Not yeti — at least, not yet.

January 31, 2018

I shared an elevator not so long ago with Matt Moneymaker. In a Beverly Hills hotel. He saw my TV Critics Association name badge, looked at me quizzically and said, “Didn’t you write about me?”

Moneymaker, the Finding Bigfoot guy, had seen something I had written at the time for the local paper in Vancouver — the wilderness surrounding Vancouver in southwestern BC is Bigfoot country, or said to be, at any rate — and this was his way of saying he hadn’t appreciated my tone in the article. That tone was not so much skeptical as, well . . . satirical. I saw his lifelong ambition — well, nine seasons and counting of Finding Bigfoot — as parody, and had decided that while Finding Bigfoot was rousingly good TV, it was not exactly good science.

I thought about Moneymaker when I came across a recent heading in The Guardian: “DNA sampling exposes nine ‘yeti specimens’ as eight bears and a dog.”

“Huge, ape-like and hairy,” the Guardian science correspondent Nicola Davis wrote, “the yeti has roamed its way into legend, tantalizing explorers, mountaineers and locals with curious footprints and fleeting appearances. Now researches say the elusive inhabitant of the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau has been unmasked.”

It turned out that scientists studying nine DNA samples of hair and teeth, ostensibly from yetis, found the samples belonged to bears. One sample, though, proved to be different — the exception that proves the rule? — and not just because it had been taken from a stuffed yeti, as opposed to a yeti that had been hit by a car on the Alaska Highway or shot by a fat dentist from Minnesota.

The sample in question turned out to be a genetic mélange consisting of the hair of a bear and the teeth of a dog. Bear bites dog, or dog bites bear: take your pick.

Either way, the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the yeti was decidedly a ‘no.’

Darn scientists. Ruining everything with their, ahem, facts.

“It demonstrates that modern science can . . . try and tackle some of these mysteries and unsolved questions we have,” spoilsport-in-chief Dr. Charlotte Lindqvist told The Guardian, Lindqvist, a trained biologist, specializes in bear genomics and was co-author of the study at State University of New York at Buffalo, a public research university formerly known as the University of Buffalo. SUNY Buffalo counts NASA astronauts Ellen Baker and Gregory Jarvis and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer among its alumni, and is the largest public university in the state of New York. The school’s motto is Mens sana in corpore sano — “Sound Mind in a Sound Body” — and academic standards are high. We’re not talking about Trump University here, so any research findings have to be taken seriously.

Dr. Lindqvist herself studied at the University of Denmark in Copenhagen and conducted her postdoctoral research at University of Oslo, Norway, specializing in “speciation processes, polyploidy and hybridization in animals and plants, particularly marine mammals.” Her current projects include the study of polar bear evolution — critically important now, considering the effects of climate change on Arctic polar bear populations — and microbiata in marine mammals.

It seems the yeti of myth and mountain lore owes more to the Tibetan and Himalayan brown bear, genetically speaking, than the Abominable Snowman first hinted at in mountaineer B.H. Hodgson’s account of journeying through northern Nepal in 1832, as published at the time in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

Closer to home, there have always been suspicions that Bigfoot is a distant cousin of the yeti, in the same way the North American grizzly is a distant cousin of the Himalayan brown bear.

The skeptics may be a dime-a-dozen, but Moneymaker is having none of it. Skepticism, that is.

“Actually there’s every kind of evidence that these things exist, except bones, except a carcass,” he told TV critics in Los Angeles. “There’s sound recordings, there’s videos, there’s photographs, there’s footprint casts, there’s hairs. There’s everything except a carcass. And they’re very rare. They’re not everywhere. And animals, when they die out in the woods, usually they’re in places where people aren’t going to stumble across them.”

Moneymaker is a real name, by the way. Or so he says.

“It’s actually a translation of the last name ‘Geldmacher,’ which is very common in Germany. It was translated in 1789. It means coinmaker in the Middle Ages.”

Meanwhile, back in the world of science, Lindqvist’s findings may have temporarily dashed cold water on a tantalizing “what if” tale, but they’ve provided plenty of fodder in social media chat rooms.

Hikers in Tibet and the Himalayas need not fear the monstrous yeti, goes one salient piece of advice, but they’d l better carry bear spray if they do.

As for Finding Bigfoot — in which the lads search far and wide, but never actually catch up to one — one skeptic on YouTube asked, somewhat pointedly, “How come everybody sees a Bigfoot except them?”

“Shouldn’t they at least have found a dead one?” another doubter wanted to know.

“We asked the hosts of Finding Bigfoot why it’s taking them so damn long,” the science-technology website Gizmodo said of Moneymaker and Bigfoot “evidence analyst” Cliff Barackman, back in 2016, when Bigfoot was in its eighth season.

That answer should be self-evident, one doubter groused on the site’s message board.

How is this show still alive, another demanded to know.

Well, that part’s easy.

