Feeding Invasives to Natives

That sounds so cruel. My step dad once cut off a crodaids claws saying it wouldnt hurt and that I would feel like its nails getting clipped. But when i saw him using the scissors I felt so bad because Im pretty sure he was wrong about it not hurting especially since its a big part of their body

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Here in FL, there is a law with FL Stone Crabs that you can only take one claw. This way, the crab still has one to defend itself with. I do indeed think they can feel pain, but this is a controversial subject with many animals.

I also think you meant crawdad/crayfish.

I feel bad about the animals used for fishing and getting fished, but its life and nothing is going to stop it because people love profit : (

Indeed. I used to fish, but have since then stopped as it feels weird, hooking an unknowing fish though the mouth. Worse yet is commercial fishing where they let mass amounts of fish suffocate. But some people make a living from it. Again, a controversial subject.

Yeah very, also I just realised that you corrected the spelling, I never knew how to spell them and now I do so you have my thanks

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I have also come to the conclusion that lizard lives matter and I will no longer feed them to birds. Even though they are invasive, they’re still cute.

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Since you know alot of geckos would you know if a wild gecko would eat mill worms from walmart?

I would say no, wild geckos wouldn’t eat the dried mealworms (meant for bluebirds) from Walmart, but most likely live mealworms from Petsmart. I would recommend placing in a cup - not too deep so that the geckos don’t notice it, but deep enough they stay inside - by some trees and check during the night. Birds will also visit, mockingbirds and bluejays are just a few examples in FL.

Should we continue this in messages? It gave me a message recommending that we did
Screenshot 2021-05-14 12.38.56

And since you are in Arizona, you have fence lizards and banded geckos. I would set out a sheet of metal or a plank of wood and leave it for at least 4 weeks before checking to see if you even have geckos. Make sure not to flip them too often, as they will feel uncomfortable and leave. Once you know you have geckos, then I would try mealworms. You can also set a camera trap up next to the mealworms to see if it’s the geckos that are eating them or some other creature.

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That’s funny, as I was just about to suggest that.

Invertebrates have very different nervous syste, so understanding of pain doesn’t really stick to them, but they def. feel it as something bad happening with their bodies, though insects loose their legs very easily, so you’d think if it was a big “pain” for them, they wouldn’t live long after that with no sign of stress. I don’t think cutting off crab legs is a needed thing at all though.

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It could be considered consolidation. Once you’ve concentrated enough invasive small-animal biomass into a feral cat, you just need to figure out where the foxes live.

No, they’re just saying to kill the animal humanely first. Humanely killing invasive animals is generally a positive thing for the environment. I would be inclined to favor simply leaving the dead animal out for general nature to eat, rather than feeding it to anything specific, to avoid the potential issues re. feeding a specific animal and having it get fat or habituated.

And, as to another comment in this thread, there’s some solid evidence that crustaceans can feel pain.

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Latest lines of evidence is that crustaceans most likely feel pain in a similar way to vertebrates. Some articles that give evidence or reviews in support of this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347207004332
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2019.0368
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9750-7

This is one of the reasons why people are trying to promote an electrocution box to more humanely kill lobsters than boiling them alive.

Fishes definitely feel pain as well, though if crustaceans feel pain fish most likely would based on simple logic. There have been experiments where trout were deliberately infected with oral cold sores and they responded in a similar manner to what would be expected for pain (i.e., they started rubbing the affected parts of their mouth up against the walls of their tank).

I think the latest line of thought is that insects don’t feel pain in the same way that vertebrates do, but given how often the bar has been shifted I’m not super sure if that line of thinking is going to stick around. At least one study claims that insects do feel pain in an analogous manner to vertebrates (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190712120244.htm).

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I remember my ichthyology professor telling me about a controversy the field had back when he was a student and they were switching methods of euthanasia over from just dropping the fish in formaldehyde while they were still alive to euthanizing them beforehand and then putting them in isopropyl alcohol (which is less toxic and doesn’t leech the colors from the fishes over time). A bunch of the old fuddy-duddies protested, saying that dropping the fish in formaldehyde while it was still alive was better because the fish’s thrashing around as it died in agony caused the formaldehyde to be more evenly distributed within the fish’s tissues and thus make it better preserved. I don’t remember the exact details, since it was years since I heard this, but it was definitely argued along the lines that the more inhumane method was preferred because the animal’s death throes produced a better specimen. I was absolutely horrified by this, a bunch of scientists were actually advocating for a less humane method of killing animals that caused more suffering because they thought it would produce a better specimen (and also because “that was how they had always done it”, but this was how they justified not changing their methods to more humane ones and teaching this method to their students).

