Table Of ContentTHE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
ANIMAL ETHICS SERIES
Beyond the
North American Model of
Wildlife Conservation
From Lethal to Compassionate
Conservation
Anja Heister
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
Series Editors
Andrew Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK
Clair Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our
treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of
other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From
being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics
and in multidisciplinary inquiry. This series will explore the challenges
that Animal Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional
understandings of human-animal relations. Specifically, the Series will:
• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals;
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accom-
plished, scholars;
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in
character or have multidisciplinary relevance.
For further information or to submit a proposal for consideration,
please contact Amy Invernizzi, [email protected].
Anja Heister
Beyond the North
American Model of
Wildlife Conservation
From Lethal to Compassionate
Conservation
Anja Heister
Independent Researcher
Missoula, MT, USA
ISSN 2634-6672 ISSN 2634-6680 (electronic)
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
ISBN 978-3-031-14148-5 ISBN 978-3-031-14149-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14149-2
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I dedicate this book to all earthlings, especially the furbearing ones.
Foreword
Anthropocentrism is the dark side of our species’ belief in its own unique-
ness. Under this rubric, all other living creatures, lacking our version of
language, are unable to demonstrate a sufficiently conscious awareness of
self to warrant equal treatment as rational and moral beings. These assig-
nations ensured that non-humans have long been perceived as lesser crea-
tures with no claim to moral standing or even the right to coexist with us
as fellow autonomous beings. That these spurious rationalizations reflect
a high level of cognitive dissonance, or that morality is rooted in benevo-
lence, not reason, have had little impact on the predatory relationship
between humans and wildlife through time, especially in North America
where continuous settlement patterns and rapacious resource extraction
have put wildlife at threat.
Modern wildlife management under State control originated in North
America in the early twentieth century as a component of the Conservation
movement which advocated “wise use” practices to conserve natural
resources like forests, soils, and minerals. Wildlife was included in this
conservation “package” as a species-specific renewable resource to be
managed in the human interest. For most of the twentieth century and
beyond, official wildlife management practices focussed on game animals
while unreservedly embracing Aldo Leopold’s utilitarian maxim which
equated desirous wildlife to a harvestable crop. Despite modern, more
sensitive modifications to human belief systems about the proper
vii
viii Foreword
treatment of wildlife, this blatant anthropocentric stance has maintained
itself in official wildlife policymaking, supported in large part by a well-
organized and powerful coterie of vested hunting and trapping interests.
It is to this ecologically untenable and morally deficient mindset that
Anja Heister has turned her attention in her well-researched monograph,
Beyond the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation: From Lethal to
Compassionate Conservation. Heister decries the officially sanctioned
plunder of fur-bearing and game animals as cruel, unnecessary, morally
wrong, and reflective of an anthropocentric belief system. Her call for a
more affective relationship with animals based on compassionate conser-
vation grounds is central to her narrative.
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation is of particular
interest to Heister and for good reason. Conceived in the Conservation era
and nurtured by Aldo Leopold’s beliefs about sustainable game animals,
the Model was fashioned at the dawn of the new millennium by a group of
interested parties, including the Boone and Crockett Club, and came into
being as a set of seven guiding tenets respecting public rights to non-com-
mercial fish and wildlife. Though lacking any legal power or precedent, the
Model has become widely accepted by professionals and agencies and has
been incorporated into government policymaking in the United States and
Canada. Heister recognizes the Model’s narrow base despite its well-funded
supporters and takes it to task for its heavy endorsement of sports hunting,
its overt hypocrisy, its reliance on tired science, and for its species-specific
approach which fails to recognize animals as individuals.
This latter point comes through strongly in the narrative. The failure
or refusal to consider the value of individual lives is at the root of anthro-
pocentric wildlife policies. The designation of wildlife as a natural resource
presupposes its human utility. Only in a belief system that fails to recog-
nize animal consciousness or individual lifestyles that parallel our own in
their experiential nature, can an aggregate of living beings be equated to
truckloads of coal. Heister acknowledges this aberration often in her nar-
rative and attributes it to several factors.
Though she does not exclude women, Heister’s statistics demonstrate a
dominant male presence in the hunting and animal exploitation com-
munities as well as in their sponsor and lobby groups. On the other hand,
she indicates the heavily disproportionate role of women in animal
Foreword ix
welfare and advocacy groups. The contrasts are clear enough for her to
suggest that women generally are more suited than men to espouse her
compassionate conservation ethic.
Heister makes a powerful point in isolating the relatively low numbers
of people involved in the hunting and trapping industries in contrast
with overall population numbers, the vast majority of whom have no
interest in hunting or trapping. Indeed, Heister contends accurately that
most people are sympathetic towards wild animals. However, they remain
largely unaware of wildlife management philosophy generally, let alone
the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, or the sickening
practices of the Safari Club. This explains why animal exploitation groups
manage to maintain their position of financial and political privilege. To
Heister, most Americans might lack awareness of the barbarities associ-
ated with hunting and trapping, but both in terms of numbers and
behaviour they are far less anthropocentric than the small influential
minority who cleave to the outmoded ideals of the North American
Model of Wildlife Conservation.
For Heister, the solution to a meaningful shift away from anthropo-
centrism lies in the affective domain. To her, empathy is the key. She asks
humans to empathize with the plight of violated creatures who cannot
speak for themselves. She thus calls for a greater public awareness of the
pain, misery, and emotional and physical suffering endured by animals in
traps, and less public tolerance for the practice of destroying and ruining
the lives of healthy wild animal for sport. It is her hope that empathy will
find a collective voice.
Readers will learn a lot in this book. A painful litany of abuse and vio-
lence emerges as Heister lays out her facts about hunting and trapping.
Readers will also be given hope that this predatory anthropocentric atti-
tude towards wild creatures and especially fur-bearing animals, need not
prevail in a modern society where it is neither needed nor wanted, and
where empathy supersedes power.
Department of Communication, Media, and Film Max Foran
University of Calgary,
Calgary, AB, Canada
Prologue
Liberating a Trapped Pine Marten
as a Life-Changing Experience
Several winters ago, my partner Dave, his son and I, while cross-country
skiing in a national forest outside of Missoula, came across a victim of
Montana’s furbearer trapping program. A female pine-marten was hang-
ing from a tree, with her front paw caught in a leghold trap; her body
motionless, her head tipped to the side, a huge pile of scat on the ground
beneath her indicated she had been hanging there for an extended period
of time. Upon our approach, she began to twitch with fear. We were
shocked, but our natural, empathetic instincts to help kicked in and we
started working to free her from the merciless grip of the steel trap.
She then ran away, her gait turning to a limp once she assumed a safe
distance from us. All of a sudden she stopped and turned around to look
at us as if to thank us. Our eyes met. I will never forget that moment. She
became a someone to me. She then disappeared in the woods. The three
of us were in tears. If the trapper had found this animal before we did (if
he had returned to the trap site), this young, tortured, helpless pine mar-
ten would have been likely clubbed, stomped to death, strangled, or shot,
after having spent an unknown time hanging in the trap—a fate that no
animal, whether domesticated or wild, deserves.
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