If Bigfoot — or the yeti for that matter — doesn’t exist in real life, surely the show can last forever.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/10/travelbooks.samwollaston

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/17/yeti-dna-ancient-polar-bear-scientists

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/no-joke-b-c-minister-laughs-off-lawsuit-claiming-proof-of-bigfoot-1.3656876

“Hell no. This war is ON.” From the front lines in the rhino wars.

June 18, 2017

There are two kinds of people who stand up for the world’s critically endangered animals, such as rhinos: Those who talk, and those who do.

“Doing” is preferable — no news flash there — but direct action has a way of provoking controversy, even at the best of times.

And not much is more controversial these days than the use of heavily armed guards, many of them U.S. army veterans recently emerged from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the bush war against poachers in private game reserves in South Africa, and a handful of other countries.

The public controversy has simmered since 2013, when an Animal Planet docuseries Battleground: Rhino Wars — the Discovery Communications-owned cable channel’sfollow-up to its popular Whale Wars series — introduced ordinary TV viewers to the concept of mercenaries in the service of wildlife conservation.

An expansive exposé in the UK Guardian newspaper last month briefly touched on the somewhat uncomfortable optics — uncomfortable to some, anyway, especially in post-apartheid South Africa — of heavily armed outsiders, mostly white, imported to combat the problem of poaching by local, mainly black Africans.

Like much of The Guardian’s journalism, the exposé — by veteran Guardian Africa correspondent Jason Burke — weighed different points-of-view, and raised issues the casual observer might not have realized. One unexpected factor, for example, is the reality that many of the U.S. army veterans involved are recovering emotionally and physically from post-traumatic stress. By fighting for a cause they believe in, by putting their lives on the line — once again, but this time for critically endangered animals — many of these veterans see the initiative as a way to ease back into civilian life after weeks, months and even years of intensive firefights in Afghanistan.

“Green militarization,” as it’s called, has its critics. The scale of the crisis facing Africa’s rhinos is clear to almost everyone, though, especially in a world where rhino horn, which is made primarily of keratin — the same substance as fingernails — is now worth $65,000 USD per kilo on the black market, according to recent conservative estimates.

In 2007, a mere 10 years ago, no more than a dozen rhinos were poached in South Africa. In 2015 alone, according to The Guardian, that number jumped to 1,200.

Given that a rhino’s gestation period is 16 months, and given that a rhino has just one baby at birth, one doesn’t need to be a mathematician to see that the numbers are untenable.

South Africa is critical to the species’ survival because the country is home to 80% of the world’s surviving wild rhinos.

At the time Battleground: Rhino Wars debuted on U.S. television, Animal Planet president and general manager Marjorie Kaplan told an assembled group of reporters and TV critics in Pasadena, Calif. that more than 100 African park rangers were killed the previous year while trying to protect the continent’s wildlife reserves.

“Make no mistake, this is war,” Kaplan told the assembled reporters. “The men and women protecting rhinos on the ground in South Africa are outgunned and outmanned. This is not about threatened habitat. This is not about human encroachment. This is pure greed, and pure ignorance. There is absolutely no justification for these creatures to be dying. The people who are risking their lives to to protect them are heroes.”

Former US Navy SEAL Craig “Sawman” Sawyer, one of the original team leaders in the anti-poaching initiative and one of the leading voices behind Animal Planet’s Rhino Wars, said the poaching problem has many faces. It isn’t just about impoverished locals trying to make a living.

“It’s a mix,” Sawyer said. “It’s the locals. It’s an international problem. This is major money, a multibillion-dollar business going on. With each rhino horn being worth up to half a million dollars, it’s easy to see the lure there. So what we have to do is change the incentive. We need to come up with a multifaceted approach to address the problem. Because this species is on the brink of extinction. They’ve been around for 50 million years, and in the past 50 years alone, man has almost completely wiped them out. We’re at the redline crisis at this point.”

A number of poachers caught in the Rhino Wars net said they wanted to get out of the criminal life, but had a hard time finding jobs. Some of those same ex-poachers have since been hired by ranchers to help protect the dwindling rhino herds, as they have intimate, first-hand knowledge of how poaching is done and the most effective way to prevent it.

Sawyer said action beats words every time.

“In our role here, we have an opportunity to directly address the physical problem of poaching,” he said. “With our backgrounds, coming from the special operations community, that’s what we can contribute. Our fight is travelling halfway around the globe and risking our lives personally to join the South Africans in their fight to save not only a national resource but a global resource. We’re all losing our rhino, okay? We’re over there fighting this fight to try to save the rhino and also raise awareness. If we take it to them, maybe we can help spread the word. Maybe we can raise global awareness and bring some pressure against this threat to the rhino, and actually maybe even save the species.”

