Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene

Front matter

The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics 33

Bernice Bovenkerk Jozef Keulartz Fditors

Animals in

Part II Domesticated Animals Hidde Boersma viii Contents

11 Place-Making by Cows in an Intensive Dairy Farm: Leonie Cornips and Louis van den Hengel

Paul B. Thompson

13 Reimagining Human Responsibility Towards Animals Andreia De Paula Vieira and Raymond Anthony

Susan Ophorst and Bernice Bovenkerk

15 Comment: Animals in ‘Non-Ideal Ethics’ and ‘No-Deal Ethics’ .... Erno Eskens

Part II Urban Animals

16 Stray Agency and Interspecies Care: The Amsterdam Stray Cats and Their Humans ..nccccecccdeocawe sence casei caddacaase ss Eva Meijer

Oy. SRE ARIE cspero i perenne baacadeiagetacaeeeeneeensd Joachim Nieuwland and Franck L. B. Meijboom

18 Interpreting the YouTube Zoo: Ethical Potential of Captive PeeCGUMENS: c5265 cas debsebhhebsdcedadddavieods Danaa Yulia Kisora and Clemens Driessen

19 Wild Animals in the City: Considering and Connecting Sabrina Brando and Elizabeth S. Herrelko

20 Comment: Encountering Urban Animals: Towards Whe FOU PONS: 2668 ois cdee be des aunee esed SAE EET REE Lauren E. Van Patter

Part IV Wild Animals

21 Should We Provide the Bear Necessities? Climate Change, Clare Palmer

22 Understanding and Defending the Preference for Native POCO sg kateb nie had ae oe P oobi anh ae E EN Ned Hettinger

23 Coexisting with Wolves in Cultural Landscapes: Fences Martin Drenthen

Contents

Mateusz Tokarski

Charles Foster

Part V Animal Artefacts De-extinction and Gene Drives: The Engineering

Christopher J. Preston

Jennifer Welchman

The Welfarist Account of Disenhancement as Applied

Adam Shriver

How to Save Cultured Meat from Ecomodernism? Selective

Cor van der Weele

Henk van den Belt

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Bernice Bovenkerk is Associate Professor of philosophy at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Her research and teaching deal with issues in animal and environmental ethics, the ethics of climate change, and political philosophy. Current topics are animal agency, the moral status of animals, and other natural entities, with a particular focus on fish and insects, the ethics of animal domestication, animal (dis)enhancement, and deliberative democracy. In 2016 she co-edited (together with Jozef Keulartz) Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans. Blurring Boundaries in Human-Animal Relationships (Springer) and in 2012 she published The Biotechnology Debate. Democracy in the Face of Intractable Disagreement (Springer). She received her Ph.D. title in political science at Melbourne University and her Master’s title in environmental philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Her homepage is bernicebovenkerk.com.

Jozef Keulartz is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and senior researcher Applied Philosophy at Wageningen University and Research Center. He has published extensively in different areas of science and technology studies, social and political philosophy, bioethics, environmental ethics, and nature policy. His books include Die verkehrte Welt des Jiirgen Habermas [The Topsy-Turvy World of Jiirgen Habermas, Junius, 1995] and Struggle for Nature—A Critique of Radical Ecology (Routledge, 1998). He is co-editor of Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture (Kluwer, 2002), Legitimacy in European Nature Conservation Policy (Springer, 2008), New Visions of Nature (Springer, 2009), Environmental Aesthetics. Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground (Fordham University Press, 2014), Old World and New World Perspectives in Environmental Philosophy (Springer, 2014), and Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans (Springer, 2016).

xi xii Editors and Contributors

Contributors

Raymond Anthony Department of Philosophy, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK, USA

John Basl Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Henk van den Belt University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia Charlotte E. Blattner University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland Hidde Boersma Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Bernice Bovenkerk Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Sabrina Brando AnimalConcepts, Teulada, Spain; University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK

Leonie Cornips NL-Lab, Humanities Cluster (KNAW), Amsterdam, The Netherlands;

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

Martin Drenthen Institute for Science in Society, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Clemens Driessen Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Erno Eskens Noordboek, Gorredijk, The Netherlands

Charles Foster Green Templeton College, Oxford, UK; University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Louis van den Hengel Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

Elizabeth S. Herrelko National Zoological Park, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA; University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK

Ned Hettinger College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA

Hugh A. H. Jansman Wageningen Environmental Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Jozef Keulartz Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands; Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Yulia Kisora Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Editors and Contributors xiii