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Generally the best way to get rid of or control an invasive is to introduce a predator. Environments with functioning predator guilds and decent numbers of apex predators are rarely successfully invaded. It’s generally the more degraded environments that let invasives move in. E.g., alewives were unable to invade the Great Lakes until after the sea lampreys wiped out all the fishes that would have eaten them, and rabbits only became established in Australia after dingos, wedge-tailed eagles, quolls, and most of the native Aborigines (for whom rabbits were no different from any mid-sized native marsupial game) were wiped out.

In Australia foxes are known to suppress cats, Tasmanian devils are known to kill and eat foxes, and dingos suppress all of them. This is one reason why people have suggested reintroducing the dingo to parts of Australia, it’s not native but it is naturalized and it does a good job of hunting down feral cats and foxes. Of course, going back to the “healthy ecosystem” thing, declines in native quoll and devil populations (the latter due to contagious facial tumor disease) have causes feral cat populations to skyrocket and there’s some concerns that foxes have started showing up on Tasmanian shores when previously the devils kept them from getting a foothold. Foxes got booted off Tasmania really quickly whenever they tried that before.

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I would guess it is likely a similar amount of suffering for the animal eaten, though as others have noted there are two factors that could lead to more suffering: 1) the predator is likely more efficient in terms of prey handling when hunting on its own (so it may take it longer to kill/eat the prey when being fed by a human and 2) Capture and handling by a human is itself stressful for the prey animal (which it wouldn’t be subjected to if eaten naturally).

I don’t think that this is really the key point though. For me, the key point/question is for: what reason/s is it acceptable to be responsible for pain and suffering in/of another organism? What responsibility do we have in this area?

I think one of the key questions is intentionality. If I run over an anole on the street unintentionally with my car, I would feel sad and guilty for a second or two, but not much more than that since I didn’t intend to do it. Intent doesn’t matter for the animal experiencing the pain, but it does reflect on my ethics/choice.

Additionally, by driving a car sometimes, I’ve had to accept that some small animals will likely die as a cost of me getting somewhere (a benefit). For intentional taking of another organism’s life, especially in a painful way, I think the bar for justifying that pain and death is higher. For instance, I personally don’t feel that hunting and killing things purely for the pleasure of the hunter is particularly ethical. On the other hand, if the hunter is going to eat their prey (a demonstrable benefit), I am comfortable with it, as long as that hunting is done in a way that reasonably minimizes pain and suffering.

So in the case of feeding invasive prey animals to predators in a way that increases their pain and suffering, it is intentional (in my mind higher responsibility/more justification needed) and there needs to be a clear benefit to justify being a direct participant in causing that pain and suffering. In most situations with brown anoles, there is definite pain and suffering, caused intentionally, and I don’t see a clear benefit (the herons are already doing fine, the loss of a few brown anoles won’t have any meaningful positive impact on native species).

Some situations in which I could understand feeding of brown anoles being justified:
The heron has been injured and is being rehabilitated. It needs food and/or to learn how to handle live prey.
There’s a large scale effort to remove an invasive species that will have an obvious positive impact (and then why not have the bodies of the invasives benefit natives, etc.)
And plenty of other scenarios

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I agree with a lot of what is written here, but I would like to disagree with one small point:

I don’t think that cruelty is really a (non-human) animal characteristic. According to Wikipedia, that bastion of human knowledge, cruelty is “pleasure in inflicting suffering or inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily available.”

Certainly, the hunting methods of many animals can cause extreme pain and suffering in prey (wild dogs come to mind). However, the predators (as far as we know) aren’t taking pleasure in the suffering itself. They certainly aren’t minimizing it. But as you noted, they are likely just using the means evolution has shaped for them to hunt. This is without consideration for the prey, but also without a clear alternative method of killing that is less painful.

For an action to be cruel, I’d also argue that that animal inflicting the pain has to be able to understand that the prey is also an organism capable of experiencing pain/suffering (which I don’t think has really been shown). If you don’t understand that another organism experiences pain, you can’t make the choice to minimize it.

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I’m against breaking bones, that’s awful, but simple handling doesn’t do much harm for the frog/lizard, and it will be eaten anyway, where stress is much higher, bet you, herons don’t kill prey immediately. But I have no idea how you’d feed a healthy heron at all, they’re not pigeons and don’t walk around humans, plus there’s no invasive vertebrates other than 1 deer species and mouse/rat, so it’s not something I’m gonna deal with.

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