DOWN UNDER BIOXENOPHOBIA INTENSIFIES
LEURA, New South Wales, Australia>>
Twenty-six years after convening the first meeting of Animal Liberation Australia, 12 years after venturing to India, Christine Townend has returned home. She and her retired lawyer husband Jeremy Townend are back more-or-less to staywhile making frequent visits to India to supervise their ongoing humane projects.
Yet Townend admits she often feels like an alien. She senses a meanness of spirit in Australia now that she did not previously recognize, in her past careers as activist, teacher, poet, short story writer, and investigative author, whose 1985 book Pulling The Wool remains the classic expose of the Down Under sheep trade.
Then, Townend believed, rough Australian treatment of animals was mainly from ignorance. Behind the Aussie swagger and bluster, she believed, were good hearts, who could be brought around to treating all animals with kindness. She has become less optimistic.
"I feel that morals in Australia as regards animals have gone backward since I left," Townend told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "Every day there is something in the news about mass slaughters of animals. There seems to be an orgy of killing underway, with absolutely no consideration about the ethics of taking of life. Today it is camels, yesterday it was brumbies (wild horses), and on Friday it was foxes. Animal protection people are really struggling to get any publicity at all."
Townend finds that a sad contrast to India.
"It is hard to reconcile myself to moving from the philosophical and spiritual respect for all life which has existed in India for thousands of years, to immersion in the Australian attitude of unthinking slaughter and killing of animals," Townend wrote.
The Indian literacy rate is half that of Australia, but even Indians who are not kind to animals know that the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist cultural traditions require that they should beand so did Islam, as interpreted by the 16th century Mogul emperor Akbar the Great, who first united much of India. Indian newspapers are thin beside those of Australia, yet animal advocacy and protection rate regular coverage. There is editorial agitation from some papers, notably The Times of India, to amend the national animal control policy so as to resume killing street dogsbut even The Times of India does not pretend that there are no credible opposing views.
Kerry Lonergan, executive producer of the Australian TV news magazine show Landmine, by contrast curtly and completely dismissed Townend when she pointed out to him after a July 20 episode promoting fox hunting that, "It is not efficacious to remove some of a population of introduced animals if conditions are favourable to their survival. This is because the remainder who have not been removed continue to breed, often at an increased rate due to lack of competition for food and cover. Therefore killing foxes," as Lonergan favored, "is carried out for commercial rather than ecological purposes, and at best can only temporarily reduce the fox population."
The basic principles of wildlife ecology favored Townend, but Lonergan shot back, "Foxes kill native fauna as well as domesticated animals like sheep, cattle, and horses," disregarding that there seems to be no case on record anywhere of foxes ever attacking either cattle and horses except when rabida non-issue in Australia, which has no rabies.
"Environmentalists will tell you foxes are responsible for the extinction or near extinction of many of our smaller ground-dwelling animals," Lonergan continued, equally oblivious to the actuality that the major prey of foxes in Australia, as elsewhere, are rabbits, mice, and rats.
Like the foxes of Australia, rabbits, mice, and rats are non-native, introduced during the mid-19th century. Like the foxes, they too are blamed for extirpations and extinctions of native marsupials. Reality, however, is that ground-dwelling marsupials lost their habitat to fires set to clear land, lost their burrows to the pounding of sheeps' hooves, and their lives by the millions to recreational shooting, trapping, clubbing, and hunting with dogs, beginning to disappear from the first-farmed regions decades before the rabbits and foxes arrived. Sheep came to Australia in 1788. Rabbits and foxes were brought 70 years later, as deliberate imports to be hunted because the native prey had run thin.
Rabbits and foxes knew how to live in deep warrens at the edges of sheep pastures and, like the mice and rats, were able how to outbreed human depredation. They moved into the vacated habitat niches and thrivedjust as did the transported British convicts who built the Australian nation, conquering a largely uninhabited continent.
In Jaipur, India, the Townends live in two cluttered rooms on the grounds of the Help In Suffering animal shelter and hospital they built in 1991, after taking over the organization from the late Crystal Rogers, who founded it in 1978.
The garden is pleasant, the resident beasts of more than a dozen species are mostly well-behaved and appreciative, and the Townends' work is highly regarded throughout the nation. Yet the noise, dirt, heat, chaos, crowding, and constant exposure to poverty and suffering animals and humans who also sometimes get emergency aid from Help In Suffering are scarcely what most former westerners would retire to.
