Hammers and Whales

At the time I was listening to the audiobook, I wasn't sure when Brooke Bessesen had written her book Vaquita: Science, Politics, and Crime in the Sea of Cortez.  As such, I wasn't sure if it was recent enough to include the saga of the effort to bring vaquita into human care.  Unfortunately for me, it was, which meant, after hearing the author express hope that this last ditch Hail Mary effort might help save the little porpoise, I got to experience the devastation alongside her (even though I knew it was coming) of its failure.

It was a risky proposition from the start.  Dolphins are kept, albeit controversially, at many institutions around the world, and we know a lot of their husbandry and management in a captive setting.  Porpoises are kept much, much less frequently, and it seems that they're shier, more secretive manner makes them much more easily stressed than the bolder, more confident dolphins.  Perhaps if the project had been attempted decades earlier when there were more vaquitas, a little "trial and error" would have been permissible.  Some animals likely would have been lost, but if a formula for successfully managing the species was developed, it would have resulted in better success before they got into the single digits...

Or perhaps not.  Maybe, best intentions aside (and I'm certainly not faulting anyone who was willing to think outside the box to save this species, because nothing else seemed to be working), captive management just wasn't going to work for vaquitas.

The detractors of zoos and aquariums can be far too dismissive of the role that we can (and do) play in conservation of endangered species - and I don't think there's an endangered species alive that we can't contribute to the conservation of.  What that contribution is varies from species to species, though.  Housing animals and breeding them under human care is what we're best at, so it makes sense that it becomes our go-to solution for every problem.  But captive breeding is just a tool for conservation.  In some situations, it's the best, most valuable tool.  For others, it can be part of the solution.  And for others, it might not work at all... might even make the problem worse.

But you know what they say... when you hold a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Again, I don't for a second blame or fault the folks who thought that capture and removal from the wild was a worthwhile idea to pursue for the vaquita.  One of the best reasons to try removing animals from the wild is if it's proving impossible to adequately protect the animals in their natural habitat (which, also, is no slight against all of the folks who were working so hard to do just that in the Sea of Cortez, sometimes putting themselves in harms' way to protect the porpoises).  If someone hadn't tried to capture vaquitas, and they'd gone extinct (as they still seem likely to do), we might be cursing ourselves for not having tried to capture any.  

As that ever-quotable philosopher, Dwight Schrute from The Office, says, "Not everything's a lesson...  Sometimes you just fail."  Although as long as there are still a few vaquita breaking the surface of the Sea of Cortez, I suppose we haven't failed yet.