Defending Animals by Kendra Coulter

Author:Kendra Coulter [Coulter, Kendra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: animal protection; animal cruelty; animal abuse; wildlife; animal care; conservation; animal sanctuaries; animal ethics; animal welfare; animal rights
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Dr. Kerry Bowman, a leading conservationist who is also a bioethicist at the University of Toronto, worked to protect orangutans in Asia in the 1980s and then expanded his work to Africa. He founded the Canadian Ape Alliance in the late 1990s when war was destroying many human and nonhuman lives in the DRC. “There was massive loss of the Grauer (eastern lowland) gorillas, and it was a nightmare. The park guards were hanging on by a thread, and they hadn’t been paid in a long time. My approach at that time was to simply raise money [in the Global North] and then pay the park guards.”

In the ensuing years, as outright war ended, the work evolved. Attuned to the diversity of local cultures, the Canadian Ape Alliance pursued a mix of strategies, including the development of local agricultural projects for Batwa people, who had traditionally been hunters and gatherers but lost that option when the Kahuzi-Biega National Park was created. The alliance facilitates a women-led cooperative that tends to chickens whose eggs are fed at the local nursery school and helps fund an environmental school whose students are primarily children of park rangers.

Today, Bowman collaborates with many partners, including a Congolese NGO, Strong Roots, which is led by Dominique Bikaba. Bowman stresses that the Congolese are leading the current efforts and that true partnerships are essential. “The directions of these programs and the meaning of these species are really in the hands of the Congolese, as they should be. And in the area, there are many different ethnic groups that are distinct culturally and linguistically. But among the vast majority, gorillas are tremendously respected and not hunted.”

Bowman and Bikaba argue that land is still critical to conserving species like the eastern lowland gorillas, but that communities need to be actively engaged in the protection. They have seen the fragmentation of gorilla groups, and are pursuing the creation and protection of corridors connecting protected spaces to allow the groups in heavily forested areas to move around. Local Indigenous leaders have been central to these efforts as well as to interweaving newer concepts like “forest health and community forests” with traditional, precolonial practices like not hunting pregnant animals and reestablishing sacred sections of the forest where many animals go to give birth. Major rain forest–focused organizations are partnering to support this work, and Bowman recognizes that when you’re protecting large, charismatic species like gorillas, you’re also protecting “frogs, turtles, the biosphere itself, and species people may not have even identified or named yet.” Indigenous-managed forests can complement publicly owned national parks, and in parts of Latin America constitute significant amounts of land—upward of one-third of Amazonian and other forests in some countries.

The DRC is no longer considered at war, but it is a fragile situation. Unlike in some parts of the world, Bowman doesn’t think that the militias in the DRC are antienvironment or target conservationists. He has seen compelling progress in the area, even throughout the pandemic. Remarkable developments, such

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