely acceptable when it is personal but
>extremely harmful when personal attitudes are used to influence policies
>that control the activities of others. And, of course, this is exactly what
>is happening; many museums have bowed to the pressure, with cessation of
>collection-based research activities.

Underlying much of this debate is the question of how far can one go in
research before reaching such a point of remove from nature as a) to become
pathologically alienated from it and b) to lose moral sanction for one's
research. The first is, both individually and institutionally, a
psychological question; the second, ethical and cultural. I remember reading
on BirdChat recently that an ornithology student in the eastern US was doing
a study on biometrics but didn't have a range of western species'
measurements to compare, so was hoping--rather coldbloodedly, in my
subjective and editorial opinion-- for someone associated with an eastern
museum to shoot a whole bunch of them so he could finish his thesis. I
wondered at the time why he couldn't simply go out west, net and release
enough birds from enough locations to give himself the ranges he needed, and
thus spare a large number of creatures from what amounted to a premature
death from what was an arguably trivial reason. It was coldly explicit from
the wording of his post that his thesis mattered, but the birds didn't. Such
casual callousness may simply have been the result of his never having to
confront directly those living creatures upon which his research depended,
and seeing them as living creatures rather than statistics, or it might have
been that he was simply following the conceptual modelling of his teachers.
Either way, I'd submit, the lack of respect for these animals *over which we
hold the power of life and death* would be a failure of teaching as well as
a prevailing socioeconomic attitude.

>And this is extending not just to
>birds and mammals but all the way down to insects. There is some pressure
>now (from other nature lovers) on dragonfly researchers not to collect
>dragonflies, and the first laws have been passed to legislate this
>pressure.

This must form a bitter dilemma for you and others in the museum/research
area. I can see such limitation as hampering --even halting-- the call of
curiosity. Simultaneously, if they were capable of appreciating the import
of protective legislation, most birds and animals would breathe a sigh of
relief. The question of whether it's better to love a creature in life or
know it in death is, I think, irresolvable, as two mostly opposing,
exclusive premises are in play.

As someone who, as a sort-of serious amateur, has played occasionally at the
very fringes of science, I can appreciate the objective need for study
samples, while offering a brief prayer for the soul of the shot creature I
may be holding at the time. I can only hope that is not a luxurious
hypocrisy, as it sometimes feels. At risk of sentimentality, I hope the
collector did also, but to the bird itself, it's immaterial and I can hear
in my mind a ghost's voice ask "What did you need to know so badly that you
had to kill me before my time?"

>I too value the life of animals and would literally never hurt a fly unless
>I felt it was justified. But I know that death follows life invariably,
>that all animals will die, and that, for better or worse, people have a
>great deal of influence over whether individual animals live or die. What
>concerns me the most is that so many people seem to single out research
>and/or education as insufficient reasons to justify the death of animals,
>when we kill so many more of them in so many other ways and for so many
>other reasons. We've discussed free-roaming cats, picture windows, oil
>spills, and habitat destruction in this forum, but I don't recall anyone
>saying much about Kentucky Fried Chicken or Thanksgiving. Just think if
>every bird lover in America stopped eating birds! And how about the keeping
>of pet birds? Is it really better for a budgie to be in a cage than in the
>Australian outback? (by now I've probably offended all the people on
>tweeters I didn't offend with the first message)

Oh, there may be a Slagged Budgie-Owner support group out there somewhere
with your picture on the dartboard, Dennis, but I wouldn't sweat it--they're
usually pretty understanding folks. Yes, you're right: it *is* unfair to be
so singled out, but the wider issues are resolvable only when birders decide
to organise en masse to cast their then-considerable weight into a credible
lobby--but we've also discussed that, if inconclusively, in earlier posts as
well. As collecting has historically sometimes been committed for less than
noble scientific reasons--status of a collection or collector rather than
quality, or inter-museum competition, for example--it may be simple justice
that the shotgun be restricted to a last resort as a 19th Century relic.

What may be more useful than defensiveness here is to consider this a
challenge for researchers to devise non-lethal ways to gather their data.
For example, would it not be possible to model a virtual museum from
existing specimens in current collections? Or virtual specimens from live,
anesthetised birds in the field? There's blood-work and photography,
laser-scanning, microchip, MRI and PET technologies and lots others just
*aching* to be applied to this field somehow, both in the museum and in the
field. Of course money is a problem, but when hasn't it been?

>Sorry to take up so much space on something so far removed from bird
>finding.

Are you kidding, Dennis? This is a great issue to chew on! It's fascinating,
as it requires examining (maybe again) and retesting some basic principles.
I hope there's more!

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery, and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)