The open flames of the traditional Hindu crematorium next door provide a constant reminder of mortality which alone might daunt the typical retiree, even without a daily influx of road-injured dogs and cats, lame horses, wormy goats, and sometimes even an abandoned, inarticulate, desperately ill mentally handicapped person with nowhere else to go.
After 12 years of putting Help In Suffering on its feet, directing a successful city-wide street dog sterilization campaign, eradicating canine rabies locally, opening a second Help In Suffering shelter and hospital in the far-off Himalayan foothills city of Darjeeling, encouraging expansion of Jaipur human as well as humane services, and gradually transferring the day-to-day Help In Suffering management responsibilities to hired staff, the Townends' visits back home to Australia are stretching from the few brief weeks they dared to take off at first, to as long as four months at a stretch, allowing their handpicked and long trained successors the opportunity to grow into the job.
But now Townend, as a former member of the New South Wales government animal welfare advisory council, is beginning to feel compelled to resume struggles in Australia that she had hoped would be resolved for the better by now.
Instead, the current government of New South Wales recently liberalized the NSW hunting rules to encourage more killing of feral species. Twenty-seven organizations promoting animal rights, animal welfare, environmental concerns, and gun control opposed the bill, to almost no visible effect.
Influential defenders of non-native wildlife are scarce these days in both Australia and neighboring New Zealand, where the purging is as vicious.
What defense of non-natives is accomplished is mostly done by small advocacy groups formed on behalf of individual charismatic species. Among the species having some vocal champions are wild horses, rare breeds of livestock, feral cats, rabbits, flying foxes, and dingoes, often called non-native despite a history of 20,000 to 60,000 years in Australia.
Their defenders express two separate dimensions of concern: the right of nonnative animals to survive at all, wherever they hold a niche, and the cruelty of many of the means used to kill them.
The right to exist might be seen as an animal rights issue, while preventing cruelty, even in connection with extirpation, is an animal welfare issue.
Neither the Down Under animal rights community nor the animal welfare community, however, makes the plight of non-native wildlife a focal concern. There may be many reasons for this, including a feeling that defending non-natives may be seen as indifference toward the many native species now on the verge of extinction; desire to avoid conflict with the many Australian organizations dedicated to protecting native species; the hope of avoiding the label of "bunny-hugger," which carries even stronger pejorative connotations of irrational sentimentality Down Under than elsewhere in the world; and simple preoccupation with other issues demanding time and resources.
Echoing a global trend, and following Townend's own example in writing Pulling The Wool, the Down Under animal rights community has shifted gradually from an early focus on antivivisectionism to a current emphasis on behalf of farm animals. The best-known Australian activist since Animal Liberation author Peter Singer took a professorial post at Princeton University in New Jersey may be Patty Mark, who has campaigned across the spectrum of animal issues for decades, but became prominent for recent rescues of sick and injured hens from factory farms.
The Royal SPCA of Australia and the New Zealand SPCA, though critical of overt cruelty to non-natives, tend like the SPCA organizations of other nations to focus on dog-and-cat issues, with some attention to farm animals and native species. As in other nations with national SPCAs, the Australian and New Zealand SPCAs strivenot always successfullyto maintain political alliances with organizations of comparable size and vintage specifically dedicated to protecting birds and native wildlife.
The strongest organization Down Under making defense of non-native wildlife a priority is the Australian Wildlife Protection Council. Founded by Arthur Queripel in 1969, now headed by Maryland Wilson, and also very active on behalf of native Australian wildlife, the Australian Wildlife Protection Council lists Peter Singer and legislator Richard Jones as patrons. Both were involved with Townend in forming Animal Liberation Australia.
Though dynamic, the Australian Wildlife Protection Council is smaller than most of the leading organizations seeking to purge feral species, and often has difficulty making itself heard. It advances the views that wildlife of all species is best served by the perspective that all life is sacred; culling of any species, regardless of the frequent pretense to ecological necessity, tends to serve human economic interests more than the purported animal beneficiaries; and that Australian native species tend to hold their own against the less well climatically adapted non-natives, contrary to common impression, when allowed to do so. Any real threat to native species attributed to non-native animals, the Australian Wildlife Protection Council argues, is primarily the result of introduced habitat change, and it is restoring habitat, not killing non-natives, which is most essential to enabling rare native species to recover.