Michiel Korthals University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenza/Bra, Italy Nathan Kowalsky St. Joseph’s College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Joost Leuven The Hague, The Netherlands

Franck L. B. Meijboom Ethics Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Eva Meijer Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Joachim Nieuwland Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Susan Ophorst University of Applied Sciences Van Hall Larenstein, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands; Radboud University, Institute for Science in Society, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Clare Palmer Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

Andreia De Paula Vieira Animal Welfare Scientist and One Health Researcher, Curitiba, Brazil

Christopher J. Preston University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

Ronald Sandler Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Adam Shriver Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Oxford, UK

J. A. A. Swart University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

Paul B. Thompson Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA Mateusz Tokarski Independent researcher, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Lauren E. Van Patter Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

Cor van der Weele Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Jennifer Welchman University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Chapter 1 A) Animals in Our Midst: An Introduction E Jozef Keulartz and Bernice Bovenkerk

Abstract In this introduction we describe how the world has changed for animals in the Anthropocene—the current age, in which human activities have influenced the planet on a scale never seen before. In this era, we find many different types of animals in our midst: some—in particular livestock—are both victims of and unwittingly complicit in causing the Anthropocene. Others are forced to respond to new environmental conditions. Think of animals that due to climate change can no longer survive in their native habitats or wild animals that in response to habitat loss and fragmentation are forced to live in urban areas. Some animals are being domesticated or in contrast de-domesticated, and yet others are going extinct or in contrast are being resurrected. These changing conditions have led to new tensions between humans and other animals. How can we shape our relationships with all these different animals in a rapidly changing world in such a way that both animal welfare and species diversity are not further affected? We describe how animal ethics is changing in these trying times and illustrate the impacts of Anthropocene conditions on animals by zooming in on one country where many problems, such as biodiversity loss and landscape degradation, converge, the Netherlands. We conclude by giving an overview of the different chapters in this volume, which are organised into five parts: animal agents, domesticated animals, urban animals, wild animals and animal artefacts.

Other contributions in this volume in which the Netherlands will function as a textbook example are the chapters of Hidde Boersma, Susan Ophorst and Bernice Bovenkerk, Eva Meijer and Martin Drenthen.

J. Keulartz (GX) - B. Bovenkerk Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: Jozef.keulartz @ wur.nl

B. Bovenkerk e-mail: bernice.bovenkerk @ wur.nl

© The Author(s) 2021 1 B. Bovenkerk and J. Keulartz (eds.), Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene, The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics 33, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63523-7_1

As we are preparing this book for the publication, the world is in the grips of Covid- 19, the corona virus. Scientists have traced the virus back to bats and some argue that the bats become particularly infectious when they are stressed. This stress is caused amongst other things by waking them up prematurely from their hibernation or by keeping them in captivity.! This virus does not only have implications for humans, but also for other animals. Some have also been infected, most famously a tiger in the Bronx zoo in New York.” Others are being used as animal models in medical experiments to find a vaccine for Covid-19. In a number of European countries, infections of mink have been met by a massive culling of all animals on mink farms in order to prevent them becoming a reservoir for COVID-19. This was done after a comparison of viral DNA that suggested that mink had infected a small number of employees (Oreshkova et al. 2020). In the Netherlands, the corona crisis has led to a debate, spurred on by the Party for the Animals, about the intensive way in which production animals are kept, with virologists stating that the Netherlands is ‘full of potential hosts that can transmit a virus’.* Globalization has certainly been a driver of the massive outbreak of this disease, and as we will argue in the introduction has had major implications for animals and for the human-animal relationship.

In the (Australian) summer of 2019/2020, large parts of Australia are on fire. So far, the devastating bushfires killed 26 people and over a billion animals.’ In particular one of Australia’s main symbolic animal species, the koala, is hit hard by the fires, as its strategy is to move further up the tree in case of danger. With the fires still blazing, the Australian government is denying its own contribution to climate change and downplaying the link between climate change and the bush fires.> Australia ranked last in the Climate Change Performance Index out of the 57 countries that are responsible for the lion’s share of greenhouse gas emissions.°

In 2015, a dentist from Minnesota killed famous lion Cecil just outside of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. The hunt was legal, but nevertheless caused a public outcry against trophy hunting.’ This case raises difficult ethical questions, such as ‘should we allow trophy hunting and even support game farms in order to raise revenue for wildlife conservation?’ It also sheds interesting light on the changing

"https://www.nre.nl/nieuws/2020/02/07/het-spoor-van-corona-leidt-naar-een-gestreste-vleermuis- 23989708.

