Paul Hopwood Speaks for the Commercialisation and Utilisation of Australian Wildlife

by Claudette Vaughan
 

Q.  In your book, ‘Animal De-Liberation’, you say animal liberationists deny the reality of life.  What is the reality of life Paul?

A.  Humans are one animal species amongst a range of animal species. We are a unique species in that we have additional abilities.  Namely the ability to be self-conscious.  While amongst many animal species there’s consciousness, they can feel pain, and they can suffer,  they still don’t have the higher order of self-consciousness [that we have].  Because this feature lacks, the way we deal with animals can be quite justly different from the way we deal with people. The problem that many animal activist people have is they see animals as ‘little people’ and they try and apply the rules we apply to self-conscious humans to merely conscious animals. That is not the reality of life.

Q.  Have you read Professor Michael Archer’s latest book ‘Going Native’ on the commercialisation and utilisation of Australia’s wildlife? (book reviewed in this issue)

A.  Yes.  I’m reading that at the moment and finding it very interesting.  I believe that as Australians we should be using Australian resources more than we do.  I’m very much against the European way where we assume that things that are European are necessarily good to the exclusion of things Australian.  In that general area I’ve been working specifically on the sustainable utilisation of Australian native animals.  The animal I’ve spent most of my research career on is the kangaroo.  I’ve been very interested in looking at the kangaroo as an alternative production animal to sheep in the arid regions of Australia.  That work is starting to show dividends. The Australian Game Meat Industry is developing quiet nicely at the moment.  The problem with putting Skippy on the dinnerplate is this cut against some preciously help beliefs of animal activist people and that’s the reason why I came into conflict with animal liberation views.  These people see the utilisation and commercialisation of kangaroos as a food-producing animal as being totally unacceptable in their belief system.  Therefore it was necessary for me to come to grips with their philosophy and understand what they actually believe and why they believe it and try and work through their viewpoint and see whether or not they were right or whether they were mistaken.  Clearly I believe they are mistaken but they are honestly mistaken.  They hold their views in good faith and we are all entitled to our own viewpoints.  Animal rights people are good people but seriously mistaken in the views they hold.

Q.  Do you think that intensively farmed kangaroos is a good idea then?

A.  I don’t think that the kangaroo is an animal that can compete with our European livestock in rich agricultural lands.  The data clearly shows it is more profitable to farm sheep and cattle in the high rainfall area.  That doesn’t mean to say you can’t have kangaroos there as a production system, in addition to your sheep and cattle. They certainly would not be the major part of farming income.  The situation changes when you move into the more fragile low rainfall arid zone.  To my view the data shows that we would be better off ‘farming’ kangaroos,  not in a European sense but more in a wild game animal sense.  

Q.  You are pushing for the commercialisation and utilisation of native animals as ‘pets’ into suburban households.  What makes a good ‘pet’ do you think?’

A.  That depends on the context.  For small children, for instance, a white mouse might make a good pet.  Therefore Australia’s equivalent, such as Mitchell’s Hopping mouse or the Spinifex Hopping mouse makes great substitutes. I’d prefer to be keeping Mitchell’s Hopping mouse than white mice.  If,  on the other hand,  you wanted a pet that was going to fetch the morning paper for you, the Hopping mouse might not be suitable.  So there are all sorts of reasons why people keep pets and all sorts of ways that people want to interact with their pets.  I’m not advocating that we shouldn’t keep dogs or shouldn’t keep cats.  What I am advocating is we should broaden the species that we keep and certainly we should look to keeping Australian native species where they adapt and do well in captivity.

Q.  Even if you do manage to adapt native Australian wildlife into the suburbs what kind of diseases, for instance, will you bring into the suburbs that haven’t been there before?

