If we can sell it, it isn't endangered

CanWest reports on a new study which suggests that both Lib and Con federal governments have based decisions about proposed endangered species classifications on how profitable a type of animal may be, rather than the risk actually faced by the species:

SFU Biologist Arne Mooers and his colleagues at the Vancouver based university looked at 30 species rejected for endangered-species protection by the federal government from 2003-2006, and compared them to 156 species listed as endangered.

"Listings under the current law seem to discriminate against the fuzzier, tastier endangered species," Mooers said. "The decisions make it look as if Canadians value milk snakes and dromedary jumping slugs more than they value polar bears, beluga whales and coho salmon. That's hard to believe."

While all 12 endangered birds and all 26 at-risk reptiles and amphibians received protection under the Species at Risk Act, only one of 11 imperiled marine fish and 12 of 30 mammals were listed, the scientists said...

The reason for the "bias" against mammals and marine fish comes down to human use, said Mooers' colleague, University of B.C. biologist Laura Prugh.

"What I saw as the most striking difference between the protected and unprotected species was whether or not they're harvested," Prugh said. "Economic reasons are often cited."

Protection of harvested species would require restrictions on hunting and fishing, she noted.

Federal authorities appeared keen to grant protection to species already protected by provincial authorities, Prugh said.

"It seems as though if listing the species was going to require new effort to actually protect them, it would be denied," Prugh said...

The federal government did not list the northern cod, despite a 99 per cent population decline, or the porbeagle shark, which has suffered a 90 per cent decline, Mooers and his colleagues wrote in the international journal Conservation Biology. Listing the shark may have led to the loss of eight jobs, the article said. Keeping it off the endangered list, according to Mooers and the other scientists, reflects "an implicit policy not to list any marine fish perceived to be of economic value, no matter how small."

It shouldn't come as much surprise that both of the past two governments have disproportionately favoured short-term economic considerations over longer-term environmental issues. (And let's be clear that even the longer-term economics presumably favour a management regime which helps to replenish the affected species, rather than one which preserves incentives for continuing to harvest species which are genuinely endangered.)

But it's still striking that the result of current practices is to exclude from Canada's endangered-species management both the species most often put forward as mascots for environmental considerations, and the ones whose population decline has already had the most measurable impact on the lives of Canadians. And that can only have the effect of minimizing the positive impact of the Species at Risk Act, as well as the public's familiarity and sympathy with the need for protection.