Parrots, panthers get costly aid
2006-05-11 14:43
Oslo - Australia's orange-bellied parrot
and the Florida panther are in an exclusive but growing club -
rare species getting costly protection even as the world faces
what may be the worst wave of extinctions since the dinosaurs.
Governments in rich nations sometimes write virtual blank
cheques to protect exotic animals - even as thousands of less
glamorous creatures and plants slide silently into oblivion.
Many experts say it is impossible to set a ceiling on the
value of a species and that willingness to pay may be widening,
posing risks for businesses like mining, industry or logging
that affect the habitats of rare animals or plants.
"Willingness to pay is related to wealth," said Don Coursey,
a professor in public policy studies at the University of
Chicago. "As world wealth tends to grow, willingness to pay to
protect species is growing even faster."
Coursey once wrote a report estimating it cost $4.9m per creature to protect the endangered Florida panther - the
most expensive US protection scheme and more than many
insurers pay for a human life.
The California condor was second at $1.6m per bird.
Parrots vs windmills
In April, the Australian government vetoed a $200m wind energy project in the southern state of Victoria to protect
the rare orange-bellied parrot.
"I'm required under the law to put in place a recovery plan
to make sure that the bird does not go extinct," Environment
Minister Ian Campbell told Australian radio.
Even so, one study showed the threat from the windmill
project was one dead parrot every 1 000 years.
In one of the most costly examples, animal lovers paid $20m to retrain Keiko the killer whale, star of the "Free
Willy" movies, for life in the wild. Keiko died of pneumonia in
a Norwegian fjord in 2003, 18 months after he was freed.
"We even balk at asking what is the value of a person's
life. And it's the same for many species," said Partha Dasgupta,
an environmental economist at Cambridge University in England.
"There are cases where people have emotional attachments to
animals. But we don't care about rare micro-organisms or worms."
In Coursey's study, creatures such as shrews, mice and
salamanders were at the bottom of the animal spending list with
almost zero protection.
But in a possible sign of public concern widening to less
attractive species, New Zealand's state-owned Solid Energy Ltd
agreed in April to resettle - by hand - rare snails before
developing a $300m coal deposit.
In a landmark 1978 ruling in favour of a rare fish and
against developers of a hydroelectric dam on the Tennessee
River, the US Supreme Court ruled that Congress "viewed the
value of endangered species as 'incalculable.'"
It said it had no way of weighing the loss to a company over
a dam project - even if it was $100m - against the fish
whose value was deemed "incalculable".
The dam was eventually built, after stocks of the tiny snail
darter fish were found elsewhere.