The killing of wild birds in research revisited: nature, numbers, speed and ethics

Extract

In a recent editorial in the journal The Condor, Walsberg (1994) raises some important issues concerning bureaucratic inefficiency of which most people are aware. He is especially concerned about what he claims is the inefficient way in which collecting permits are issued to those who want to study various aspects of avian biology. However, Walsberg's essay, that centres on the killing of wild birds in research (collecting is a synonym for killing; Bekoff 1993), contains assertions that need considerably more clarification, scrutiny and support before they can be used to make policy about how collecting permits are issued. There are many ethical issues that he glosses over which are directly related to animal welfare. For example, it is not clear how his comparison between predation rates and the number of birds killed by Cooper's Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) and the number of birds killed by scientists, supports Walsberg's argument that more streamlined permit processing is needed. On the one hand, Cooper's Hawks (and other non-human predators) are natural born killers who do not behave according to a code of ethics; they are not moral agents who are responsible for their actions. On the other hand, most scientists who kill birds are not natural born killers. It seems reasonable to assume that they are moral agents who are responsible for their actions (for discussion see Bekoff and Hettinger 1994). In my view, the comparison between the predatory habits of wild animals and the killing habits of humans does not lend any strong support to arguments that there should be more rapid permit processing.