The Australian Wildlife Protection Council seems to be the only prominent organization in either Australia or New Zealand to recognize that introduced wild species chiefly fill vacant habitat niches, and survive, when they do, only as part of re-establishing a lost ecological balance.
The major voices for non-native wildlife in New Zealand appear to be Betty and Walter Rowe, American emigrants who founded the Arapawa Wildlife Sanctuary in 1986, 15 years after settling on Arapawa Island in East Bay, South Island. The sanctuary maintains three pigs, 85 goats, and 12 sheep who are descended from animals left on Arapawa by Captain James Cook and others prior to 1839, whom the Rowes and allies protected from extermination efforts.
Longstanding New Zealand government policy is to extirpate non-native wildlife wherever possible. The only mammals considered native to New Zealand are bats.
The Arapawa Wildlife Sanctuary also protects resident native birds, leads efforts to save the small East Bay population of endangered Hector's dolphins, whose plight the New Zealand government has been very slow to address despite international pressure, and also leads a related campaign to rid the East Bay of floating mussel farmsallegedly a threat to the dolphins, a source of pollution, and an industry built around a species introduction.
A small endowment for the sanctuary, incorporated as the Arapawa Wildlife Trust, was recently provided by the estate of former Marlborough Express chief reporter Jim Kidson. The survival of the Arapawa Wildlife Sanctuary is now somewhat more assured than before, especially in the immediate aftermath of a March 1999 fire that razed the Rowes' home and killed their dog.
Yet the struggle against lethal wildlife management is not over, Betty Rowe told ANIMAL PEOPLE in mid-July 2002. Drifting aerial sprays apparently directed at nearby government land had just caused four goats to lose their hair, two to go blind, two to die, and many to spontaneously abort.
"We have lost four baby goats in three days, and a third buck is about to die," Betty Rowe said. "The symptoms are scouring, loss of fitness and weight, bulging eyes, crying out, and inability to walk or stand, followed by wasting away. The goats seem to be more the victims than the sheep or pigs."
Betty Rowe was not certain what was sprayed, or what the target species was, but her description of the unusual "web-like" texture of the spray sounded like the shredded beets and carrots steeped in Compound 1080 that the New Zealand Conservation Department has used intensively to kill introduced species including feral pigs, deer, and brush possums.
In fact, New Zealand reportedly uses 90% of global production of Compound 1080. Also widely used in Australia, Compound 1080 was banned from general use in the U.S. in 1972, although USDA Wildlife Services is allowed to use sheep collars containing it to kill coyotes.
Brush possums, brought from Australia in the early 20th century to start a fur-trapping industry, have recently been targeted in New Zealand with escalating intensity because they are believed to harbor endemic reservoirs of bovine tuberculosis, much like badgers in Britain and Ireland.
Similar spraying on the North Island brought 170 protesters to the Department of Conservation field office in Whakapapa in April 2002, led by Joss Richardson of the Ruapehu Action Group. They brought with them dead birds supposed to have been protected by the sprays but allegedly killed by Compound 1080 instead.
The major defenders of non-native wildlife in the mountainous interior of the North Island are remote private landowners whose chief concern seems to be keeping feral deer and pig populations to hunt. Rising European demand for venison recently stimulated outside hunter interest in shooting feral deer from helicopters and airlifting out the carcasses. Residents of an area called White's Clearing in March 2002 responded by stringing wires across a popular helicopter landing zone.
"At least two helicopters have been shot at in the area this year, and numerous hunters have been confronted," Jo-Marie Brown of the New Zealand Herald reported on June 5, after a 46-year-old Ruatahuna man was charged with disarming four helicopter passengers at gunpoint.
Except for the Australian Wildlife Protection Council and Arapawa Wildlife Sanctuary, the leadership of Down Under advocacy groups for native wildlife now almost unanimously favors the extirpation of non-native wild species by any means possible. This in itself reflects a hardening of attitudes.
The Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, for instance, founded in 1909, has always emphasized protecting native species, albeit without objection to hunting and trapping those who are abundant. One early president was actually a fur dealer. The Wildlife Preservation Society has also long favored extirpating introduced wildlife.
Yet the Wildlife Preservation Society journal, Australian Wildlife, took a somewhat gentler tone than recently during much of the 16-year editorial tenure of Vincent Serventy, and his subsequent 36 years as presidentif only, perhaps, from hesitation to offend members and donors.
