After last week’s post I became interested in the way acclimatization societies created unintended consequences from non-native species introduction around the world. Those societies sometimes introduced species without thought to impact on the local environment. More recently, governments developed environmental protection regulations to protect endangered species. These regulations have had Cobra Effect type second-order effects as well. Let’s look at why and what we could do instead.

Importing Risk

Acclimatization societies active in the 1800s and 1900s introduced non-native species into controlled new areas or even just released them haphazardly into the wild. Their intent was usually to release animals as potential sources of game, or to combat pests such as insect populations that damaged crops. In some other cases, species (especially birds, as it turns out) were also introduced to provide some color and birdsong for homesick settlers.

Let’s look at animals that these societies imported as sources of food. The list is long, but we’ll consider them in these categories:

Animals imported from colonized or other lands into a “home” country
Animals imported from a home country into colonized lands

Importing animals into their home country

A potential risk of the acclimatization societies, or at least the one in UK, was that its membership liked the concept and the social nature of the society more than the study of species introduction. The UK Acclimatisation Society, founded in 1860, had membership that was skewed toward the aristocracy and wealthy landowners, while the older Zoological Society, which had similar aims, had more members with more scientific backgrounds. Members of the Acclimatisation Society of the UK seemed uninterested in studying how to successfully import and avoid risks of new plants and animals. That is, they did not consider what risks they might encounter.

Apart from not studying the science, they also didn’t study the market. That lack of knowledge actually kept them from doing too much harm. That is, when deciding what animals to acclimatize in Britain based on how tasty they were, the societies didn’t consider whether the local population would actually eat them. A market test could have provided some insight there. Instead, acclimatization society members, who delighted at eating wombat, kangaroo, and ostrich, did not represent the general public.

I’ll just provide one anecdote. One of the society’s leading members was William Buckland — someone who wanted to eat as many new things as possible. At a dinner party where the embalmed heart of Louis XIV was displayed (that’s strange enough), reportedly Buckland picked up the container, declared ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before.’ And with that swallowed the heart. Back to the post…

In They Dined On Eland, by Christopher Lever, we learn of a dinner party at which the guests were served eland, an East and Southern African antelope, raised in a private collection in the UK.

From member Frank Buckland’s (the son of William, above) attendance at the London Tavern’s famous eland dinner in 1860: “I had the good fortune to be invited to a dinner, which will, I trust, hereafter form the date of an epoch in natural history… We had a large pike from the west, American partridges…, a wild Goose… and an Eland…”

Tasty to some, but too difficult to raise in the UK to serve as a source of game. With the eland’s introduction unlikely, we never got as far as what would happen to local deer populations if this antelope was introduced into the same environment.

There were also times when society members paused before introducing animals because of the environmental damage they might do, even when the species might be good candidates for new food sources. Again from Frank Buckland in They Dined on Eland: “After considerable discussion and correspondence about the transportation and possible acclimatisation of a new species of fish… (the zander or pike-perch), it had been unanimously decided not to introduce the fish, ‘as it would appear to be too voracious in its habits and might prove detrimental to our waters.'”

In the Paris Acclimatisation Society, the aim was “the enrichment and expansion of agriculture, now, as before, the greatest source of national wealth.” Society member Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire spoke about how important non-native species were to Europeans as a source of food. Potatoes, grapes, wheat, goats, and fowl were all major sources of food in Europe by the 1800s.

But fewer new non-native species introductions worked out and that frustrated the society members. As Saint-Hilaire said: “We have given the sheep to Australia; why have we not taken in exchange the kangaroo — a most edible and productive creature?”

A search for more foods makes sense, both out of culinary interest and lowering the risk of too few local sources of food becoming lost. A wealthier population and a population suffering from lack of food when the Irish potato blight hit. Therefore, find a new source of that food, like imported Chinese yams, that were not susceptible to blight. But most of the acclimatization societies impact was in colonized lands.

Animals imported into colonized lands

Most of the damage acclimatization societies did was in newly colonized lands, perhaps because society members didn’t yet understand their environments. The best examples of unintended consequences come from Australia and New Zealand, the two large land masses distant enough to avoid new species introduction until more recent times.

Some of the new introductions were successful, like the sheep mentioned earlier. Other introductions had dramatic impact on local environments. These include rabbits, sparrows, and cane toad and were discussed in more detail in this post.

As I wrote last week, the introduction of rabbits and hares in Australia was destructive. In the 1870s of a pair of brown hares were released in Mulgoa, inland from Sydney, Australia. By the end of the decade, hares had “overrun much of the south of the state.”

