WHEN DOING NOTHING IS NOT AN ANSWER

WHEN DOING NOTHING IS NOT AN ANSWER

All the agencies involved are to be congratulated on the latest announcement of the results of the successful campaign to exterminate the rat population on Lundy island. This task was completed 15 years ago and since then sporadic surveys have confirmed a growing success with huge increases in the numbers of puffin and Manx shearwater especially. It wasn’t just rats that required removal. Rabbits, although not eradiated entirely from the island, have been rigorously controlled, as their grazing had degraded much of the island’s habitat as well as damaging ancient burial sites.

It is at this point that it would be worth reminding ourselves of what was said when in 2004 it was announced that the rats were gone and that the rabbits would shortly follow. Quick to describe it as a “desperate failure” a spokeswoman for animal rights body, Animal Aid, told The Guardian newspaper in early 2005: “This is a perfect example of why we should leave nature alone. The rat cull on Lundy was always a complete over-reaction and they are now desperately trying to back-track by killing rabbits. It is disastrous.”.

Ten years later in 2015 Animal Aid were still insisting that the long term (but by then stemmed) decline in bird numbers was not about rats and rabbits, but about tourists. The group accused the organisers of the Lundy campaign and a similar one on the Isles of Scilly of condemning rats to an “awful death” for “commercial reasons”. It suggested that other factors – including too many tourists – could be causing the falls in seabird numbers. Its then director, Andrew Tyler, said: “Rats don’t sell tourist tickets, but birds do. They are making a judgment that the birds are important and rats are disposable. We do not accept that premise”.

Since the latest report was published last month spelling out the enormous success on Lundy and taking into account that tourist numbers both on it and on the Isles of Scilly have significantly increased without any apparent impact on bird numbers, Animal Aid has been very quiet and so they should be. The idea that left to its own devices nature will restore a balance might be a practical solution if you have several millennia in which to measure the results and as long as you are happy in the interim to see countryside populated by magpies, badgers and deer, but free from hedgehogs, trees and ground nesting birds of any description. Of course the people at Animal Aid and indeed others who argue against any form of wildlife management actually know this, but they are trapped by a rigid orthodoxy which encourages the sort of pious solutions which had they been followed on Lundy would have resulted in a landscape devoid of birdlife.

See the original article by the landmark trust here, https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/lundyisland/news-and-events/latest-news/seabird-success/