Under Patrick W. Medway, who succeeded Serventy as president in February 2002, Australian Wildlife has become more overtly hostile toward non-native wild species, including the feral dogs called dingoes, who have roamed Australia for at least 20,000 years. Australian Wildlife has also become downright combative toward any critics of what is done to the non-natives, as it defines them, including in the continuing contributions of Serventy himself.
The first edition of Australian Wildlife published since Serventy retired ripped the Royal SPCA of Australia for making an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute National Parks and Wildlife Service personnel who shot 600 wild horses from the air in October 2000 at Guy Fawkes National Park, New South Wales, and left them to die slowly of their wounds. The charges were dismissed in early July 2002.
The Colong Foundation for Wilderness and the National Parks Association of NSW promptly asked the NSW government to lift a moratorium on shooting wild horses from the air, to expedite anihilating the estimated 3,000 who inhabit the upper elevations of Kosciuszco National Park, allegedly trampling and eating 21 rare plant species.
In the next edition of Australian Wildlife, Serventy and Medway opposed environmentalists who objected to the use of the poison Compound 1080 to kill dingoes and foxes in northern New South Wales, including Kosciuszco National Park, the major purpose of which was to prevent predation on domestic sheep. The strategy includes trapping and radio-collaring 10 tiger quolls within the Byadbo and Pilot Wilderness Area of Kosciuszco National Park to find out whether they are "killed by aerially delivered poison balls."
Compound 1080 is already known to kill tiger quolls who ingest it in other forms.
The same edition of Australian Wildlife endorsed a scheme to export the meat of feral camels to Islamic nations. Doing business as the Central Australian Camel Industry Association, one Peter Seidel in late June 2002 reportedly exported more than 100 camels from Darwin to Saudi Arabia. An estimated 500,000 camels now roam the Outback, descended from 10,000 imported from Palestine and India as work animals between 1860 and 1907.
Under Medway, the Wildlife Preservation Society has so far not been consistent in defense of native species, either. Just as the British-based vegetarian advocacy group Viva! launched a boycott of kangaroo leather soccer boots, coinciding with the World Cup soccer tournament held in Japan and South Korea, Medway went on television to advocate kangaroo culling and the use of kangaroo leather for soccer boots.
A philosophically consistent position might endorse the view of some Austalian environmentalists that the sheep industry should be replaced entirely with a kangaroo industry. Kangaroo culling, however, like killing dingoes and foxes, is mainly done to make more grass available to sheep.
The pace of culling has intensified in recent months because of prolonged drought in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia.
"We have friends who are going out with rifles each evening and shooting kangaroos because they are eating all the grass," sheep farmer Vikki Gibling of Gulargambone, New South Wales, told Nick Squires of the London Sunday Telegraph.
"Another farmer found that emus were eating all the grain he was putting down for his sheep. He rounded up a big herd, shot them, and burnt them," Gibling added.
Replacing sheep with kangaroos on the 42,000-hectare Puckapunyal army base in Victoria state recently brought calamity, in an experiment seemingly designed to fail, because it included no brake on the kangaroo population beyond starvation and disease. Dingoes and foxes, who prey on kangaroos, had already been extirpated to protect the sheep. Neither were the kangaroos subject to culling for commercial slaughter like a sheep herd.
After the sheep were removed in 1999, the kangaroo population leaped from 47,640 to 81,175 in just two years. Eventually the kangaroos spread to neighboring farms, whose predator control efforts continued to keep dingoes and foxes off the base. The Australian army responded by fencing the kangaroos in, leading to a situation that Royal SPCA of Australia president Hugh Wirth eventually called the most "appalling situation for animals that we have seen in 30 years." Still without predators, the kangaroos continued to breed, despite expert estimates that they had already reached twice the maximum population density that Puckapunyal could sustain. By May 2002, many were verifiably starving, and they numbered up to 100,000.
As the kangaroos again invaded nearby farms, breaching the fence, sharpshooters were hired to kill 15,000. Another 25,000 were scheduled to be shot later in 2002.
The hides and carcasses are not being sold, in potential competition with the market for sheep byproducts. Hides and meat are a lucrative byproduct of kangaroo culling elsewhere in Australia, where the current kangaroo quota is 6.9 million, but Victoria state does not allow commercial exploitation of native wildlife.
As debate explodes over whether or not to permit the sale of culled kangaroo hides and meat, no one even appears to be mentioning that what the kangaroos really need, to keep an ecologically appropriate population balance, are dingoes and foxes in the numbers that the prey abundance permit.
