【原】猎杀真能保护农场？

Amber看世界 2021-05-21

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On 5 August, biologists from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife ascended in a helicopter to shoot two members of the Profanity Peak wolf pack, which had been preying on cattle in the state’s northeast corner.

8月5日，来自华盛顿鱼类和野生动物部门的生物学家乘坐直升飞机升空，向在该州东北角以牛为食的作案高峰狼群的两名成员射击。

After the cull failed to end predation, the state removed four more members of the 11-wolf pack.

在这次捕杀阻止狼群捕猎失败后，该州又从11只狼群中移走了4只狼。

Some conservationists were outraged, but the logic behind such lethal control seems airtight: Remove livestock-killing wolves, coyotes, bears, and other predators, and you’ll protect farmers and ranchers from future losses.

一些自然保护主义者对此感到愤怒，但是这种致命控制背后的逻辑似乎是无懈可击的:除去杀死家畜的狼、郊狼、熊和其他食肉动物，你就能保护农民和牧场主免遭未来的损失。

A new study, however, claims that much of the research underpinning that common sense notion is flawed—and that the science of predator control needs a methodological overhaul.

然而，一项新的研究声称，许多支持这一常识的研究是有缺陷的，而且捕食者控制的科学需要进行方法上的彻底革新。

Adrian Treves, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues examined more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, searching for ones that randomized some by removing or deterring predators while leaving others untouched.

威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校的保育生物学家艾德里安.特雷夫斯和他的同事们研究了100多项同行评议的研究，寻找一些随机选择的研究，其中一些会移除或阻止食肉动物，而另一些则不去碰它们。

Not a single experiment in which predators were killed has ever successfully applied this randomized controlled design, they reported 1 September in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

他们于9月1日在《生态与环境前沿》杂志上发表报告称，这种随机对照设计从未成功应用于任何一个杀死捕食者的实验。

“Lethal control methods need to be subjected to the same gold standard of science as anything else,” Treves says.

特雷夫斯说:“捕杀这样的控制方法需要和其他任何方法一样遵循科学的黄金标准。”

He argues that policymakers should suspend predator management programs that aren’t backed by rigorous evidence.

他认为政策制定者应该暂停没有严格证据支持的捕食者管理项目。

David Mech, a wolf expert at the University of Minnesota (UM), Twin Cities, isn’t persuaded.

明尼苏达大学双城分校的狼专家大卫·梅切对此并不买账。

He notes that many of the studies Treves scrutinized “met some pretty good scientific standards, but just weren’t quite perfect.

他指出，特雷斯仔细研究的许多研究“达到了一些相当好的科学标准，但并不十分完美”。

… Drawing the conclusion that therefore all these depredation management programs should stop until gold standard studies are done—that’s a very big leap.”

因此，得出的结论是，在黄金标准研究完成之前，所有这些掠夺管理项目都应该停止——这是迈出了很大的一步。