The idea of introducing elephants to Australia for the purpose of managing gamba grass is just as dumb as it sounds. It will never happen, but it's provoked a bunch of media attention for a day.
David Bowman doesn't think it will happen either, he admits he has raised it to be provocative. Don Driscoll at Australian National University has backed up Bowan saying ''we should consider introducing elephants and rhinoceros to Australia. However, this should be weighed up alongside alternative approaches for dealing with the problem.'' Why? The proposal is so silly, so preposterous, why spend even a second considering it? Yes, Australia has enormous problems with invasive species management. But that doesn't mean we should spend time and effort and credibility with the public discussing stuff that is plain silly. If Bowman and Driscoll want to spend their time on harebrained schemes and have a bit of fun in the media for a day, I guess that doesn't cause much of a problem. But I think scientists should consider that we don't have masses of built up credibility with the public that we can afford to burn so easily.
Invasive animal management is a serious issue and involves a lot of emotive issues like shooting, poisoning and killing. Land tenure debates flare up. One person's sheep-killing dog can be another person's ecosystem-service-providing dingo, literally depending what side of a fence the animal is on.
Bowman and Driscoll seem to be saying that the provocative elephant introduction debate can be used as a stalking horse to have a serious discussion about the role of dogs/dingoes to provide ecosystem services (that is controlling overabundant kangaroos; feral pigs and foxes). But I sniff a touch of academic elitism here and dumbing things down to use of the elephant introduction discussion is failing to recognise that the argument is not black and white.
Many graziers are already participating in community control of wild dogs and in the retention of predators to control other pests. Graziers are used to weighing up the difficult issues like the variation in the status of a pest like a feral goat depending on its market value. Many graziers are actively participating in excellent conservation projects with neighbours that might have different objectives to them like a national park or a private sanctuary owned by Bush Heritage or the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
Driscoll was quoted on the ABC website saying: ''Through the dogged research of Chris Johnson over the past few years, we now know that culling dingos in our rangelands is counter-productive. Culling dingos leads to an increase in foxes and an increase in kangaroos. More foxes mean fewer native Australian mammals, and more kangaroos mean less grass for cattle and sheep producers. Dingo culling is the elephant in the room in Australian rangelands. If dingo packs are allowed to establish, they keep away foxes to the benefit of bilbies and they control kangaroo numbers, to the benefit of native plant species and commercial productivity.'' But he hasn't added the very important words ''in some places and at some times''. It's absolutely not as simple as leaving dingoes alone and the system will fix itself up. Promoting such simple solutions fails to acknowledge the complexity of the situation. It sets up a conservation versus grazier debate that fails to acknowledge the role of many graziers in conservation.
We shouldn't allow the debate to become more polarised than it already is. Calls for leaving dingoes to manage our rangelands for us are every bit as unrealistic as calls to ''carpet bomb'' wild dogs with poison. Both fail the reality test and leave us nowhere to go.
By pushing the pendulum in the debate all the way to red hot crazy by proposing elephant introduction, the result will be ultimately be to the detriment of conservation. Haven't the ''carpet-bombers'' at the other end of the debate just been given a massive gift when land managers next sit down and nut out real solutions? I can imagine that as the discussion gets into managing dogs on a nil-tenure, geographical basis, the carpet-bombers will have a nice new bat to yield - ''aren't these the same wankers that wanted to bring in elephants?'' The article that provoked the debate also suggests the impact of events like the Black Saturday bushfires, which killed 173 people in February 2009, would be reduced with elephants. But the elephants would be in the savannahs of northern Australia, thousands of kilometres from deadly fires. Bowman says in a New Scientist interview that ''we had to contextualise''. There's a good one for the the next politician caught out lying or treating the public like dopes: ''I had to contextualise''. The public aren't dopes and don't deserve to be treated as such.
Seventeen ''PestSmart'' meetings are going on around the country as I write, delivered by smart scientists talking to smart graziers; serious about finding better ways ahead. Can we please stop treating them all like idiots? Elephant introduction as an indulgent distraction might get a professor or two a day in limelight, but it won't help (and might harm) those genuine conservationists out in the field trying to make a difference.
Tony Peacock is chief executive of the Cooperative Research Centres Association. He is a former CEO of the Invasive Animals CRC and the 2010 Australian Government Eureka Prize winner for Promoting the Understanding of Science.
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