EA - And the capybara suffer what they must? [the ethics of reintroducing predators] by tobytrem

The Nonlinear Library: EA Forum

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: And the capybara suffer what they must? [the ethics of reintroducing predators], published by tobytrem on March 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is aDraft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked.Commenting and feedback guidelines:This is an article, written over a couple months in late 2022, which ended up not being published. I wouldn't have published it without the nudge of Draft Amnesty Week, because I'm not inclined to redraft it, and I had to redact a name for someone who didn't want to be mentioned without looking over the draft. Fire away! (But be nice, as usual)Jaguars reenter IberáGreen-winged macaws that have grown up in captivity are too weak and naive to survive in the wild. In 2015, the conservation group Rewild Argentina released their first batch of seven macaws into Iberá National Park. They had to recapture the birds the next day[1]. Iberá is a large wetland in Argentina's Corrientes province. The macaws quickly became stuck in the sticky flooded ground, unable to take off. After a rest back in captivity, the birds were re-released.Within 5 days, two of the birds, whose lifespan in captivity is 60-80 years, were killed by wildcats.After this incident, Rewild Argentina hired a trainer to teach them to avoid predators. In the training drill, the trainer encourages a cat or a falcon to attack an embalmed macaw, while macaw distress calls are played through a speaker. Next time they are released, the macaws aren't quite so naive.Nearby, in El Impenetrable Park, conservationists from the same organisation raise and train predators that they want the macaws to avoid. Rewild Argentina plans to reintroduce species that were killed or driven out of Iberá over the past century by cattle ranching and over-hunting - including the jaguar. Legally, the group couldn't import the jaguar from neighbouring countries, so they had to produce their own.Their first group came from Tania, a female jaguar from a local zoo and Quramta, a wild jaguar. Finding Quaramta was a stroke of luck.In El Impenetrable, the jaguar aren't locally extinct, as they were in Iberá, but they are extremely rare. Quaramta was located after he left a single footprint by a river bank. Quaramta and Tania's cubs were raised in a thirty hectare enclosure, out of the reach of humans. Sebastián Di Martino, the conservation director, told me that if the cubs were raised by humans, then they would seek humans out when they were hungry.To train them to hunt for themselves, conservationists captured and released live prey into the enclosure, including nine-banded armadillo, caiman aligator, feral pigs and capybara. The training was a success. As of this year, one of Qaramta and Tania's cubs, Arami[2], has given birth in the wild.Rewild Argentina's project is hard. It involves legislative wrangling with governments, an ongoing campaign to ingratiate the locals, and after all that, the deaths of their charges, sometimes at the hands of each other. Why are they doing it?The last few centuries of land use drastically changed the ecosystem of Iberá. Cattle ranchers routinely burned down vegetation to make room for their cows, and locals hunted jaguar and other animals for skins to sell to wealthy europeans. Among the species driven to local extinction were giant anteaters which grew up to 8 feet long; bristly, pig-like collared peccaries; and the aforementioned green-winged macaws. Now, the land is occupied by capybara, previously the prey of the jaguar.Presently, they have nothing to fear. Di Martino told me that "if you go out, the capybara are grazing by hundreds all day. They are not afraid of anything. All they do is eat, and eat".The late Doug Tompkins[3] and his wife Kristine Tompkins use their philant...