Killing to Kill

"When we began the report, we knew hardly anything about these control measures..." state the authors of a recent report funded by the League Against Cruel Sports calling for an end to predator control, and indeed the killing of any free-living animal in Scotland. No matter, they presumably thought, we'll learn on the job.

And what a topic to get stuck into for an ethical philosopher - predator control in the Scottish uplands provides respite for a relatively small suite of declining, red-listed ground-nesting bird species - but it involves the deliberate killing of a suite of common species in large numbers. How might an ethicist approach the challenge of pitting the collective benefits to scarce or declining species that accrue from predator control be balanced against the rights of individuals of common species? It's worth noting that the piles of evidence that predator control benefits ground-nesting birds are not difficult to find; for an academic with experience searching peer-reviewed literature, in half an hour you'd have a decent list of the key publications of the last twenty years. So what insight might our ethicists have?

We are also informed that "the report is signed by numerous ethicists and philosophers, including Scottish academics from the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh, Stirling and Aberdeen, and the Nobel Laureate, J. M. Coetzee." Who knew that the author of The Art of Roman Britain, or a German expert in the ethics of generative AI, or a Humanities Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa might also be expert in the effect of fox control on Lapwing population dynamics in the Scottish uplands.

Well, they claimed to review the conservation case on predator control, but instead ignored the published literature and stated that there was a "dearth of evidence" on the conservation benefits of predator control. They even had their own unevidenced hypothesis to offer: predator control didn't work because ground-nesting birds are still declining in spite of the fact that predator control exists. But the point isn't the content - the point is simply to thicken the fog, to incite anger, to hit the news cycle. The funders or promoters of the report don't really care about the contents - precisely no-one has been so stirred by the arguments that they are now calling for an end to deer management or Mink control (the authors demand an end to the killing of any free-living animal, remember).

The promulgation of scientific misinformation and doubt where scientific consensus exists is a science in itself - create a dense fog of reports and articles that can be referred to in future articles and campaigns, which can be thrust at politicians, which generate quick headlines in the churn of a news cycle. The actual content of each report or document doesn't matter; what matters is that there's enough of it piling up, hitting people from different angles, seemingly from different sources and supported by enough supposed experts. Climate science denialism and the campaign to ban trophy hunting run on the same steam.

And sure enough, it all works perfectly - The National state that "The Scottish Government is facing calls from more than 120 academics - including a Nobel laureate - to end "cruel" predator control measures on shooting moors." The Herald pick it up too, and a screenshot of the front cover is shared widely on social media. Not a single ecologist or conservation scientist put their name to the report, and those individuals who authored the report or put their name to it will never bear a shred of responsibility for any of the consequences. No matter that the arguments presented are threadbare, the fog of misinformation grows thicker, and it becomes harder for the public to distinguish evidence from conjecture or fact from fiction.