They’re Hungry, Hungry Hippos.
Indeed? Maybe, just maybe, the urbanites are the correct ones in these matters and the traditional ways of the rurals are as unnecessarily cruel and brutal as they look on the surface. In my experience, country people do tend to be more callous and inhumane wrt animals than city dwellers and have a lot less regard for non-human lives. Furthermore, it’s in the cities that “different”, innovative and advanced notions like treating animals better and more kindly, tend to arise. Many times those notions are the more correct ones. Even when they’re erroneous, at least they err on the side of mercy
Well, that’s not me, by any means; I don’t agree with the Mrs. Melmac approach at all. We abhor the use of chemical poisons around here, because they end up contaminating the outer, upstream environment when predators and scavengers consume the dead and dying target creatures. We’ve dealt with rodent invasions the old-fashioned way, namely with traps (whose fatal nature still gives me pause and regret, but the so-called humane alternatives don’t work worth shit) and making foodstuffs unavailable to them, and with insects by means of simple agents like boric acid and diatomaceous earth. So far it’s worked, too
[quote=“Beckdawrek, post:38, topic:1005209, full:true”
Parrots really are awesome, I’ve had parakeets and cockateils for much of my adult life, and we bring great pleasure to each others’ existence, and as soon as I’m ever in a situation where I can have a couple of bigger ones move in and live with me, I will do so joyfully. I need to correct you on an important point though, because I’ve had that point thrown at me more than once by those who disapprove: pet parrots aren’t taken from the jungle any more. Legally acquired parrots must be captive bred in the USA and other CITES countries, where it is forbidden to import wild-caught ones; thus any parrots that were taken out of the jungle were either smuggled illegally, or else they came to the USA before CITES was passed. As some psittacines can live for well over a century, there are probably some elder parrots living here as pets who remember the jungle, but not very many at this point.
Thank you!
Yeah, everything just wants to “be free and live its life” from lice to mosquitos to rats to roaches to termites to starlings to pythons in the Everglades. That doesn’t hold a ton of currency with me if they’re causing larger problems.
I am starting to hate the racoons here in Germany, where they are an invasive species which destroys local fauna and has no natural enemies, so I can relate to feelings of violence towards them. And I also see that some measures are simply not possible, frustrating as this is. Magical thinking (expelliarmus! and off they fly to their native countries of origin) remains a fantasy.
I’ve found two skeletons while hiking in the rain forest area in St Martin. I took pictures and eventually learned what I’d found.
The first was a raccoon. An invasive species that may have escaped from the little zoo in Sint Maarten after a hurricane. The second appeared to be a primate, but I thought that impossible. Turns out it was a green monkey! Never knew they existed on the island. We have since seen a few, always in the rain forest near Pic Paradise.
Huh! I didn’t know about those either.
I see they’re on a number of Caribbean islands. Did they bring them over on purpose, or were they pests who snuck onto ships?
They were introduced to the island as escaped pets originally. In the 1950s they were very popular pets and very cheap to buy.
Well this seems like just straight-up hypocrisy, with a side of irrational sentimentality. Why is it okay for you to murder rodents and insects that are just trying to live their lives but which you don’t want causing problems in your environment, but not okay for Colombians to murder non-native hippopotami that they don’t want causing problems in their environment? Will it make it okay if the Colombian hippo culling gives the cullers “pause and regret”?
Personally, my attitude towards wildlife “murder” is strongly influenced by (a) whether the species is native/established or recently human-introduced from an entirely different region, (b) the feasibility of nonlethal solutions such as relocation or sterilization, and (c) whether there are predators in the ecosystem that will keep the population in balance without human intervention.
So I relocate rather than killing most arthropods in my house, for example (spiders I don’t even usually relocate, they’re being helpful), and I think that gardeners, rural dwellers, ranchers, farmers etc. need to develop the ability to coexist with a certain amount of potentially harmful wildlife presence.
But I’m in favor of things like possum eradication in New Zealand, deer herd reduction when the local populations balloon due to lack of predators, culling and/or sterilizing some feral domestic cats, and so on. Yeah, true, there’s no pure Edenic “state of nature” that we or our natural environment can ever return to, unless and until we as a species succeed in wiping ourselves out and letting the rest of the planet rebuild its life. But until that (tragic or glorious, depending on your viewpoint) day arrives, I think it’s our responsibility to try to balance the needs of our human existence with the evolving ecosystems around us, and that includes controlling human-introduced invasive species to some extent.
