Vegans Love Carnivores

Repost from my article featured on IFLScience March 11, 2015 | by Niki Rust photo credit: Coming to a forest near you? lynx image via www.shutterstock.co,uk  Share on facebook The lynx: a short-tailed felid weighing up to six times more than your domestic moggy. This large carnivore once roamed the British Isles 1,300 years ago but, due to habitat destruction, overhunting of its prey and purposeful killing by humans, the species was driven to extinction in the UK. Now, there are plans to reintroduce this species to three sites in England and Scotland. But what are the chances of a success? The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has strict guidelines for reintroducing species into the wild. One of the key recommendations they make is that the main causes of the historical decline must be addressed to ensure success of the reintroduction. In terms of the threats to lynx, we now have stringent land management policies in place so it is unlikely that the cat’s p...

This is from my latest piece in The Conversation on my latest journal article in African Journal of Ecology . Southern Africa’s game farms are private reserves that house wildlife such as giraffes, zebras and antelope to be used for restocking national parks, meat production or trophy hunting. But these farms have a problem. Warthogs and porcupines want to move around the reserves too, and they have an annoying habit of making large holes under the boundary fences to burrow their way in and out. For cheetahs, these holes are an ideal way to get inside and prey on the valuable game. Cheetahs are considered pests in these reserves and, in Namibia, game farmers end up killing more cheetahs than livestock farmers do. These game farms needed to find a way to let the warthogs in while keeping the big predators out. Warthogs in, cheetahs out. Niki Rust, Author provided The solution is simple but unusual – have you ever considered whether your cat flap might be used by other animals besides...

Latest article published in The Conversation on the recolonisation of predators in Europe. This features an interview with me on my views on this topic. Anyone got any loo roll? Kjell Isaksen In a rare conservation success story, research has shown that numbers of wild large carnivores in the continent have been steadily increasing and a third of the European mainland now has at least one kind of large carnivore. There are an estimated 17,000 brown bears, 12,000 wolves, 9,000 lynx and 1,250 wolverines living in Europe – nowhere near historical levels, but a healthy amount all the same. But what’s more surprising is that these populations are found in the same places as people. In a new study in the journal Science containing the most exhaustive data set ever collected on large carnivores in Europe, Guillaume Chapron and colleagues found that not only are all four species surviving in human-dominated landscapes, but their populations are generally stable or even increasing. Move ...

Latest article that I've published is now available on The Conversation . Here is the article: Wolf cull backfires as wild canines feast on farm animals Lock up your sheep. USFWSmidwest , CC BY Wolves, lions and other large carnivores rely on meat for sustenance and there are only so many wild animals to go round. Sometimes, dinner means cow or sheep. Farmers can use guard dogs or protective fencing to deter predators and protect livestock. But lethal methods such as hunting and trapping are also used to control wild carnivore numbers. As a livestock farmer in wolf country, it would be reasonable to assume that killing more predators would result in fewer attacks on your animals. However, a new study by Washington State University has turned this assumption on its head by discovering the opposite: the more wolves that are killed (up to a threshold of 25% of the population), the more the remainder preyed on local sheep and cows. Why is this? Unpicking the pack The r...

Reposted from my article on The Guardian The term vegan has been around for 70 years and its long list of health and environmental benefits has not been lost on some of the most influential people in the world: Ghandi, Al Gore and Bill Clinton, to name a few. Never one to pass on a growing trend, Hollywood has seen the number of celebrity vegans increase exponentially – even Mike Tyson has reportedly turned vegan to reap the health benefits. The United Nations has urged more people to try out a plant-based diet to help reduce the burden that humans place upon the planet (and on our waistlines) but, despite all this, only 2% of Brits claim to be vegetarian and a mere 1% classify themselves as strict vegans . If we know we should be eating less meat, what steps can businesses take to help us transition to a meatless diet? Make vegan wins clearer on packaging Although some supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s are starting to include the golden phrase “suitable for vegans” on their produ...

This is an article I wrote for The Conversation on 26 August 2014: Bribery won’t stop Sweden’s wolf hunters Conservationists have recently become very excited about financial incentives. The idea is to pay people to do things that will help biodiversity, for example, where farmers are paid not to till crops that reduce soil erosion or where landowners are given money to plant trees to capture carbon in the atmosphere. This technique, considered by some as bribery to do what you want, has actually changed environmental behaviour for the better in some significant instances. “Great”, I hear conservationists say, “let’s pay everyone to do exactly what we want!” The possibilities are endless: we could give farmers money to set aside land for nature , we could make fishing more sustainable , or we could reward people to not kill threatened predators . There are, however, problems with the system behind paying people to do things that they wouldn’t normally do, not least because some...

Taken from my article published on The Conversation There has been a huge increase in attention recently to the problem of wildlife poaching, mostly from the stream of grisly stories from Africa about rhino and elephants illegally killed for their horn and ivory. At the same time there has been a growing awareness of trophy hunting, with pictures of hunters, sometimes minor celebrities, posing next to their kill prompting furious outcry . But these two forms of wildlife are being wrongly lumped together. Despite both resulting in an animal’s death, they are entirely different. Poaching is the illegal killing of wildlife, undertaken for reasons that may include revenge, meat for food or sale, tradition or money. Poachers might be poor locals from the area to foreigners capitalising on the lucrative illegal wildlife trade. By contrast, trophy hunting is the entirely legal killing of wildlife, often carried out by rich foreigners for sport and enjoyment. Both result in one animal fewer in...