Between the opposition of the sheep industry and that of native wildlife advocates like Medway, Serventy, and the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, introducing "non-native" kangaroo predators would be politically unviable.
Instead, Victoria state on July 1, 2002 introduced a bounty of $10 per tail on foxes. Hunters turned in 8,227 tails during the first week of the program and 25,000 through the first month, thereby practically guaranteeing resurgences of the kangaroo, rabbit, mouse, and rat populations.
Introducing native kangaroo predators to Australia, if one considers dingoes to be non-native, would be impossible, since the only large native Australian terrestrial predator, the marsupial thylacene, was officially extirpated from the mainland before 1900, and has been officially extinct since the last documented member of the species died at the now defunct Hobart Zoo in Tasmania in 1936. Sporadic claims of sightings have emerged from remote parts Tasmania since then, along with at least two inconclusive video clips, but if any do survive, they might be jeopardized by deployments of Compound 1080 meant to eradicate foxes.
Seemingly oblivious to the controversy over poisoning tiger quolls with Compound 1080 in Kosciuszco National Park, NSW, Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment zoologist Sally Bryant insisted to Brett Stubbs of the Hobart Mercury in June 2002 that the poison drops in Tasmania would not affect tiger quolls and Tasmanian devils.
"We are confident that the dosages of 1080 that are put into our baits are far, far less concentrated that what is needed to kill a native species," Bryant said. "One bait with a dose of 1080 is enough to kill a fox, but an eastern quoll would need to eat three or four a night to get a lethal dose, and a devil would need 13 to 14."
Her assurance was enough to win the endorsement of the Tasmanian Conservation Trust, but not that of Malamute breeder Claire Macfarlane, who lost her fourth-generation prize female Mooshi to a 1080 bait allegedly put out by a cattle rancher to kill wallabies.
Amid the controversy over 1080 use was doubt as to whether there are still any foxes in Tasmania, after past purges. Disability pensioner Eric Bosworth, 51, touched off the present fox extermination campaign when he claimed to have shot a fox on September 13, 2001, and produced the remains 10 days later. Bosworth mistakenly thought he was eligible for a reward of $5,000 offered by a hunting magazine, but the offer had been withdrawn. A necropsy found that the dead fox had eaten native Tasmanian prey.
Fox tracks and scat were found at two other locations, according to government fox task force manager Terry Reid, but state senator Shayne Murphy, an independent, released to media correspondence among police and other public officials casting doubt on the validity of the evidence.
While Tasmania tries to kill foxes, whether they exist or not, the New Zealand Department of Conservation, Auckland Regional Council, and Kawau Island Pohutukwa Trust have embarked on a three-year effort to eradicate an estimated 4,500 to 8,500 brush-tailed wallabies, introduced from the Australian mainland in 1870. A few will be captured alive, for export to zoos and to help replenish the depleted population of their original habitat, in the Blue Mountains, west of Sidney. The remainder will be poisoned.
Pohutukwa Trust founder Ray Weaver indicated to Anne Beston of the New Zealand Herald in March 2002 that about 90% of the funding for the poisoning would come from private property owners, who consider them a pest.
Back in Sydney, there seems to be more excitement recently about an estimated 15,000 protected silver gulls nesting on Cockatoo Island and pooping on outdoor restaurant-goers than about the decline of wallabies. Clamor to cull the gulls rose in May 2002 after a report by Ian Tenby of Deakin University in Melbourne attributed millions of dollars worth of damage per year to their highly acidic droppings.
Objected Birds Australia conservation manager Michael Weston, to Peter Munro of the Sydney Morning Herald, "It is not as if they are evil by nature and have decided to wage a waste war. They are more a part of Australian beach culture than a guy on a surfboard."
That does not mean the silver gulls are not at risk of being labeled "alien" and "invasive" to rationalize killing them. Grey-headed flying foxes are not only native to Australia but also federally listed as vulnerable to extinction. Yet the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne managed to kill 12,000 of a resident population of 20,000 in 2001, arguing that the flying foxes were not found in large numbers in Melbourne before 1983.
The Royal Botanic Gardens flying fox colony was eventually federally protected. In June 2002, however, the Australian Research Center for Urban Ecology, based at the Botanic Gardens, found a new way to attack the presence of the flying fox colony: instead of asserting that the flying foxes are non-native, the argument now is that their habitat is alien, created by the planting of 315,000 trees native to New South Wales and Queensland many years ago to shade Melbourne-area streets.