*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/bronx-zoo-tiger-tests-positive-for-coronavirus.

3https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/viroloog-nederland-is-vol-met-gastheren-die-een-virus-over-kun nen-dragen-br~afbc59f5/.

4https://aeon.co/essays/we-cant-stand-by-as-animals-suffer-and-die-in-their-billions. Shttps://www.vox.com/world/2020/1/8/21051756/australia-fires-climate-change-coal-politics. Shttps://newclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/CCPI-2020-Results_Web_Version.pdf.

Thttps://wildlife.org/survey-shows-u-s-citizens-increasingly-humanize-animals/?fbclid=IwAR30 Dxvy7q-B5Q_cxGrh9j- leINSQWML4hLO9ODj YK17e3 Y w Yui6H40gP69E.

attitude of humans towards other animals. A recent study suggests that people increasingly attribute human-like characteristics to wild animals, and that this anthropomorphism results in changing strategies for wildlife management. The researchers of this study notice ‘a shift in values from domination, in which wildlife are for human uses, to mutualism in which wildlife are seen as part of one’s social community’ (Manfredo et al. 2019, 1).

In Cincinnati, two police officers sitting in a car, were approached by a goose, who started tapping on the police car’s door. The goose did not respond to the food offered her, but kept on tapping, walking off, and tapping on the door again, as if asking for help. When the police officers followed her, they found her baby goose tangled up in string, and rescued the baby goose, under the watchful eye of his mother. This case raises interesting questions about animals’ cognitive capacities and capacity for self-willed action, or agency. The goose clearly went up to the human beings planning to ask for help, expecting them to be able to afford help. Does this mean the goose is capable of intentional action? And does intentional action presuppose second-order thought? Could she even be said to possess Theory of Mind?

These and many other recent cases exemplify the changing and ambivalent relationships we have with the diverse animals that live in our midst in the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene, which was introduced in 2000 by chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stroemer, refers to the current age, in which human activities are so omnipresent that humanity itself has developed into a global geophysical force, at least as influential as natural forces. Even though the term would suggest otherwise, nonhuman animals in fact play an important role in the Anthropocene, not only as victims of our treatment, but also as actors in their own right. Some—in particular farm animals—unwittingly are driving forces of the Anthropocene, others are forced to respond to new environmental conditions. Think of animals who due to climate change can no longer survive in their native habitats or wild animals that in response to habitat loss and fragmentation are forced to live in urban areas. Other types of animals in our midst are (extreme breeds of) companion and sports animals, previously domesticated animals that are becoming de-domesticated, exotic and invasive species, animal species faced with extinction, and vice versa, extinct animals faced with resurrection. We witness changing relationships between these different groups of non-human animals and between human and non-human animals.” Our integration with many of these animals has become stronger, leading to problems such as zoonotic diseases, invasions of exotic species, and human-wildlife conflicts. At the same time, our knowledge about animals and their (mental) capacities is increasing and this raises new questions about our treatment of them and about the possibilities to create shared life worlds with animals.

Shttps://www.homesluxury.net/goose-kept-pecking-cop-until-he-decided-to-follow-her-she-leadhim-to-her-trapped-baby/?fbclid=Iw AROofz3B70INuAezBAhzQKle3sRXx3Zjran5 1 3NO8rPIS7 Pvydxx4¢31f-0.

For simplicity’s sake we will mostly refer to non-human animals as animals and human animals as humans in this chapter.