A.   With every animal species there are problems.  There’s a whole range of zoonotic problems.  These are diseases that transfer from animals to man.  Let me assure you that the number of problems associated with suburban cats and dogs are quite significant and it would be strange if you didn’t have similar problems with native animals.  The interesting thing is there are far fewer recorded problems with the ‘natives’ than with the traditional domestics.  Whether that’s because they haven’t been kept as intensively as some of the more oddball things haven’t been documented or whether it’s because they have developed not within the normal domestic sphere between animals and man and therefore don’t carry the common zoonotic agents.  The bottom line is,  there are no problems with the natives as the existing problems with the domestics.  The disease issue is just used as a debating point rather than necessarily a real problem.  One of the things you need to be careful about is different animals needing different amounts of space and so if you are to talk about keeping large kangaroos in a small space, then that would be totally inappropriate.  On the other hand, if you are living on a 15 acre holding in the outer suburban fringes of the city people keep macropods there really well and have a lot of fun in keeping them.

Q.  The Pet Industry’s annual turnover – a whooping 2billion dollars annually - is looking to divert cats, dogs and tropical fish over to native animals? Do you see the commercialisation of native wildlife taking off hand in hand with the Pet Shop Industry?

A.  In my view the Pet Shop Industry serves a community need but it doesn’t necessarily mean industry is set up in the best way it could be set up. The Pet Shop Industry, for arguments sake, will sell you Sulphur Crested cockatoos and they will also sell you one of those crummy little cages to put your cockatoo in.  If you can tell me that’s a far go for the cockatoo then I just don’t accept it.  I think there are some traditional practices that go on today that are hopeless and one of them is putting beautiful native birds like the sulphur crested cockatoos in crummy little cocky cages.  On the other hand,  you can put Hopping mice into modified 5ft long tanks with a sandy bottom and in an evening they strut their stuff up and down the tank. The amount of space they have is relative to what they need is reasonable.

There are a large number of Australian native mammals that are under 100grams in body weight and more and more Australian people are moving into apartment living.  So some of these little guys, especially some of the small possums show great potential to be kept as pets.  This is all part of the basic philosophy I’ve been working to over a research career of about 30 years.

Q.  Which is?

A.  Better utilisation of Australian native animal resources whether it be slaughtering for meat or pampering for pets.  The real question is to utilise our resources in a win-win situation.

Q.   Surely there’s a conflict of interest in what you say.  On one hand the sense of trying to persuade the Australian public to get native animals into the suburbs as pets and then to turn around and equally persuade them to eat the same animal on the other hand?

A.   People might think there is a conflict of interest but we have cats at my household and they make great pets.  There were tears all round when Fluffy eventually died.  On the other hand I advocate we shoot and exterminate feral cats ruthlessly when they are doing damage to the environment.  So it’s not the fact that it’s a cat,  it’s a fact that it’s the context of where the animal is and it’s relationship [to us].

Q.  Isn’t that superficially looking at the symptoms of the problem with feral cats when through no fault of their own they are in the situation they can’t get out of?

A.   To pick up on the word you used ‘fault’.  Animals are never at fault because animals are not part of the moral world.  The animal is an amoral entity so to look at a feral cat and say, “You terrible creature, you have just eaten an endangered Bilby” is a nonsense because that’s what cats do.  The cat is just following it’s biological imperative and so when we talk ‘fault’ we need to talk in terms of humans.  We humans are the only one’s that are moral or immoral creatures.  The better question is: ‘Is it right to breed dogs with such pushed up faces that they can’t breath probably?’  I think it’s a nonsense to mutilate animals by breeding and selecting them in such a way they can’t leave a fairly normal healthy life with the species that you’re dealing with.  So if you want to look at ‘good’ dogs in my view,  good dogs are like kelpies, cattle dogs, greyhounds that are physically fit and we haven’t mucked up their ability to live.  Dogs that we have not done the right thing by are dogs like the English bull dogs and dogs whose faces have been pulled back to such a great grotesque deformity that they can’t even fit their teeth into their jaw and their soft palates get in the way of their breathing,  so everytime they breathe the air is obstructed by the soft palate at the back of the throat.  These kinds of things should not be allowed to happen to animals.  The question is an interesting question. Are all our animal management programs good?  The obvious answer is “No”. If you look at the reasons then sometimes bad things have been done for perfectly good reasons.  People have meant well.  Wisdom is the art of making the right decisions and unfortunately many decisions that have been made in the past haven’t been wise.  And many decisions on animals won’t be wise in the future because people get entrenched into their viewpoints rather than looking at the objective data and looking at the reality of life and then coming to some conclusions.  When we change animals, that’s not necessarily a bad thing to do providing the animal is changed and providing it can live comfortably in it’s new environment because environments are changing all the time.

