News

[moonvoice]

Aboriginals and Feral Animals in Australia; a Central Land Council report - guess what? They don't hate them, so why should we?

Ganked from ayellowbirds who kindly provided a link.
This topic is a very important one to me, it has always fascinated me how much loathing 'white/mongrel' people have generally directed towards feral animals in Australia. Like they 'don't belong.'

Hey, if most of the Indigenous peoples can accept them, where exactly is our problem coming from? Maybe we don't like the fact that their destructiveness reminds us of our own feral destructiveness. Who knows.

Comments

[tsukikokoro.livejournal.com]

...why would anyone hate feral animals? I mean... unless they're constantly attacked by them. Even then... weirdos.

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

I've met way more people (Australians specifically) who have really vicious attitudes towards feral animals than those who don't.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

My Dad gets vicious about feral cats. Mind you, he also gets vicious about outdoor cats. Not to the point of hunting them down, but he gets really quite narky - to the point of refusing to host m'sister's cat. He gets narky because he's a birder. Native birds are one of his favourite things. He sets rat traps baited for blackbirds, because they're non-native.

I don't get it. I really don't. Intellectually I can understand that he feels this way, but it's just a thing he does and meh.

For me, if I get the Smallholding I dream of, and end up with a rat or mice problem, I'm getting a terrier, not a cat, but that's to do with (unconfirmed) allergies, and trainability.

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

Moet was surprisingly trainable, only hunts mice and rats now. We basically gave him treats and praise whenever he caught mice/rats, and ignored him or took his birds away (which were always feral birds anyway) when he caught them.

Our next-door neighbours in our old house used to trap cats and then drown them. They would trap ANYONE's cat that just happened to go into their back yard (something that cats WILL do), because they had birds. Now, I can understand trapping to protect birds, and then putting them back over the fence again - eventually cats will learn that that house is the BAD house - but to then go and take someone's persian and drown it, is just unconscionable to me.

And I've encountered that attitude a lot, particularly in like - 40-60 year old guys. Lol.

The thing is, native birds are one of my favourite things too. I have binoculars, I collect books on bird identification, I take photos of them, I watch them for hours, I've even rehabilitated them. Being a bird person is no excuse to hate cats I think. The vicious attitude must come from deeper places than just 'I love birds therefore I must hate cats.'

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

My Dad is 63, btw. M'sister's cat once caught a Striated Pardalote (she was living with m'parents at the time, and had gone to Europe for a year-long holiday, so they had her cat). Dad caught her with it (having run into the house after spotting it to get binoculars and bird book), put the dead bird in a bag in the freezer, and left it there so that he could rub in in my sister's face (not literally) when she got home again that This Is What Cats Do. He then put it back in the freezer, where it stayed until I threw it out a couple of years later.

I really do think he has Issues.

The fox terrier we had when I was growing up was trained to catch blackbirds, rats and mice. The peewees Dad was feeding (he still is feeding some of the offspring of the original bird) could walk up and check her for fleas and she wouldn't twitch. She also liked to scarf up anything that fell from the bugzapper, which saved us cleaning it.

[ayellowbirds.livejournal.com]

how much loathing 'white/mongrel' people have generally directed towards feral animals in Australia. Like they 'don't belong.'

Do i need to type the word "irony" here? I think that it's fairly well implied.

It's interesting how much an invasive non-human species can become part of indigenous culture. There are cultures in the US which are know famous for their horse-riding, to the point where they are almost never portrayed without horses, on a continent where the earliest horses we can reliably verify arrived less than five hundred years ago.

One of the last courses i took in school was on the relationship between indigenous peoples and environmentalism; the biggest problem is often that white folks have a completely different understanding of "environment" from the people who actually live in the environment (which usually means that they think that people can't be part of the environment if it's going to be preserved).

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

That course sounds really interesting. It's always kind of struck me that the humans living closest to the land - like Indigenous folk - have often very different ideas of what is harming the environment, why, and what to do about it.

Western culture wants to 'musuem-ify' and preserve everything. But I want to live WITH the land, not just... distantly on it.

[ayellowbirds.livejournal.com]

Being trained in anthropology, the very school of study that creates many of our museums, i've tried to maintain a consciousness of context; to keep in mind that nothing happens in a vacuum. Too many museums present items outside of the context that makes them meaningful, wiping off the patina of ceremonial oils or reducing the cultural context of an artifact to a 2x4 inch placard. I don't know if my professors were deliberately instilling this in me, or if i was unconsciously selecting courses where i'd go deeper into this, like taking a course on the anthropology of Europe: the science that started out as Europeans trying to understand non-Europeans turned back on itself.