1.2 Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene

In the Anthropocene we face a tension in our dealings with nonhuman animals. On the one hand current research shows that animals are capable of ‘self-willed action’ — in other words that they possess agency (Irvine 2004). Characteristics that used to be seen as human-specific have been discovered in certain other animal species, including language use, morality, a sense of justice, altruism, complicated hierarchies, and cognition (Meijer 2019; Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Brosnan and de Waal 2012; O’ Neill and Hastings 2007; Wasserman and Zentall 2012). This calls into question the sharp division between human and animal minds on which human exceptionalism rests—the view that humans are essentially (rather than just in degree) different from and superior to other animals (De Waal 2016; Lurz 2009; Gruen 2011). On the other hand, despite this heightened awareness of animals and their capacities, animals are increasingly limited in their agency. So even though the Anthropocene has shaped the knowledge and technology for us to realize that animals have more agency than has been assumed, ironically it is also an epoch where animal agency is increasingly curtailed. In the Anthropocene, most (vertebrate) animals live in captivity as livestock or companion animals, where humans control their movements and genetic makeup. Domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, and chickens often live in ‘simple, predictable and monotonous environments’, where they are hardly challenged and their agency is not stimulated (Spinka and Wemelsfelder 2011, 27). In the wild, through habitat loss and fragmentation, urban sprawl, and climate change, animal agency is also curtailed, as animals have less room to maneuver in environments suitable to their species. Due to the detrimental impact of livestock production on the environment, humans are forced to seek alternative means of producing proteins, such as cultured meat. In the Anthropocene, technology increasingly mediates our interactions with animals—from milking robots to gene editing and cloning—and this also has implications for the human-animal relationship and for animals’ capability to exert their agency.

Whereas human-nature relationships figure prominently in discussions about the Anthropocene (Rolston 2012), human-animal relationships remain underdeveloped (except for Bovenkerk and Keulartz 2016; Tønnessen et al. 2016). Animal ethicists have criticized human exceptionalism (Gruen 2011), but have not yet formulated a coherent response to the specific and urgent challenges of this new epoch. The animal ethics field arose as a response to ill treatment of farm and laboratory animals, explaining its focus on individual domesticated animals, overlooking dilemmas occurring on the level of species (Bovenkerk 2016). Traditional animal ethicists (Singer 1975; Regan 1983) perceived animals as passive victims of our treatment, rather than active agents with whom we need to negotiate our common lifeworld. These theories have insufficiently thought through what it means for human-animal relationships when we take animal agency more seriously. Moreover, they could not have anticipated the variety of human-animal relationships and corresponding challenges we would be facing in this new epoch.

In this edited volume, we have brought together authors from a range of disciplines—philosophy and ethics, ecology, communication science, linguistics, cultural geography, animal welfare science, history and law—to shed light on the changing human-animal relationships in the Anthropocene. The reader will encounter starving polar bears, greeting cows, stray cats, pedigree dogs, backyard rats, laughing chimps and roaming wolves. The question throughout is how we can give shape to new relationships with these animals. Can we find consolation in philosophy when confronted with discomforting wildlife? How do we know what is the right dog to take into our homes? Should we feed polar bears who are victim to changing climatic conditions? How can we conserve the biodiversity of animal species? Should we resurrect extinct species? These and many other questions need to be raised in our efforts to create new meaningful relationships with the animals in our midst.

This volume is divided into five parts: animal agents, domesticated animals, urban animals, wild animals, and animal artefacts. Each part is followed by a commentary. With this division we base ourselves in part on the categories of animals proposed by influential animal philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. In Zoopolis (2011) they plead for a political turn in animal ethics and suggest that we grant different types of political rights to three groups of animals: domesticated, liminal, and wild animals. All animals have universal rights, such as the right not to be killed or unnecessarily harmed, but different groups of animals have differentiated additional rights. Domesticated animals are full members of our political communities and should be treated as such. We have more specific duties towards them than towards for example wild animals, because they are already part of our community; we have made decisions about the way they live and even about whether or not they live and about what their genetic composition is. They work alongside humans and fulfil important functions in our societies. According to Donaldson and Kymlicka, justice requires that we grant them citizenship rights. In their view, animals that have not been domesticated, but that live among humans, such as urban wildlife, should be termed ‘liminal animals’. Think of the squirrels in our parks and the rats in our backyards. We are witnessing an increasing ‘liminalisation’ of wild animals, raising the question of whether this might be a precursor to their elimination (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2016, 226). In order to prevent their elimination, we will need to develop a way of cohabitation with them that protects their basic rights but that also gives us opportunities to combat the nuisance they are sometimes causing. We owe these animals similar duties as we owe to tourists who are visiting our country; they have residency without citizenship rights and are so-called denizens. Finally, wild animals have an interest in being able to live their lives as unimpeded by human interference as possible. Justice between human communities and wild animal communities could be compared to justice between countries. Wild animals should be granted sovereignty rights; the right to autonomy over their own territories. Many of the chapters in this book relate to Donaldson and Kymlicka’s views in one way or another. For example, in his search for meaningful co-existence with wolves in the Netherlands, Martin Drenthen draws on their model and argues that we should see wolves as members of a sovereign community. Eva Meijer uses the concept of liminal animals to analyse the question of how we should deal with stray cats in the city. Susan Ophorst and

Bernice Bovenkerk discuss what the notion of citizenship rights for dogs tells us about what the right choice is when obtaining a dog.