After the Industrial Revolution people began moving into new city environments and as time goes by, we are making the environments work better for us and in a new environment, animals that have been bred for special characteristics may actually be better in those new environments than the wild stock that they came from.  It’s a complex story.

Q.   You assume humans are moral but there are plenty of immoral people out there and commercial considerations often override wisdom.  What would you say to people reading this that have deep concerns about bringing native animals into the suburbs and what native animals are you specifically referring to?

A.   There are a range of native animals that could  be considered for city areas.  The animals that all have to be in confinement.  E.g., put up feeding stations in public parks and attract certain types of animals into the park so that people have the pleasure of interacting with these animals.  You can feed bushtail possums off your veranda. There are different concepts of keeping pets from total ownership and control to simply supplemental feeding stations for whole populations that are already there but may not be there in large numbers that could not be considered desirable.  It’s a very much situation-specific.   What may be appropriate in one suburb may not be appropriate in another depending on the characteristics of that suburb. 

Q.   Has anywhere else in the world tried out your suggestion for commercialising native animals to the suburbs?

A.   In some countries there is a very large pet trade.  In the USA you can buy Australian sugar glider possums quite readily whereabouts you can’t keep them in Australia.  So the answer to your question is “Yes”.  A wide range of native animals are kept in many overseas countries.  The problem we have in Australia is at the end of WW2 the reigning paradigm changed from: If it moved shoot it, if it . By the time we went from post-war into the 60’s people started to say the horizon is not unlimited and the environment is not able to sustain unrestrained exploitation.  The preservation paradigm still lingers on today but the new paradigm that’s coming in, but still is not here yet, is one called, Use it, or Lose it.  When things get built into your culture and into your society then you ensure their perpetuity.  For example we have built sheep into our production system. There are 120 million of them munching away day after day wherein if we didn’t have them as a production animal.  The best way to conserve is through utilisation.  You need to realise it’s not something you can paint with a broad brush because in the state of NSW there is at least 3 habitat types: urban, agricultural lands and national parks and wilderness areas.  So the paradigm that holds in one land use area doesn’t hold in another.

Q.   So you are a utilitarian then?

A.   No. No. No.  A utilitarian believes the ends justifies the means.  I don’t subscribe to that because I don’t think there is any integrity there.  I think individuals are important and we should defend the rights of the weak. 

Q.   Lastly, in this increasing world of commodification and commercialisation is everything, including Australian wildlife, dictated by the almighty dollar?  At the end of the day, isn’t that what we are really talking about here?

A.   I don’t know if that is a philosophical, veterinary, or religious question.  Economics is a strong force and if you say that the economics of a situation is not important, then I think you’ll be proven wrong but it’s not everything. If I can put it this way: You can look at a painting and describe the painting in terms of the canvas and pigments and the chemical composition of the pigments. These descriptions would give you nothing of the aesthetic value of the Mona Lisa.  You could also describe the Mona Lisa in terms of its artistic value and no absolutely nothing about its chemical composition that’s used in it.  We need to be smart enough that it’s not a ‘this or that’ type argument. We need to support ecotourism where it is good and we need to oppose ecotourism where ecotourism destroys something of value.  What I am saying is we need good government to maximise our resources so that we handle them in a win-win way.