It’s seldom that editorial writers are at a loss for words, but one news story this week left us speechless.
A group of scientists, writing in the prestigious journal Nature, raised the idea of bringing African “megafauna” like lions and elephants to the great plains of North America, both to save threatened species and to fill vacant ecological niches. (Remember, wooly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers are long gone from these parts.)
Thanks to the Internet, the story looped around the world faster than a cheetah can bring down an antelope. The reaction was more plentiful than the Kansas wheat crop.
“It seems kind of loopy,” Craig Packer, a lion ecology expert at the University of Minnesota, told Newsday.
“Just when you think the world has gotten as weird as it can get, something like this comes along,” Steve Pilcher, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association, told The Associated Press. “I wonder how many calves or lambs it would take to feed a family of lions for a month? We sort of know what it takes for wolves, but something tells me we would be in a whole new ball game.”
“It sounds a bit farfetched,” Dean Hildebrand, director of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, said to the Grand Forks Herald. “I can’t imagine an elephant walking along the shore of Lake Sakakawea in January. I think it would have problems with a freezing trunk.”
“Rash” was the word Lisa Manne, an assistant professor of conservation biology at the University of Toronto, used when speaking to the Toronto Globe and Mail.
“We do already have an area like this, and it’s called Africa,” Callum Rankine, of the World Wide Fund for Nature, tartly told the Times of London.
“Obviously, gaining public acceptance is going to be a huge issue, especially when you talk about reintroducing predators,” said Josh Donlan of Cornell University, lead author of the article in Nature. “There are going to have to be some major attitude shifts.
“That includes realizing predation is a natural role, and that people are going to have to take precautions.”
For sure.