Anything animals do that costs anyone money can become a pretext for killing them, and almost any government expenditure on alternative strategies may be politically vulnerable in the present atmospher.
Economic hard times are even hardening attitudes toward koalas, the teddy-bear-like marsupials who to much of the world symbolize Australia. Struggling on the mainland, koalas were introduced to Kangaroo Island, north of Adelaide, in 1923, with the idea in mind that the island might form a sort of Noah's Ark for the species. Koalas are still struggling to survive on the mainland, where their preferred habitat has tended to conflict with development, or lies in the paths of forest fires, and they are notoriously often roadkilled.
The Kangaroo Island koala population has reportedly increased from 5,000 as of 1996 to an estimated 27,000 to 33,000, however, and Adelaide University ecologist David Paton and Nature Conservation Society of South Australia president Robert Brandle now argue that at least 20,000 koalas should be killed. Sterilizing 3,700 koalas since 1996 and relocating 1,380 to the mainland has not been cost-effective in bringing about a population decline, they say, although the sterilization and relocation efforts have never been big enough to be reasonably expected to produce visible results.
The South Australia state Wildlife Advisory Committee agreed in October 2001 that, "Continuing to adopt the soft approach of sterilization and translocation may well establish a precedent in wildlife management that is not in the best interests of conservation. The committee believes that these high-cost management options are driven by socio-economic and tourism needs rather than sound ecological management and conservation principles."
Translation: admitting the validity of any nonlethal wildlife management approach could weaken public support for the lethal approaches that traditional wildlife managers favor.
Tests of a contraceptive vaccine that could provide a nonlethal alternative to culling the Kangaroo Island koalas are underway at the Marsupial Cooperative Research Centre on Snake Island. Versions of the vaccine based on a protein from brush possums are reportedly not preventing pregnancy, but versions based on a protein from pigs are "promising," MCRC director David Kay told Melbourne Herald-Sun environment reporter Sarah Hudson in late July 2002.
The experiment is opposed, however, by Australian Koala Foundation executive director Deborah Tabart, in part because up to 15 of the 30 koalas in the test group will be killed and necropsied to ensure that the vaccine was the reason why they did not conceive.
Medway, Serventy, and the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, like other native wildlife advocacy groups in Australia and New Zealand, may merely take their cue from the increasingly xenophobic national moods.
Indeed, recent Australian Wildlife commentaries about human population growth have been downright restrained compared with the editorial pages of some major newspapers and speeches of leading politicians. Amid a tide of denunciations of Asian immigration, Australian Wildlife pointed out, for instance, that Great Britain and New Zealand still send 13 times as many immigrants to Australia as China sends.
Australian prime minister John Howard and the Labor Party won re-election in November 2001, despite a slumping economy, after taking an even harsher position against illegal immigration by Asian refugees than was urged by opponents.
The issue came to a head in August 2001, after a leaky Norwegian freighter, The Tampa, rescued 421 refugees from a sinking Indonesian ferry off Christmas Island, an Australian possession where they were believed to be hoping to make an illegal landing. As the refugees were picked up in Indonesian waters, Australia forced The Tampa to head on to New Zealand, and then New Zealand sent the refugees on to Nauru, a remote Pacific atoll.
Reported Grant Holloway of CNN, "For a country whose European settlement was pioneered 213 years ago by a fleet of decrepit boats carrying the human cargo of an English penal colonyand prides itself on its relaxed, multicultural societythe ironies abound."
The popularity of the Howard position remained high after another 356 would-be immigrants to Australia drowned in the Java Sea on the night of October 21. There were 65 survivors21 who were dropped off on an island when they demanded to leave the ship before it sank, and 44 found alive by fishing vessels the next morning.
Then, on the eve of the election, two women were killed and 160 would-be immigrants were rescued by Australian Navy and Customs Service vessels, after another Indonesian ship, the Sumbar Lestari, ignored warnings to turn back, caught fire, and sank as some of the passengers tried to fight off a boarding party.
Accordingly to Grant Holloway, the Australian Navy said "the asylum seekers deliberately destroyed the vessel to prevent the Navy returning it to Indonesian waters. The incident came as accusations flew over whether the government misled the public in claiming that an earlier boatload of asylum seekers deliberately threw their children overboard in order to blackmail the Navy into taking them to Australia. Conflicting claims from Australian naval officers suggest no such actions occurred. A Navy video that the government earlier said supported the child-throwing claims proved inconclusive, although it did clearly indicate the boat was distressed and sinking, and that those on board had to abandon ship."
Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser called the government claims overtly false.
Thirty years after the "White Australia" policy was dismantled, which from 1945 to 1973 virtually prohibited non-Caucasian immigration, some minor political parties with elected representatives still advocate restoring it.
Their rhetoric is at times almost indistinguishable from that of spokesmen for eradicating non-native species which are often identified by name with the places whose human immigrants Australians tend to find most threatening.
"Certainly reports from areas where they come from in Africa and southern Asia indicate that they will form very large populations," a Western Australia state agriculture department official explained recently of his hope of eradicating Indian ringnecked parakeets.
Australian National University scientists a few weeks earlier offered parallel reasons for introducing a species-specific method of trapping and gassing Indian mynahs. Brought in 1862 to eat crop-damaging insects, the ancestors of the mynahs arrived with Indian immigrant laborers.
The most openly xenophobic and bioxenophobic of all prominent Australian wildlife advocates is probably John Wamsley. Known for his catskin cap, boasting of killing his neighbor's cat at age 10, and outspoken denunciations of all feral wildlife, also espousing misanthropic views of humanity, Wamsley claims to have achieved unparalleled success at breeding rare marsupials by completely clearing their captive habitat of non-native flora and fauna.
Whether or not Wamsley's results have been as unique and spectacular as he says, however, is disputed by some mainstream zoological conservationists.
In 2000 Wamsley declared his intention of showing up all rivals and critics by founding Earth Sanctuaries, a 10-site for-profit eco-tourism venture. By February 2002, however, Earth Sanctuaries was insolvent, and Wamsley resigned as managing director, having refused to go nonprofit to avoid having to cater to "bunny-huggers."
The Wamsley approach continues in concept, however, as in April 2002 the Australian Wildlife Conservancy bought four of the biggest Earth Sanctuaries, enabling Wamsley and his wife Proo Geddes to try to regroup and continue with several of the smaller sites, closer to population centers and more likely to attract tourists.
Not yet demonstrated is that xenophobia in any form can be successfully combined with ecotourism.
There are signs that some thinking people Down Under outside the animal advocacy community are beginning to question the promotion of violence toward non-native wildlife. The New Zealand Herald on June 15 shocked readers used to thinking of their nation as a bastion of peace and harmony with a profile of the rural New Zealand hunting culture, as viewed by British newspaper correspondent Kathy Marks, who now lives in Sydney, Australia.
"New Zealand is a nation hooked on blood sports," wrote Marks. "One million peoplea quarter of the populationhunt, fish, and shoot," she continued, explaining that the hunters' targets are almost exclusively introduced species. "Attitudes toward animals are robustly unsentimental," she added, " and there is only a tiny anti-blood sports lobby."
Conversely, there may be thousands of youngsters like Teira Gill.
"With his blue eyes and curly blond hair, Teira Gill is a picture of cherubic innocence," observed Marks. "Suddenly he points a toy gun at the visitor. 'Bang! Bang!' he declares. Just two years old, Teira already knows what he wants to be when he grows up: a pig hunter. He has experienced the thrill of the chase with his father Jimmy. 'He had his first kill before the age of one,' says his grandfather, Alan Gill. Jimmy Gill says, 'He runs around the house with his toy knife, stabbing the dog in the ear. He's a natural-born killer.'"
Later, Jimmy Gill beat a dog in Marks' presence for chasing a feral goat instead of a pig.
The Melbourne Age just one day later published and syndicated a feature about a four-year study by Griffith University professor Mark Dadds of children who lack empathy. His focus is "whether children who are cruel to animals may be predisposed to commit serious violent crimes as adults." Dadds cited "kicking cane toads," encouraged by some native wildlife advocates, as an example of the sort of behavior he is looking at.
Dozens of U.S. studies have long since linked violence toward animals with violence toward humans, but Dadds is reportedly the first Australian researcher to do such a study.
"We looked at the literature and there was a lot of evidence that cruelty to animals seems to be a really reliable prognostic factor for later violence in humans," Dadds said.
That issue seems to concern Australians and New Zealandersand may be a starting point for reversing the psychological catastrophe that Christine Townend believes has befallen her homeland. --M.C.