To kill two birds with one stone

GUEST POST: What is the economic value of wildlife to humankind?

In the 1870s-1930s, a global movement emerged that set out to ascertain the economic value of wildlife to humans. Field scientists in the British, American, and German empires in particular, circulated thousands of questionnaires to farmers asking their opinion on which animals were ‘useful’, ‘harmful’, or ‘neutral’ to their crops. They dissected myriads of bird stomachs to examine whether they were eating insect pests like locusts or crops like wheat and corn. They spent thousands of hours in the field closely watching wildlife to figure out what they ate. They crunched numbers at their desks to calculate the pound or dollar value that each species was saving or costing farmers. These scientists were students of a largely forgotten science called economic zoology which attempted to categorise animals according to their utility or harmfulness to commerce and public health, and to advocate for the legal protection of animals deemed useful, and persecution of those damned as harmful. Its legacy – the framing of wild animals as providing services to the economy has been long lasting – and arguably continues to inform wildlife management and museum education to this day.

Although there were earlier antecedents, the first large scale study in economic zoology probably began in the 1880s in the USA, where a controversy had long been brewing over the rapidly increasing populations of English sparrows. These birds had been introduced into the country in the nineteenth century and found themselves in paradise. Urban sparrows feasted upon discarded remnants of meals, while their rural compatriots were spoilt for choice on countryside plantations. Between the 1870s-80s, various citizens began complaining that the animals were crop devourers, filthy nuisances in towns, and invaders that were aggressively mobbing and evicting indigenous birds. Others disagreed: these birds were consuming insects which attacked crops and gardens. To settle the controversy, the US Department of Agriculture commissioned a scientific investigation led by ornithologist Walter Barrows.

Between 1886 and 1889, Barrows dissected hundreds of sparrow stomachs to determine their contents and circulated 5,000 questionnaires to citizens in various parts of the USA asking for information on these birds. Barrows’s conclusion was damning. The little sparrows, in his assessment, were abominable pests who gorged themselves on grain, attacked indigenous birds that consumed noxious insects, and ate comparatively few of these insect pests themselves. He recommended that citizens shoot, poison, and trap any sparrows that they saw.

This report set the agenda for the growing discipline of ‘economic zoology’ in the Anglosphere and sparked concerted efforts around the globe to scientifically distinguish animal friends from foes. ‘Friends’ were defined as those animal ‘allies’ of humankind, who aided in the destruction of villainous ‘enemies’, such as locusts, flies, beetles, and rats. ‘Foes’ were those who ate and destroyed capital or endangered public health directly.

The first scientific studies into the status of animals as ‘friends’ or ‘foes’ of farmers in South Africa, were conducted in the Transvaal Colony in the first decade of the twentieth century by two naturalists: Jan Gunning, a medical doctor and founder of the Transvaal Museum (now Ditsong National Museum of Natural History), and Alwin Haagner, a self-trained ornithologist. These two saw themselves as modernisers, who wished to overturn folk biological beliefs amongst Afrikaner farmers. Both zoologists insisted that insectivorous and predatory birds such as storks, owls, wattled starlings, and others were of immense economic value to the farmer due to their diets of insects and rodents. In service of spreading these views, they installed educational information in their museum and published articles in the Transvaal Agricultural Journal. These works, however, were not widely read and the impact of economic zoology among farmers remained extremely limited until the 1920s, when Irish-born zoologist Frederick FitzSimons began an aggressive publicity campaign on behalf of South African birds.

A charismatic orator and writer, FitzSimons was a regular columnist for the popular farming periodical Farmers Weekly, which was read primarily by white scientific agronomists, but also had a smaller black readership. In his articles and his book, The Natural History of South Africa: Birds, FitzSimons pushed an ecological, economic, and race science-based argument in favour of protecting virtually all South African birdlife. Unlike his predecessors who had argued for the economic utility of select bird species like owls, FitzSimons argued that virtually all South African birds were providing a service for farmers in consuming insects and rodents that devoured their crops. FitzSimons framed his argument in terms of profits and labour, arguing that while most birds were performing a pro-bono service for farmers by eating insect pests, some would occasionally claim ‘payment’ in the forms of a few mouthfuls of grain, fruit, or vegetables. Such small ‘payments’, he argued were far cheaper than employing workers to kill pests on their farms. Persecuting these birds had catastrophic impacts. Drawing on evidence from the United States, FitzSimons claimed that a “single species of hawk saved the farmers of the Western States 175,000 dollars a year by destroying grasshoppers and field mice” and thus the “slaughter of our birds” was causing “our crops, our orchards, our pasturage, and our forests” to be “riddled and damaged by the insect armies”. Other birds, he argued, were protecting the public health of South Africa by consuming diseased rodents, mosquitoes, and flies.

FitzSimons’s views were controversial among both farmers writing letters to the Farmers Weekly and his scientist peers. Farmers pushed back against his views, arguing that while some bird species were indeed helpful, others devoured their crops and thus needed to be shot or poisoned. Austin Roberts, the most famous South African ornithologist of the twentieth century, dismissed FitzSimons as a pseudoscientist, spreading dangerous and false ideas. Nevertheless, FitzSimons’s campaign was highly effective, partially because he tapped into the prevailing fears of the “swart gevaar”, arguing that black South Africans were largely responsible for the decline of birdlife and thus were dangerous to white farmers’ profits. Anti-bird attitudes among some whites, he added, were a product of racial degeneration and posed a risk to both white society and to the evolution of the white races. In an article entitled “Birds and the Balance of Nature”, published in Farmers Weekly in August 1920, FitzSimons went as far as to suggest that bird destruction was causing physical deterioration of the structures of the brain:

If a man lives in the back kitchen of his brain, or, in other words, if he only uses the parts of his brain which he has in common with lower animals, those brain centres will grow increasingly strong, and the others correspondingly weak. He will then be a slave to his passions, a man devoid of moral and aesthetic sense. Such a man is lower than an animal. . . . [He] indulges his animal appetites so freely, and so frequently, that he loses control of them. They . . . master him.

Through presenting bird killing as a practice that was harming the economy of the Union of South Africa, its public health, and white racial evolution, FitzSimons succeeded in pressuring provincial authorities to protect numerous birds of prey and insectivorous birds, some of which had previously been considered vermin.

FitzSimons’s economic argument (aside from its racist undertones) has remained powerful in contemporary South African zoological education. When I visited the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria in 2018, similar arguments were still on display. In one, pictured below, a display case argued that for every chick a bird of prey kills, the animal devours an enormous number of rodent pests, tipping the balance of the scale in favour of raptors.

Ultimately, economic zoologists like FitzSimons tried to synchronise the human economy with what was then described as the ‘economy of nature’. This was an attempt to align nature’s order with agrarian capitalism by encouraging the population growth of species that ate pest animals and thus preserved the profits of white farmers. For economic zoologists and their politician and farmer allies, nature was defined according to its utility or harmfulness to human life: rodents and various diseased insects appearing at the very lowest end of the scale, and birds of prey at the top. In this vision of human and animal relations, the only wild animals allowed to live with humans free from persecution were those that provided free labour.

‘To kill two birds with one stone’ was first published on Our Long Walk. The images were created with Midjourney v6.