Outfits such as the US-based nonprofit organization Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife (Vetpaw) serve a two-fold purpose: to draw a line in the sand against the wholesale slaughter of rhinos, and to help former combat veterans in the US find a renewed purpose in life. The Guardian noted that many former servicemen suffer high levels of unemployment and mental illness — PTSD by any other name. Ex-servicemen often struggle to reclaim the sense of brotherhood they got from combat. Despite millions of dollars spent on training — billions of dollars, even — the US government doesn’t use them again. Helping protect wildlife affords them a renewed sense of meaning and self-worth.

Vetpaw founder and squad leader Ryan Tate, a former US Marine, told The Guardian that he selected combat veterans precisely because they are disciplined enough, experienced, battle-hardened and well trained enough not to use lethal force unless absolutely necessary. Poachers are apprehended in the act, and then turned over to local police. Alive.

Another Vetpaw commando, a British-born veteran who served 15 years in the US elite special forces until last year, told The Guardian that the rhino wars are textbook counterinsurgency — about winning hearts and minds on the ground, rather than actual firefights.

“Let’s not sugarcoat it,” Sawyer said, back when Rhino Wars first aired on US television. “We’ve got hardcore crime syndicates coming in from Mozambique, armed with AK-47s, not only slaughtering an entire species but anyone who gets in their way. More than 100 rangers have been killed trying to protect the rhino, whether they were armed or not. This war is on. And we can either sit back and go, ‘Isn’t that unfortunate? We don’t have the heart to deal with it.’ Or we can pick up arms and go and face the enemy and tell them, ‘Hell, no.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/30/us-army-veterans-find-peace-protecting-rhinos-poaching-south-africa

Murky waters: It’s whaling season. Again.

January 23, 2017

Why is Japan still whaling in the Southern Ocean? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. The answer is: because they can, despite a 2014 ruling by the toothless International Court of Justice that the then newly modified Japanese whaling program was illegal. Japan’s original whaling program claimed some 6,800 whales over an 18-year period, ostensibly for “scientific research.” Japan rewrote and resubmitted its program in 2014; the International Court rejected it, and Japan ignored the court’s ruling.

It’s the Antarctic summer right now, and once again the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is doing its best to harrass, interfere and do what little it can to prevent the whale slaughter — no thanks to Australia and New Zealand, who, if you choose to believe Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson on his Facebook page, have chosen to stand by while the Japanese whaling fleet sails unimpeded through the southern nations’ territorial waters.

None of this is new, of course. Anyone who has seen even a few minutes of Animal Planet’s Whale Wars program knows the drill by now: the ships Nisshin Maru, Ocean Warrior and Steve Irwin have practically become household names.

What is new this time is that the bottom may be about to fall out of the whale-meat market in Japan and other Asian countries. That’s because — cue irony klaxon — the toxins in whale meat have now reached a point where the meat may no longer pass inspection in many countrues. Iceland’s largest whaling fleet did not leave port this past summer because the market has dried up.

Commercial whaling was banned in 1986 — some 30 years ago — but Japan’s whalers continue to exploit a loophole that allows whaling for scientific research purposes. (If you’re wondering why countries like Iceland, Norway and the Faroe Islands are still whaling, that’s because another loophole allows a certain amount of whaling for indigenous subsistence. Mind you, if toxicity levels are so high that many people won't eat whale meat, the whole subsistence argument becomes moot.)

Interestingly, the whalers of the mid-19th century kept copious notes — you might even say “research” — of their activities and whale behaviour, as evidenced by the historical records at whaling.oldweather.org.

For now, the whale wars go on — though now it’s as much a PR war as anything else. Earlier this month, in a confrontation with the makings of an international incident, Sea Shepherd spotted — and photographed — a Japanese ship with a dead whale on board, in violation of international law.

Photos taken from a helicopter show the crew of the ship in question, the Nisshin Maru, trying to cover up a dead minke whale with a blue tarp as the whirlybird flies overhead.

CNN reported that the whaling division of Japan’s official Fishery Agency was withholding comment until it received a report of its own from the Nisshin Maru. So far, no word.

Japan inssts it’s allowed to cull roughly 330 Antarctic minke whales a year as part of a research program to “study the best methods of managing minke populations.”

Australia has a keen stake in this. Australia’s Ministry for the Environment and Energy released a statement just days after the Sea Shepherd photos were made public expressing “deep disappointment” at Japan’s decision to return to the Southern Ocean to undertake so-called scientific whaling.

“Australia is opposed to all forms of commercial and so-called ‘scientific’ whaling,” the statement read in part. “It is not necessary to kill whales in order to study them.”

Australia has established a whale sanctuary of its own. The sanctuary covers Australia’s Excclusive Economic Zone, which extends 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) from the country’s coast.

As Watson has pointed out on his Facebook page, though, enforcement is everything. Sea Shepherd can’t be expected to save the whales on its own.

Then again, if the bottom falls out of the market, it will no longer be financially feasible for Japan, Iceland — or anyone — to hunt whales, for meat, sport or any other reason. We can hope.