Thing is, there is no such thing as untouched wilderness. Everything that exists has been touched by humans in one way or another, we are the most pervasively influential species on the planet, even without touching on the micro-influence of butterfly effects. Westerners-- and i can't just say white folks because i've seen people around here of every ethnicity do this, as much as i personally believe "white" is a state of mind more than skin color --like the illusion of being able to have something unspoiled that they can save for themselves, but the mere fact that you know it exists means that you've touched it in some way.

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

There's a book by Robert J. Wallis (an Art historian with some training in archaeology I think) called Shamans / neo-Shamans which looks, in some detail, into how spiritual folk interact with the land and how anthropologists find it interesting, archaeologists don't like it, and how essentially there needs to be more interaction in all parties to find a common ground of understanding. One of the most interesting books I've ever read on the matter actually.

[praetori.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea Indigenous people felt that way about feral animals. I was always under the assumption that they hated them. I'm glad that they've become part of the culture (much like the feral horses have to the Native Americans). Feels kind of like a happy ending sort of thing.

[leecetheartist.livejournal.com]

The places where they've fenced off/baited the cats, foxes and dogs from the indigenous wildlife, the native animals have really thrived, some of them back from the very brink of extinction.

I can't agree with a policy of non-control of feral animals, guys. Numbats would disappear, spectacled hare wallabies would be no longer with us and heaps of others, and rabbits would eat everything down the bone, the waterways would be full of nothing but cane toads, those that are left after the hoofed ferals have eroded them all away and eaten everything.

If starlings and sparrows moved into this city that would be all the bird life we would see here.

It's an interesting article, though.

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure no control at all is the answer, I do agree that many feral populations need to be controlled to a degree.

But I think the venomous hatred many people (particularly white feral people who are as feral on this land as rabbits and cane toads - and arguably WAY more destructive) is pointless and really goes a long way to show a misunderstanding of how nature, adaptation and evolution works in the first place.

[leecetheartist.livejournal.com]

Oh, right. Sorry, I was getting the impression that you were all just wanting to sit back and let natural selection sort them out.

Yes, it's silly to hate any sort of animal -you just have to deal with the problem as humanely as possible.

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I think that things like myxomatosis and calicivirus are necessary evils. I love feral rabbits, but I also love burrowing bettongs and bandicoots too.

My real issue isn't so much with the need to bait, poison, cull, trap feral animals - but with the hatred that so many people seem to show towards feral animals. My surprise, and reason for posting the article, was that Indigenous folks didn't hate the feral animals. Many recognised a need for them to be culled, and many ate them as well, but... no hatred. Just a calm sort of acceptance that goes 'well they're here now, might as well learn how to start working with it.'

But I've met too many people in 'white' culture who go 'oh my god I HATE foxes,' and think that such hatred means it's okay to say... torture animals. Like... cane toad golf, for example.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

*nods* If you're gonna kill something, you do it Properly. You kill it quickly, with the least pain possible, and you make what use you can of the results. If you can't eat the meat, and you can't use the skin, you can at least make organic fertiliser. And if you shoot at something, or otherwise wound it, you don't just let it go. Either you heal it up, or you euthanase.

[tsukikokoro.livejournal.com]

Not me, I believe in controlling any animal population if it's endangering the ecosystem and threatening to wipe out a species. I just think there shouldn't be a distinction between feral species and native species - a dangerous population is a dangerous population.

[paleo.livejournal.com]

If you think about it, why is another creature using humans as a vector for territory expansion so unnatural? Life will always flow where there is opportunity. We create perfect environments for rats, roaches, and pidgeons, so that is what we get.

Rabbits should go back to their own country!

[weishaupt.livejournal.com]

Hey, if most of the Indigenous peoples can accept them, where exactly is our problem coming from? Maybe we don't like the fact that their destructiveness reminds us of our own feral destructiveness. Who knows.

It doesn't make sense to me either. There's probably some form of projection like that involved.

[sidheblessed.livejournal.com]

It annoys me that people hate feral animals. It's not as though they chose to be here.

[darakat-ewr.livejournal.com]

The only animal thats feral that I detest is the indian mynor, the nasty little buggers can't be controlled by most know easy to use means, if they could be we might have a few more Gang Gang Cockatoos and White Winged Coths

[jet-ski.livejournal.com]

I particularly like bunnies - cute AND delicious!