In the remainder of this introduction, we will sketch the terrain in more detail. What impacts do Anthropocene conditions such as climate change and biodiversity loss have on animals? What different groups of animals are impacted and in what ways? We will illustrate these developments by zooming in on one country where many problems, such as biodiversity loss and landscape degradation, converge, the Netherlands.

1.3 The Netherlands as Mirror of Biodiversity Problems

This is by no means an arbitrary choice. In the Netherlands only about 15% of the original biodiversity remains. This means that the loss of biodiversity is considerably greater than elsewhere in Europe and the world.

Almost two-thirds of the Dutch territory is used for agriculture, and two-thirds of that is used for cattle breeding. The Dutch landscape is therefore increasingly dominated by monocultures of drained rye-grass, a uniform green billiard cloth that has taken the place of flowery meadows full of birds. Landscape degradation is not only caused by intensive livestock farming, but also by the enormous number of distribution centers. The Netherlands is a distribution country par excellence. At the beginning of 2017, the country had 1760 distribution centers with a total surface area of 28 million square meters. This proliferation of distribution centers is accompanied by a substantial expansion of the transport infrastructure, making the Netherlands the most fragmented region in the whole of Europe, with disastrous consequences for the diversity of species in the Netherlands. !°

Finally, there is a danger that the remaining natural landscape will be completely transformed into a recreational landscape. As a result of the increase in prosperity and mobility and the decline in leisure time, we are living in what sociologists have termed an “experience society’. The more nature becomes an attraction, complete with mountain bike routes, pancake restaurants, souvenir shops, campsites and holiday homes, the more biodiversity will be lost.

The Netherlands, then, scores very poorly on all kinds of nature rankings. By taking a closer look at this country, one gets a sharper picture of the biodiversity problems that people and animals elsewhere also have to contend with. This is done in this introduction, in which a group portrait is sketched of the many species of animals currently found in the Netherlands, whereby we sometimes make trips to other parts of the world.

10A study from 2016 calculated that half of the European territory is situated within the critical distance of 1.5 km from (rail) roads. Within this area, the number of birds decreases by a quarter and the number of mammals even halves. In the Netherlands, where the distance to transport infrastructure is much smaller than the European average, we have to expect a much greater loss of biodiversity (Torres et al. 2016).

1.3.1 The Recovery of Wildlife

We start this group portrait with a phenomenon that gives rise to some optimism. There is currently a spectacular comeback of wildlife, not only in Europe, but also in North America. The conditions for the recovery of wild populations were created by the large-scale reforestation and revegetation that took place more or less simultaneously on both continents as a result of rural depopulation. The European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), established in 1962, has led to a far-reaching intensification of agriculture and the associated depopulation of low-productive farmland, particularly in mountain areas. Thus, while intensive agriculture leads to an impoverishment of the landscape and species diversity, it has ironically led to the return of wild animals at the same time. Another important driving force behind the return of wild populations was the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1970s, which created support for European legislation for the protection of species and habitats. !!

As aresult of these changes in agricultural and nature policy, the number of large grazers increased sharply. This was a prerequisite for the recovery of the populations of large predators, which were almost completely extinct in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A recent study, based on data from all European countries (with the exception of Russia and Belarus) for the period 2012-2016, comes to the following estimate: wolves are the most abundant with 17,000 individuals; second is the brown bear with between 15,000 and 16,000 individuals; next is the lynx with between 8000 and 9000 individuals; last is the wolverine with between 1000 and 1250 individuals (Linnell and Cretois 2018).

Also in the Netherlands many species have returned or have recovered considerably. Some species have returned spontaneously, such as the eagle owl, the crane, the white-tailed eagle and the wild cat, and also the wolf has settled here by now (see also the chapters by Jansman and by Drenthen in this Volume). Other species have been helped by reintroduction, such as the raven, the stork, the beaver, the otter, the badger, and quite recently, the bison.

