Question for you Tracy - Do you ever feel that the anthropomorphizing of the peregrines (by the general public) is counterproductive to the goals of the Falcon Recovery Project? Or do you consider it learning by association with what we know and, therefore, mostly beneficial?
Six of one, half dozen of another Three. For most people, this and other peregrine webcams are the first time they have ever seen a peregrine let alone a peregrine perhaps living on a few blocks away from them. Most people anthropomorphize about animals, even biologists, for some its all animals, for some, like biologists, it might only be their family pet. Its all a question, to my mind, of familiarity, in this case not familiarity breeding contempt but rather compassion. And it works in many cases for most people. We don't actually know and we can't understand how a dog, cat, rat, bird lives in its world, but living in close proximity with humans, they know how to read our signals to meet their needs and we know how to read their signals to respond accordingly. Of course we are missing all the subtlety, but there isn't anything we can do about it.
Now, does that compassion ever get out of hand? Sure, look at the recent events at the Toronto Humane Society - going out of their way to help Wiggly the Pig at the same time it seems their no-kill policy is in fact causing more harm than compassion for their charges. Or when some pet owners insist that their pets be vegetarians because their owners have chosen an ethical stand against meat. Now those are extreme examples but they do come from our compassion for the animals we know.
Now at the other end of the spectrum you have projects like ours with wild animals that we generally do not interfere with. We are "peaking" so to speak, not interacting with them. In this case, the compassion is an important part of our efforts, because the only way to foster a sense of responsibility for our actions or stewardship for the environment is to encourage a sense of compassion of the other nations living on the planet. So with a webcam in our case, viewers get to see what happens minute-by-minute and the peregrines aren't just spectacular birds soaring on a 30-minute PBS special but rather are spectacular birds sharing our world, living and dying without a care that we exist and that we damn-near drove them to extinction with our science.
So from a Project perspective, I need the compassion that comes as a result of anthropomorphizing to be able to educate and advocate on behalf of the peregrines (and all species-at-risk). One of the things I need to educate about is that they are separate nations. They exist, separate from us, neither above nor below nor in partnership with us. They hatch, grow, fly, hunt, breed and die all because that is what a peregrine does in its world, not because that is what a peregrine is suppose to do in a human world.
Does that help to answer the question Three ?
