Month: June 2020

Leatherback Turtles have for millennia dig their nests to lay their eggs on beaches of the right latitude around the world.

While this story is not exactly brand new news it is of high importance. Having recently read and written about elephant poaching within the Ethiopian borders (posted yesterday) I was curious to see what was happening with their lion population.

The EPA continues to work against its own name as an Environmental Protection Agency, by doing things that categorically do not protect the environment.

Under Obama there were many new rules that improved the Environmental standards in the USA. One of these was a substantial reduction in the amount of mercury other chemicals hazardous to human health.

While Ethiopia has far fewer elephants than it had back in the 1970s ( around 10000) it does still have three or 4000 elephants spread across the reserves that reside within its border. 

The uproar over the way animals were kept in the market and the clear knowledge that the market caused the human pandemic has forced the Chinese government to act.

There is a new law being enacted which bans the sale of meat particularly bat meat in the market, which alone has the potential to save 50 to 100 million animals a year.

Unfortunately though this will not not extend to stop in the slaughter of animals as fur sales will be allowed. 

This seems to be rather foolish as it is not the eating of the animals that give people coronavirus but the fact of the animals all squashed into a smaller space in contact with one another and humans. As such while it is fantastic that so many animals will be spared from being eaten, there are likely to be many million that are killed for their fur, which means the likelihood of a future pandemic emerging from the same market is high. 

The simple fact is that there is inherent risk harvesting wild animals. This runs from the simple facts that there are too many humans and therefore any meat that becomes popular is likely to pushing the species to local extension, to the fact that harvesting of wild species is likely to regularly cause illnesses to jump into the human population and the fact that when we take out a species from an ecosystem we don’t know the impact that it’s likely to happen and regularly this can turn out to be rather dramatic leading to ecosystem collapse and a loss of all the other human services that it provides.

In France boar are shot by hunters, and the hunters are paid by farmers so that the damage done to their crops is kept under control. Over the last five years the number for has increased dramatically and it’s now thought they are about 2 million within the borders of France.

This is partly down to the fact that warmer temperatures are meaning that there is more food for mothers and their young and less harsh Winters to kill off some of the boar.  This combined with the fact that boar can have 3 litters every 2 years, and they can have 10 young in a litter or on occasion even more, leads to the ability for an exploding population.

Boar are also killed in their thousands by high speed cars and trains, but these have been greatly reduced during the shutdown as well.

The rooting behaviour of boar can destroy large areas of crops rapidly. Also the wheat and other crops that boar will eat when they can are often bordered by pine forests, which are perfect places for them to shelter.

One hunter gave his own recent statistics as a demonstration, saying in the past that he would kill one or perhaps two during a season. But he said that last year while he only killed two during hunts, opportunistic kills of animals he encountered when in the car bought this number up to 17.

The farming associations are on the hook when numbers go too high, as it is their job to control boar numbers when they rise they pay the compensation claims which in 2019 accounted for 60 million euro, a law which they feel is increasingly unfair are particularly as under current circumstances they can’t do anything about it as they are stuck inside.

It is still my view that in the long term France as the UK needs predators who will control these populations rather than human hunters to do the job. A healthy population wolves bears and lynx would take a significant number of humbugs (baby boar) each year if given the chance.