1.3.2 Exotic Species and Climate Refugees

There is another category of wild animals that is increasingly making its presence felt in the Netherlands. These are not native species that return here after a long absence, but exotic species, that do not originally belong here, such as the muskrat, the collar parakeet and Japanese knotweed. In fact, migrating plants and animals are nothing new, but since globalization has taken off, more plants and animals have turned into ‘globetrotters’ than ever before. As traffic and transport, trade and tourism grow, the significance of boundaries is diminishing, and at the same time vulnerability to

11 Such as the 1982 Berne Convention of the Council of Europe and the 1979 and 1992 Birds and Habitats Directives of the European Union respectively.

the massive arrival of exotic species is increasing enormously everywhere. In this context, there is even talk of a ‘mass migration’.

The number of registered exotic species in the Netherlands is almost 2400, an extremely conservative estimate because we do not have sufficient information for a number of species groups. With this high figure, the Netherlands is European champion of exotic species, and has the dubious honour of even being among the world’s top. This is the ecological downside of international trade and the transit of goods and raw materials to the European hinterland (Leuven 2017).

Apart from globalisation, there is another important cause for the influx of exotic species, namely climate change. While cold-loving species migrate northwards, heatloving species come our way from the south. Among these newcomers are a number of pest species that can cause a lot of nuisance and also serious public health problems. One of these species that made the headlines in the spring of 2019 is the oak processionary caterpillar. This moth caterpillar, whose numbers has tripled in the Netherlands since 2018, causes complaints such as itching, rash, and irritation to the eyes or respiratory tract. The pine processionary caterpillar, which has even more burning hairs than the oak processionary caterpillar, has already moved into the Belgian Ardennes. Other species that threaten to settle here are the Asian Tiger Mosquito, which can transmit tropical diseases such as chikunguna, dengue and zika, and the Hyalomatick, a giant tick that can transmit the dangerous Crimean Congovirus.

While thermophilic species are advancing, cold-loving species are increasingly getting into trouble. This is especially true for plants that can only move very slowly to colder areas because they can only move by spreading their seeds. It also applies to cold-blooded animals, such as insects, fish, reptiles and amphibians, whose body temperature depends on the ambient temperature and who are therefore very sensitive to climate change. These animals all too often encounter obstacles that are difficult to overcome in the form of natural barriers, such as mountains and rivers, or in the form of infrastructural works, such as motorways, railways and viaducts. In order to save these animals from extinction, wildlife managers sometimes resort to what is known as assisted migration or assisted colonisation: the deliberate relocation of these ‘climate refugees’ to new habitats that they cannot reach on their own (see Larson and Barr 2016).

1.3.3 The Sixth Mass Extinction

All in all, a lot of wild animals, spontaneously or otherwise, have returned to the Netherlands or emigrated here. But let’s not get too excited yet: in the Anthropocene, the age of humans, we are confronted with a worldwide extinction wave. We must therefore assess the recent increase in wild populations in the light of dramatic historical declines: most of the populations of species in the process of comeback are still far from reaching a genetically and demographically sustainable size, while many species are still declining in size. In fact, we are in the midst of a new mass extinction. Mass extinction occurs when the earth loses more than three-quarters of its species. This has only happened five times in the course of Earth’s history, the last time 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the earth. Experts estimate that the current rate of species extinction is 100—1000 times higher than the so-called background extinction rate.

In order to be able to assess the situation properly, we need to pay attention not only to the extinction of species but also to the decline in the number and size of populations. WWF’s latest Living Planet Report (2018) shows that the size of vertebrate populations fell by no less than 60% between 1970 and 2014.1? When we realise that population extinction should be seen as a prelude to species extinction, it becomes clear that “the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most” (Ceballos et al. 2017).

When we now turn our gaze to Dutch nature, we see a rather dramatic picture. This is evident from the Living Planet Report: Nature in the Netherlands, a report published by WWF at the end of 2015, in collaboration with a large number of nature organisations. According to the report, animal populations in nature reserves have declined by an average of 30% since 1990. The most recent State of Nature in the EU, a report published by the European Environment Agency in 2015, shows that the Netherlands, with no less than 96% of nature areas in an unfavourable condition, is at the very bottom of the list of all 26 EU member states.

1.3.4 Rewilding and De-extinction

It is a widespread misunderstanding that the extinction crisis only began during the era of the great discoveries, from the end of the fifteenth century until the eighteenth century. This crisis began as early as the transition from Pleistocene to Holocene, around the end of the last Ice Age, some 11,000 years ago. The main victims were the megafauna species, a group of mammals considerably larger than the current mammals, such as mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, ground sloths, cave bears, giant wolves and giant deer. !°