An American ecologist would like to establish the Serengeti in Saskatchewan, but opponents say the plan is as endangered as the species it hopes to save.
In an article published recently in Nature journal, ecologist Josh Donlan from Cornell University and a team of his colleagues proposed replacing the large animals that disappeared from North America some 13,000 years ago with transplanted African and Asian elephants, lions, camels and cheetahs.
“Humans were probably at least partly responsible for the late Pleistocene extinctions in North America, and our subsequent activities have curtailed the evolutionary potential of most remaining large vertebrates. We therefore bear an ethical responsibility to redress these problems,” wrote Donlan in his report.
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The plan, called Pleistocene re-wilding, would see cousins of the lost creatures roaming Saskatchewan, Nebraska and west Texas on large, protected tracts of land.
Ideally, the scientists suggest, such a plan would resurrect in parts of North America an approximation of the large animal diversity that existed long ago. It would also help save endangered African and Asian animals from extinction, while helping to restore the natural order of things on the Prairies.
But the proposal to turn back the clock to the Pleistocene era, which began about 1.65 million years ago and ended roughly 10,000 years ago, has been met with mild amusement at best by agricultural producers. Nor does it sit well with wildlife experts, who believe the plan has not been well thought out.
“I don’t think it’s practical and I’m opposed to it basically out of principle,” said Trent Bollinger, adjunct professor with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon and regional director with the Canadian Co-operative Wildlife Health Centre.
“Anytime that we’ve undertaken introduction programs where we’ve introduced new species into areas, we’ve brought disease or we’ve altered ecosystems that have had a negative impact on the existing wildlife, and so I see that as being very detrimental.”
Donlan and his colleagues claim their rewilding plan is justified for economic reasons. The declining population in the Prairies and the Plains states is opening up land for wild animals. They say eco-tourism value derived from setting up “ecological history parks” would help ranchers and rural people living in the thinly-populated parts of North America.
But Bollinger is not in favour of re-creating a mini-Africa in Canada when there are opportunities to create preserves that highlight the centuries-old biodiversity of the Prairies.
“I think it’s important to save natural ecosystems, but save them in the areas where it is natural,” he said, noting that economic dividends from any such venture would be needed more in Africa than in Saskatchewan.
Eleanor Bowie, a rancher from Piapot, Sask., in the southwestern part of the province where Donlan’s re-wilding would take place, laughed at such a proposal.
“Some people-they’ve got their brains in their socks, I think. Or other pouchy places,” she chuckled.
“I think I’ll run a game farm and have lions roaming at will here. We’ll just use the calves as bait around the water hole.”
Bowie said focusing on the grasslands’ own native species is more important than entertaining Donlan’s ideas.
“Our native prairie is shrinking at a rate of concern. Where are they going to put all these animals when we’re driving our own endangered species out of place?”
Darrell Crabbe, executive director of the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, didn’t think many of his organization’s farmers would be willing to take their land out of grazing or crop production to make way for safari farms.
“We’re talking about some very, very sizeable tracts of land. I don’t think from an agricultural standpoint it’s feasible.”
While Crabbe admitted the rewilding concept was pretty interesting at first, images of the movie Jurassic Park soon came to mind.
“There’s lots of disease scenarios … and escapees will obviously be a big problem.”
He said past animal transplants have often gone wrong, like the introduction of European wild boars to Saskatchewan, which were initially imported in an effort to diversify agriculture, but later escaped. The wild boar population is now out of control in some parts of the province.