And if any enraged sentimentalist wants to say that that makes me an advocate for muder, fine, let them talk.
When does an invasive species become nativized? There are a lot of invasive North American bird species such as starlings and sparrows, not to mention humans—if your timescale is long enough. I don’t think anyone is arguing that humans should be removed from the Americas, or sparrows either. So what is the logic for removing the hippos? Is it:
- recency (we can all remember a time without American feral hippos)
- destructiveness (hippos change their environment in ways we think are ultimately bad)
- size / number (still a few hundred / thousand hippos vs zillions of sparrows)
- geography (still limited vs all continent-wide)
- danger to humans (hippo encounters don’t tend to go well for humans)
The first point seems illogical: if something’s invasive, it’s invasive, as do the size / number arguments. Humans live with other dangerous wild animals, such as bears and jaguars. We don’t seem to be certain about the long-term environmental impact.
Really, the only logical reason I can see for interfering with the hippos at this point is if their presence is causing the extinction of some plant / animal that would not otherwise be under threat. That may be the case, but it’s hard to tell. Otherwise, I think leave it alone and let the environment and its humans slowly adapt to the new reality.
But maybe don’t do this again.
I’ll also recommend https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250176431/americanhippo if you’re interested in alternate-history novellas with the premise of feral hippos in the American South. I realize that’s probably a niche audience, but I enjoyed the book.
According to one book I read the king of Siam at one point wrote to President Lincoln offering to send him some elephants, The president thanked him for the offer but said the territory of the US did not cover a range where the animals could live properly.
The US Cavalry tried camels and after the experiment was over some got loose, but they were shot out by settlers in the southwest.
I was quite taken aback by that post too, after the earlier arguments they’ve made in this thread. I guess Columbians just need to learn to live with their gigantic invasive deadly pests, while El_DeLuxo is justified in “murdering” the cute little rodents that invade his area.
This reminds me of a guy around here who decided Emus were perfect livestock for his small acreage. Umm? No.
He couldn’t afford to feed them long.
He just left the gate open.
They scattered.
Got hit by cars.
Got shot by hunters.
Scared the bejeezus outta people finding them in their barns and garages.
Not a good scene.
English house sparrows and European starlings are two of the few bird species NOT protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act because they are recognized as invasive. You’re free to disrupt all the starling nests and kill all the house sparrows you want (provided you don’t run afoul of other laws in the process). Locally at least – can’t claim to have done a national survey – wildlife rehab and assistance centers won’t accept or aid starlings or house sparrows because they’re recognized as invasive and detrimental to other bird species. The USDA Wildlife Services has undertaken multiple starling eradication programs. Canada has undertaken similar programs, trapping starlings and then eliminating the birds with CO2 gas. Sparrows have had similar programs though not as intensive since starlings do more agricultural damage so are a more significant target.
So, yeah, plenty of people would be happy to see eradication of those invasive bird species.
Right. What I meant was, there are no plans for wholesale continent-wide eradication of sparrows, even if it is recognized that such a situation would be preferable. We learned to deal with sparrows (and humans), and we can learn to deal with hippos. Not to minimize the effects on the environment, just saying we’ve done this over and over again with smaller-scale animals, and this doesn’t actually seem like a worst-case introduced-species scenario; just that this particular species is large and dangerous.
Sure, but only because of feasibility, not because we’ve accepted them as a legitimate part of the ecosystem. If you could present the government with a magic wand to poof all the sparrows and starlings to death, that wand would be waved.
“We’re stuck with a trillion invasive and destructive birds we can’t get rid of” doesn’t strike me as a great argument for not getting rid of the hippos ASAP.
I think we agree, just expressing it differently. That wand would ALSO have been waved for the hippos, and yet the hippos continue.
The difference being the hippo population is still low enough to be eradicated. The only thing stopping it is people sad about dead hippos. The Colombian government effectively has an anti-hippo wand, they just lack the will to use it.