Government god complex backfires, experts baffled

Artus Register

The Australian government is apparently unfamiliar with the ecological disaster that resulted from the U.S. government playing God in Yellowstone. It went like this:

In its boundless wisdom, the government, in the manifestation of the Park Service thought the number of park visitors would increase if people saw more wildlife of the hoofed variety. So the began killing, trapping and otherwise removing the wolf.

As is normally the case with government involvement, ignorance, a lack of planning, and abject arrogance combined to form an unmitigated disaster. When the natural order of things is unnaturally changed, bad things happen. A trophic cascade occurs when predators are removed from the equation, and an abundance of their one-time prey gums up the natural order.

In Yellowstone, the wolves and foxes were gone, allowing the elk population to flourish. The larger elk ran off the smaller deer, and set up house along the riverbanks, which they trampled, sending the beavers scurrying. No beavers meant no dams, so the wet areas favored by the mink, otters, ducks, etc.
Sans the berries and trout and fruit shrubs along the river, the grizzly bears moved on to the next most reliable food source–visitor’s picnic baskets.

In response to this destruction, park officials had to begin trapping and removing bears, as well as re-introducing the wolves and fox.

Officials in Australia figured they could do better.

Due to the stubborn refusal of feral cats on remote Macquarie island to stop behaving like feral cats, Australian officials made the decision to exterminate them–all of them.

To protect the bird population, Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania officials assumed they could play god, eliminate the predators, and watch the island transform into a naturalistic utopia where life would flourish. And it did flourish for some species.

It seems the cats were not on an all-poultry diet; they also ate a lot of rabbits. Famous for their reproductive abilities, and now absent any danger, the island’s rabbit population exploded. This took a massive toll on the island’s vegetation which provided cover and nesting for the birds officials sought to save.

Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division described the less-than successful government foray into environmental architecture thusly:

“Our study shows that between 2000 and 2007, there has been widespread ecosystem devastation and decades of conservation effort compromised…We estimate that nearly 40 per cent of the whole island area had changed, with almost 20 per cent having moderate to severe change,”

Wow, nice job.  Lest anyone wonder what can now be done, fear not, the government has a solution. The problem, they contend, is that the rabbits were not eliminated at the same time as the cats. So in this alleged treasure of natural history government is now going use helicopters to drop poison on the island to kill all of the rabbits, rats, and mice. The remaining rabbits will later be trapped.

Poison bait dropped from helicopters, a hare holicost, the forceful removal of three different species, and all of it done by a government ready to spend $16.2 million fixing their last idea. What could possibly go wrong?

1 comment January 14th, 2009