[tt] NYT: (biobigotry) Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans

[Premise Checker]

This is a new concept to me, biobigotry.

Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/science/29angi.html

Basics
By NATALIE ANGIER

The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion
delicately seasoned with indignation. Pecking at my bird feeder were
two brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what
that meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be
slipping her eggs into some other birds' nest, with the expectation
that the naïve hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking,
ravenous young at the neglect and even death of their own.

Hey, you parasites, get your beaks off my seed, I thought angrily.
That feeder is for the good birds, the birds that I like -- the
cardinals, the nuthatches, the black-capped chickadees, the tufted
titmice, the woodpeckers, the goldfinches. It's for the hard-working
birds with enough moral fiber to rear their own families and look
photogenic besides. It's not meant for sneaky freeloaders like you.
I rapped on the window sharply but the birds didn't budge, and as I
stood there wondering whether I should run out and scare them away,
their beaks seemed to thicken, their eyes blacken, and I could swear
they were cackling, "Tippi Hedren must go."

In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the
persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by
those species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals,
plants and other life forms that one finds offensive.

It was not my first episode of the disorder, and evidently I don't
suffer alone. "Throughout history there have been vilified animals
and totemic animals," said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist
at the Wildlife Conservation Society. "There are the animals you
don't like and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the
animals whose attributes you absolutely want to own," to be a tiger,
a bear, lupine leader of the pack.

Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can
hurt or sicken us, like yellow jackets, mosquitoes or poison ivy, or
to fend off traditional household pests like mice and roaches.
Rather, it is the dislike we direct toward creatures that live
outdoors and generally mind their own business, but that behave in
ways we find rude, irritating, selfish or contemptible. The
squirrels are gluttons, the crows are schoolyard bullies, the house
sparrows are boring and look like mice when they skitter along the
ground. How we love those noble falcons and eagles that lately have
blessed us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges. How we beg
them to feast freely on the pigeons and starlings that curse us by
nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges.

Sometimes our biobigotry is merely attitudinal. In the course of an
interview about spotted hyenas, for example, a researcher at the
University of California, Berkeley, scornfully referred to the
wildebeest that the hyenas frequently prey on as "wildeburgers."
Why? Because once a wildebeest has been caught, said the scientist,
it just stands there with cowlike passivity and allows itself to be
torn apart. Compare that with a zebra, the researcher said, which
will go down fighting and kicking and cracking the predator's jaw if
it can.

"Oh, we're all of us prone to a massive over-interpretation of the
things that we see," said Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology
and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and author of "Moral
Minds." "I distinctly remember, when I first went to Amboseli
National Park to study vervet monkeys, how quickly I developed
strong feelings about the personalities of the monkeys -- here were
the great and brave ones, there were the lame ones that hid in the
bushes and acted pathetic."

At other times, we take steps to favor our local heroes or thwart
our chosen goats, whose greatest sin, as a rule, is being
exceptionally good at their game. We try to squirrel-proof our bird
feeders, yank weeds from our flower beds, call Animal Control, and
when all else fails, reach for our guns. Stephen C. Sautner of the
Wildlife Conservation Society cited the case of a friend and avid
birder who has a colony of purple martins on his property. "He
spends much of his time shooting and trapping starlings and English
sparrows," said Mr. Sautner, "both of which he describes as
`evil.' "

We always have a story to justify our most aggressive attempts at
unwanted-animal control. The animal is an invasive species like the
European starling, and it doesn't belong here. Or it's a native
species like the cowbird but its range has been unnaturally extended
through deforestation. Or it likes our garbage and our raggedy parks
and thus has an unfair advantage over fussier creatures. Whatever
the self-exculpatory particulars, said Marc Bekoff, author of "The
Emotional Lives of Animals" and emeritus professor of biology at the
University of Colorado, "I see it as a double cross that we create a
situation where cowbirds spread, or red foxes eat endangered birds,
and then we decide, well, now we've got to go out and kill the
cowbirds and the foxes."

Our proneness to biobigotry, experts said, arises from several
salient human traits. For one, we are equipped with an often
overactive theory of mind -- the conviction that those around you
have their own minds, goals and desires, and that it might behoove
you to anticipate what they'll do next. We spin elaborate narratives
out of the slenderest of observational threads: Look, the blue jay
is trying to dislodge the cowbird from the feeder. Could the jay
know the cowbird is a nest parasite and be trying to drum it out of
town? "We interpret animal behaviors through a human lens and human
morality," said Mr. Fraser, the conservation psychologist.

Related to the human impulse to see ourselves in nature is the
persistent sense that nature belongs to us, and that we have the
right and the means to control it. "In the past, when we talked
about exploiting nature, that was seen as a good thing," Mr. Fraser
said. "Now we realize that that attitude is counterproductive to
human success."

Nowhere is our sense of droit du roi over nature more manifest than
in our paradoxical attitudes toward farm animals. On the one hand,
they're the beloved figures of our earliest childhood. On the other
hand, many of our most pejorative comparisons were born in the
barnyard -- you lazy pig, you ugly cow, you chicken, what a bunch of
sheep.

Conservation groups, which keep track of public attitudes toward
animals, acknowledge that they are ever on the lookout for the next
Animal Idol -- an ecologically important creature that also happens
to be large, showy, charismatic and likable. If you have two
important birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr.
Fraser, one a hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can
vocalize like a human, the other a storm petrel that is brown,
squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess which face ends up
on the next fund-raising calendar.

Not that public attitudes can't be changed. Bats, for example, were
long considered vermin, but nowadays, in the wake of the wildly
popular children's book "Stella Luna," they've taken on a magical
air, as the mosquito-eating Tinkerbells that if you're lucky will
soon take up residence near you. Until then, step away from that bat
house, sparrow. Don't make me shoot.