REXANO WHAT is Conservation? WHO is a Conservationist?

WHAT is Conservation? WHO is a Conservationist?

By Zuzana Kukol, August 2008

I have been on numerous forums and chat lists over the years. Too often fights and disagreements start because of difference of opinions, and sometimes because people use different definitions of the same word.

Words that seem to cause lots of confusion are the words conservationist and conservation.

It seems the definition of the words “conservation” and “conservationist” vary from forum to forum, and from region to region, depending on what is the agenda of the people discussing it.
People need to establish clear definitions in order to have some reference points when debating the conservation related issues.

In my mind conservation is protecting wild animals and habitat, and preventing them from going extinct. To me personally, captivity is better than extinction. The most desirable method, saving them in the wild, is failing and is no longer an easily achievable goal. (Some animals, like pandas, don’t reproduce well, and even saving them in captivity is not an easy task.)

But WHO is a conservationist? How do you define one?

Is it based on how much money one donates per year?
How long does one spend in the bush?
How many animals you re-wilded (reintroduced back into the wild)?
How many re-wilded animals survived the1st year?
or How many wild animal articles you had published….???

If the goal of conservation and the conservationist is to help wild animals’ survival, are the American alligator and bison farmers conservationists then?

The captive farming totally reduced the demand on wild product, and therefore saved the wild animals/species thru captive propagation by supplying the market demand with the farmed product?
Is that conservation?

Are the current US keepers of captive exotics like tigers, lions, reptiles, birds, etc… (for any purpose, zoo to pet) conservationists too?

The captive bred US tiger population is an isolated and self sustaining one. Are the private US big cat owners conservationists by supplying market demand with the live captive zoo/show/pet animals thus bringing the demand for ‘wild product’ to zero? Captive breeding to remove the demand on the wild product is a sustainable use of the animals and will guarantee they will not go extinct by having a market value to the humans.

Should the wild populations be decimated by diseases, US big cats are spread out all over the USA, so a single disease will not wipe them out. This almost happened with cheetahs in Africa. This guarantees a constant supply of live healthy animals, so they don’t have to be cloned in the lab. Also private exotic animal owners do it at their own expense, at no cost to the government aka tax payers.

When is conservation no longer conservation for the good of animals, but rather a waste of money or pure politics/lobbying? Is the wild tiger situation/conservation failing? How many millions is reasonable to spend to save one wild animal before it becomes ridiculous and not time/money effective? Conservation should be about conserving and not wasting?

How does the serious conservation community (however it will be defined by readers of this editorial) feel about spending extremely large sums of money to ‘save’ a few circus animals and transport them to the different continent? Are serious conservation groups competing for the same donors like ‘rescue’ groups? Do conservationists see these high profile expensive rescues as waste or godsend?

The word conservationist has been hijacked and abused by the animal rights (AR) community, who want to ban captive breeding and the keeping of wild and exotic animals.

How can these people and groups refer to themselves as conservationists? By pushing for exotic animal bans, AR are proposing to regulate these animals to extinction, which is a totally opposite to the conservation they are preaching.

It is time for animal owners to take the word conservationists away from these AR hijackers to protect the animals as well as our personal freedoms which have been shrinking too fast.