do you intervene with cruel nature?

[GA Under Water]

Sometimes letting "Nature take it's course" has a bad ending. However taking prey from a predator is not smart, wise, or good for Nature. Say you see a Snow fox that just caught a rabbit after a chase and you chase off the fox. Now the Fox can starve, the Rabbit can die of his wounds and all for your conscience.




Then you have times when you think something is bad for a certian animal and it is the only thing keeping it alive. Like a California Jeep trail that was closed because an endangered frog lived in the Ruts created by the 4X4s. They closed the trails to 4X4s and the frogs went extinct.

It is amazing how our conscience can sometimes glare over the truely "right" thing to do.

 

[Trickie Dickie 99]

when you see a shark chomping on a helpless sea-turtle of dugong, do you intervene or let nature take its course? just asking a question because i have seen several of the shark-turtle encounters and i pity the turtle and feel like i should do something instead of nature taking its course.

Can't say I've ever seen it but to my mind it would be a ridiculous thing to do....leave well alone, if only because it's unwise to mess with top order predators like sharks, which have just as much right to a living as you or I. Also, would you intervene in an abbatoir to save a steer from slaughter?

But on a more practical level - beached whale rescues? We have a lot of whale strandings here in Tasmania, due to both geographical location and beach morphology and most years there will be small strandings of pilot whales and often big strandings, involving a hundred individuals or more.

When this occurs, a well-oiled machine swings into action, the State Govt send out Wildlife Officers, mobilise volunteers and they all spend the next three or four days in some place at the back end of beyond, manhandling whales, keeping them wet and generally prolonging the agony; maybe 10% of the individuals are refloated, often only to restrand and die a few miles up the coast.

I have to ask myself why? Pilot whales are not endangered and they have been doing this for thousands of years, (to the extent that one surf beach locally is known locally aas the Bone Yard, in recognition of the skeletal debris which turns up after a big storm),. it's a natural event, with cases even found in the fossil record. The rescues, which usually fail, cost thousands of tax payer $s to stage and in my book, it's unwarranted interference in a natural process.

Personally, I'd condone euthanasing stranded whales to save them a lingering death but nothing I've seen of whale rescues convinces me that it is wise at the level of animal welfare nor ethically, in terms of unwarranted interference with a natuaral process, in which there are both winners and losers.

Unfortunately, the Bambi Brigade carry such influence that these matters can't even be discussed.