ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial, October 2000--   The advantages of being seen From Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Paul Salopek came word on August 6 that brothers Antonio and Luis Faceira of Angola are working with Wouter van Hoven of the University of Pretoria Center for Wildlife Management in South Africa to restore wildlife to the 3.5-million-acre Quicama National Park, near the capital city of Luanda. Each a military general in the regime headed since 1979 by President Jose Eduardo Santos, the Faceira brothers have fought Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA insurgency for 25 years. Altogether, counting the last years of Portuguese rule, Angola has been almost continuously at war since 1961. Both sides have reputedly ravaged wildlife--for meat, target practice, and money. Salopek mentioned reports of government officials strafing antelope from helicopters. Craig Van Note, executive director of the World Wildlife Fund trade-monitoring subsidiary TRAFFIC, in 1988 accused UNITA of killing as many as 100,000 elephants over the preceding 12 years, in order to trade ivory for arms with the former apartheid government of South Africa. But Angola still has manatees, sea turtles, and rare giant black sable antelope, Salopek reported. Elephants were returned to Quicama by airlift in early September. The Faceiras are trying to bring back wildlife because they have realized that wildlife-watching is a far more lucrative business than wildlife-killing, and far more conducive to establishing a nation at peace. Though Angola as yet has almost no foreign tourism, Antonio Faceira told Salopek that Luanda residents already flock to Quicama on weekends, creating a significant domestic tourism industry. Canada   Half the world away, Canada has never fought a war at home, and attracts one foreign visitor for every two residents. Yet the great national parks of western Canada are disappointingly depleted of visible wildlife, especially compared to Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding corridors of other U.S. National Parks, National Forests, and state-reserved habitat. Tourism promoters are reportedly worried, because as word gets around, Canada is losing visitors in ever-growing numbers to U.S. competition. Opportunities to see large charismatic megafauna in natural surroundings are the leading reason why people engage in ecotourism, worldwide--for instance, attracting up to 75% of the visitors to Banff National Park in Alberta, according to an August 2000 Angus Reid poll. Yet wolves, grizzly bears, wolverines, lynx, and woodland caribou, among other popular species, are now rarely seen by casual visitors to Banff and other parks in the transboundary regions of British Columbia and Alberta, The Christian Science Monitor reported on June 28. Though we enjoyed one prolonged sighting of a wild wolf, ANIMAL PEOPLE essentially confirmed the Christian Science Monitor findings during mid-August drives through five of the best-known Canadian transboundary-region parks. Contrary to common belief, the problem isn't loss of habitat. Logging, fires, livestock grazing, cultivation, and urban growth have each impacted the transboundary habitat, but this is equally true on either side of the border. In any event, logging and fires produce second growth which harbors more charismatic megafauna, not less; livestock grazing has many negative impacts on wildlife, but does keep habitat more open, so that more wildlife may be seen if present; cultivation often attracts wildlife so abundantly that "nuisance animals" rather than invisibility becomse the leading local wildlife issue; and the urban sprawl around the city of Banff is markedly more contained than around Jackson Hole, the equivalent community near Yellowstone. Animals are present. We found scats and tracks during brief trail hikes. Within a few miles of the roads we took through Banff, grizzly bears mauled mountain bicyclist Pierre Richard, 21, on August 14, and hiker Stephen Miles, 28, on August 27. Near the roads, however, large animals behave as they do elsewhere under heavy hunting pressure--going mainly by night, fleeing from human approach, remaining at a distance which corresponds more closely to jacklighting range than the pouncing range of any natural predator. This is contrastingly different from the behavior of the same or similar species in Yellowstone and national parks we have visited in India and Kenya--each of which have excluded legal hunting for at least 30 years. There the animals are either curious about humans, or unconcerned. They don't run away on sight. Wildlife has become markedly less visible in transboundary Canada, ANIMAL PEOPLE concluded, not so much because animals are scarce as because they are scared. More species are hunted and trapped, the seasons are longer, and anti-poaching law enforcement appears to be even less visible than many aggressively poached species. Finally, although Alberta has protected grizzly bears since 1970, opening and closing a single grizzly bear hunting season in 1989, British Columbia still encourages hunting of grizzlies and just about any other species coveted for their heads, hides, or horns. Canada as a nation still has no federal law to protect threatened and endangered species. The most recent draft of such legislation, introduced earlier this year, appears to be stalled in Parliament--like predecessors introduced by previous governments.   Finding the money Wildlife has intrinsic moral and ecological value whether seen or not. Funding and securing public enthusiasm for nonlethal conservation, however, depends heavily on developing interest in wildlife among people other than hunters, trappers, and fishers. The growth of opposition to whaling, for instance, coincides directly with the advent of whale-watching 30-odd years ago. A study by Erich Hoyt released in mid-August by the International Fund for Animal Welfare found that 87 nations now have whale-watching industries, up from 31 in 1991. While Americans still do the most whale-watching, more than half of the nine million people per year who pay to watch whales are citizens of other nations. Whale-watching in Japan doubled, 1994-1998, and rose from just 200 participants in Iceland to more than 30,000. All of this long since made whales more valuable alive than dead to most of the world. Japan, Iceland, and Norway, still whaling, may eventually reach the same conclusion.   