Ostriches, introduced because of the hat plume business, dramatically dropped in value when fashion changed.

Mistiming, Mis-compensating

Different from the acclimatization societies above, there are environmental protection programs whose purpose is to preserve and help native threatened species. How do these programs create unintended consequences?

The creation of environmental protection programs in the US has decreased the freedom of land use — in order to help the environment. But if regulation creates a restriction for landowners in how they can use their land, what happens after new rules are announced and before they take effect? In one well-known case related to the pygmy owl near Tucson, Arizona, it was found that landowners preemptively altered their land to be unsuitable for the owls so that the rule change would not impact them when put in place. This is from Money or Nothing, by Jonathan H. Adler.

Adler makes an interesting case. That “[T]he lack of a compensation
requirement also means that land-use regulation is ‘underpriced’ as compared to other environmental protection measures for which government agencies must pay. This results in the ‘overconsumption’ of land-use regulations relative to other environmental protection measures that could be more cost-effective at advancing conservation goals.” This result is exacerbated in the US, where most land is privately owned. In another country, where the government owns most land, this second-order effect would be different.

Does governmental policy inhibit conservation efforts, as Adler writes?

In a well-known example, [Ben] “Cone owned over 7,000 acres of timberland in North Carolina. Given his interest in wildlife, Cone devoted substantial efforts to improving the quality of species habitat on his land, maintaining long timber rotation cycles… His efforts proved successful, as populations of many species increased on his land, including wild turkey, quail, black bear, and deer…

“Among the species that benefited from Cone’s careful stewardship was the red-cockaded woodpecker, a species listed as endangered under the ESA [Endangered Species Act]. In order to preserve the habitat that Cone had helped create, the FWS [Fish and Wildlife Service] placed over 1,000 acres of his land off limits to logging. As a consequence, the value of Cone’s land plummeted, costing Cone an estimated $2 million.

“Cone learned his lesson: If he wanted to be able to make productive use of his land, he should not manage it in a way that attracts red-cockaded woodpeckers. As he commented at the time ‘I cannot afford to let those woodpeckers take over the rest of the property. I’m going to start massive clearcutting.'”

Also listed in Adler’s paper are these effects:

“In California’s Central Valley, farmers plow fallow fields to destroy potential habitat and prevent the growth of vegetation that could attract endangered species…As one landowner explained, “Because of the Endangered Species Act we disc [plow] everything all the time. We are afraid of an endangered species moving in. It [discing] costs $25 per acre. It’s not cheap. But the risk of not doing it is too great.”
“In the Pacific northwest, the Fish & Wildlife Service found that land-use restrictions imposed to protect the northern spotted owl scared private landowners enough that they “accelerated harvest rotations in an effort to avoid the regrowth of habitat that is usable by owls.”
“In Texas Hill Country, landowners razed hundreds of acres of juniper tree stands after the golden-cheeked warbler was listed as an endangered species to prevent their occupation.”

Leadership from the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation have both argued against paying compensation to landowners affected by new designations protecting species that live on their land.

But what would the result of the opposite be? That landowners make their property more hospitable to threatened species, in order to generate more payments?

Given that landowners are likely to know whether endangered species exist on their land before any governing body, it seems to make even more sense to mandate compensation. Remove the probability that the landowner will take the financial decision to remove the species by destroying their habitat.

I’ll end this section with a quote from Quartering Species: The Living Constitution, the Third Amendment, and the Endangered Species Act: “Unlike private land managers, government biologists face no opportunity costs for their decisions to place restrictions on the use of private land. . . . Because they are not required to compensate a private landowner for reducing the value of the landowner’s property, they need not consider the value of the alternative uses of the land. Indeed, the [Endangered Species] Act forbids such considerations.”

Conclusion

What actions would minimize the risk of second-order effects in non-native species introduction and in endangered species protection? Here are some ideas.

Careful, or no, introduction of species that reproduce rapidly and can spread widely. In that category: rabbits and perch.
Careful, or no, introduction of species that are imported to eat other pests if their behavior is not understood. In that category: sparrows and cane toad.
No introduction of any species for the purposes vanity — such as introducing birdsong or a romantic notion like wanting to see the birds written about by Shakespeare. In that category: starlings, sparrows, and goldfinches.
Compensation to landowners who lose land value for making their land hospitable to endangered species.

I’ll end this with a link to pictures of zebras used as draft animals. Thanks for reading!