The growth of wildlife-watching also may contribute toward a shift in priorities for the U.S. Forest Service. The economic consulting firm EcoNorthwest on August 28 released a study done for the Sierra Club which found, based on 1995 U.S. Forest Service data, that logging, mining, and grazing in the National Forests add $23 billion and 407,000 jobs per year to the national economy. National Forests are not managed to encourage wildlife, other than some endangered species--but wildlife in the National Forests nonetheless adds $14 billion and 330,000 jobs to the economy. This could lead to some significant reconsideration of the management emphasis.   Of course tourism can stress wildlife almost as much as hunting and habitat loss, if the viewing is done in an intrusive manner and if amenities built to attract wildlife-watchers make the habitat more friendly to humans than to the animals. Hounded by too many whale-watching vessels, which make too much noise, some whale species now swim markedly farther from shore than 20 years ago; African predators including cheetahs and wild dogs reportedly have trouble catching prey amid traffic jams of safari vehicles, although others such as lions and hyenes have learned to use the vehicles as mobile cover while they stalk; and the tragedy of fed bears becoming dead bears through becoming too habituated to humans has been recognized by wildlife professionals for more than 40 years.   Wildlife managers annoyed that ecotourists seem to want to see animals too easily often respond that for easy viewing, people should visit a zoo or aquarium. Vancouver Aquarium marine mammologist John Ford, for one, has long argued that a key function of captive viewing venues is taking tourist pressure off of animals in the wild--although it is also evident, especially in the case of whale-watching, that the advent of oceanariums preceded interest in seeing marine mammals in the wild by about one human generation.   Quality zoos and aquariums, in turn, are at the forefront of innovation to serve the needs of both animals and human viewers. Keeping the resident animals happy is essential, as White Oak Conservation Center director John Lukas observed in a 1994 ANIMAL PEOPLE guest column, because the public won't make repeat visits to facilities with visibly unhappy animals, nor will they linger as long and spend as much on souvenirs and food. "You have to strike a balance: give the animals space, and variety in that space, yet design each exhibit so that the animals are close to the public," new Minnesota Zoo director Lee Ehmke emphasized recently to David Peterson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "In the 1970s," coinciding with the rise of concern for animal rights, "there was a strong movement toward getting animals out of cages and into big, naturalistic spaces," Ehmke added. "That did not take into account the issues of visibility and visitor attention span that we are looking at more closely now. " Breaking-edge zoo and aquarium design today finds means of unobtrusively leading visitors right through the animal habitat--for example, in the underwater tunnels pioneered by Sea World and Epcot Center; aboard vehicles, as at Northwest Trek and Walt Disney's Wild Animal Kingdom; up on plankways, as at parts of the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and the Fort Worth Zoo; and behind curtains of vines, as at the Warren Ilaf gorilla exhibit at the Dallas Zoo.   Lesson for dog-and-cat shelters There is a lesson in all of this for dog-and-cat shelters, too: people want to see the animals. Boosting rehoming rates and increasing financial support, the perennial quests of every humane society, are each most readily achieved by better showing off the animals, whether at special events, PETsMART Luv-A-Pet adoption boutiques, on web TV, or through building more visitor-friendly shelters. People need to see animals in order to feel the empathy that brings successful adoptions and enthusiastic response to appeal letters. Shelter directors who think they are doing animals a favor by keeping them out of sight are often misunderstanding both animal needs and human psychology. Animals appreciate the opportunity to choose privacy, but dogs, cats, and other species commonly kept by humans also crave interaction, as should be clear to anyone who ever walked through a shelter full of tail-wagging barking dogs, bouncing with excitement, and little cat paws poking out of cages, begging for a person to pet them. Even the ex-laboratory chimpanzee who flings feces at visitors and gives them the finger would rather have someone to be rude to than be ignored.   Elsewhere in this edition, ANIMAL PEOPLE describes the secrets of making shelters more people-and-animal-friendly--and the success soon-to-retire Jerry Aschenbreener has enjoyed in making Calgary Animal Services the friendliest animal control agency we have ever visited. We have previously described the adoption showmanship of Mike Arms, now director of the Helen V. Woodward Animal Center in Chula Vista, California. Previously with the American SPCA for six years and the North Shore Animal League for 20, Arms has rehomed more than half a million animals, mostly just by making sure they are seen. We have also written extensively about the success of Maddie's Adoption Center, opened in 1998 by the San Francisco SPCA, featuring home-like housing and daily training and grooming for the animals. Then-SF/SPCA president Richard Avanzino used to worry that the luxurious aspects of the $7 million shelter would discourage donations. Instead, Maddie's became a tourist attraction, adoption waiting time fell by half, adoption volume jumped 20%, and donations soared. Among the most memorable skits produced by the 1970s British comedy team Monte Python's Flying Circus was one about "The advantages of not being seen." But the invisible subjects were annihilated. The point of it, if there was one, seemed to be that invisibility confers no real advantages at all.