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Dr.Jo Hilgers
Zaaier 88
3833VW LEUSDEN
April 16, 2007
Dear Professor Prins,
A few days ago it was announced in our Magazine “The Dutch Hunter”
(De Nederlandse Jager, nr. 7, April 10, 2007) that our Royal Dutch
Hunting Association (KNJV) in collaboration with Wageningen
University is going to establish an extraordinary Chair in your
Department of Resource Ecology. An explanation of the research
planned – undoubtedly in the management of our game life and their
habitats – will be given in the next issue of the said journal for
the Dutch hunting society.
I understood that the researcher to be elected to this new Chair
will be announced shortly and that the candidate may be of
English-speaking origin, hence this letter in his language, instead
of Dutch, so it would be known to him that he is most welcome and
that the establishment of the new Chair is timely indeed, if not
long overdue. Perhaps this letter would give him some needed
background information to start his job.
As early as the 1980’s Leo Steinbusch in the southern Province of
Limburg and his hunting friends suggested the establishment of such
a Chair by the KNJV, because the Dutch people’s sentiment
started to change dramatically with regard the shooting of game for
consumption purposes. It changed into a negative sentiment, in a way
not seen anywhere else in Europe and our surrounding countries,
culminating in 2006 into a new Party represented in both our “Houses
of Commons and Lords”, exclusively dedicated to the plight and
well-being of animals.
Throughout the nineties the hunter’s image changed from a respected
citizen into an uncivilized killer of animals, who was stuck into
medieval habits and did not respect nature and especially the animal
kingdom. This resulted in a completely new law and hunting
regulations, a law with the purpose of protecting endangered plants
and animals and preserving biodiversity.
The so-called Flora and Fauna Act of 2002 divided responsibility for
so-called “shooting for pleasure” on the one hand and shooting to
contain damage to crops on the other hand. Shooting of six species
only (rabbit, hare, duck, pheasant, wood pigeon, grey partridge) as
opposed to over 32 species under the old law, would be regulated by
the law of the land, while preventing crop damage and curbing
predators would be regulated by the twelve Provinces.
Now five years later, the new law divides the nation as to the
question whether it serves its purpose well. The anti-hunting lobby
likes it as it was, but is very much against the corrective changes
made in the last four years. Shooters (hunters) perceive the law as
a bad law with too many futile rules and regulations and the
beginning of political quagmires in many of the Provinces, to the
disadvantage of the good balance of nature.
The main controversial issues focus on fox and goose hunting. Both
species have thrived tremendously and the fox and many other
predators such as larger birds of prey such as the buzzard, but also
the blue heron and the cormorant (annual fish losses of 12.000
tonnes) and on the ground the various species of martens, have
become so dominant in the field that game and also fish is becoming
scarcer and scarcer.
In the case of the geese the incredible population explosions,
especially of the graylag goose in summer time are unprecedented.
Agricultural crop damage is rising steeply with no end in sight and
millions of euros needed to satisfy the farmers, some of whom have
been forced to stop farming due to huge losses from grazing geese.
However, during the last two decennia there has been a huge surge in
the protection of our nature and their finest remnants saved from a
savage past, when farmers were obliged to maximize food production
and in the process destroyed most of which was left of natural and
semi-natural islands, crown jewels of high biodiversity.
The European rules encompassed in the so-called Natura 2000
directive from Brussels is the pinnacle of this effort to maintain
at least the present level of diversity, although substantial losses
to this date can not be reversed.
One million hectares out of the four million Dutch soil and
surrounding coastal and inland waters have been designated as
protected area and the acquisition of the remaining land in our
“EHS”, to be translated here as “Ecological Infrastructure”, will go
on until the year 2018, or so it has been planned by our politicians.
Billions of euros have been spent and will be spent for the noble
purpose.
But the hunters of our country are not amused. These grandiose plans
perceived by our ecologists, of which you are one of the main
leaders, of not the absolute guru, given your admirable list of peer
reviewed publications – even in Nature – and your considerable
school of over twenty five doctors in science, have greatly
neglected the role hunters have to play in the balance of the game
and their predators.
And we have been gradually but securely shut out of the nature
reserves, owned by the governmental and provincial agencies
Staatsbosbeheer and the “Provinciale Landschappen” and also our
private conservation organisation “Natuurmonumenten” of which you
are member of the Executive. Only private owners of natural
landscape gems do allow hunting for regulation of populations and
shooting of game for consumption.
Also shut out are other “users” of nature, such as the sports
fishermen, the “ljipaaisykjers” (collectors of lapwings eggs in
spring and protectors of their nests afterwards for the purpose of
sustaining the tradition, in the Province of Friesland only), lovers
of mushrooms, berries and flowers. Even horse riders perceive
themselves excluded the most beautiful areas and woods which our
country possesses, as highly unfair and unnecessary.
The slogan “nature has intrinsic value” meaning that nature should
develop with a minimum of human interference, has been used to
actually shut people out. In no other country will you find more
signs “no trespassing” than in our country. This is the main course
of loss of recognition by the voters for the grandiose philosophy of
bringing back the “wildernis” to our small flat country on the North
Sea.
The palynologist Frans Vera has been the main and most influential
proponent of the “wildernis” theory. His dream was and still is to
establish once and for all a savannah-like chain of larger
reservations with single big oak trees, grassy expanses with bushes
and large herds of herbivores, even allowing massive natural deaths
in winter time due to food shortage to avoid the ultimate” heresy”
i.e. killing with the rifle. Large predators have been contemplated
in this respect, but The Netherlands is of course no
Kenya-on-the-North Sea and this idea has been abandoned, albeit
reluctantly.
In the mean time in this concept foxes should be allowed to thrive,
because of the extra food from the dead animals, and thrive they did,
to such an extent that in the Oostvaardersplassen 30-100% of ground
breeding birds have been lost. And more importantly that in the
neighbouring land where foxes have expanded their territories almost
all game has disappeared throughout the country. This lack of
consideration is sometimes called in our circles “the absolute
limit” and is considered the ultimate foolishness especially in the
name of preserving biodiversity.
Browsing through your extensive curriculum vitae, you 100+
peer-reviewed papers and their content, looking at your rewards and
your awards, realizing that you are a Knight in the Order of the
Golden Ark and the House of Oranje Nassau, I was most surprised to
discover that you were Vera’s promotor in 1997. For the thesis in
palynology of the pollen in 5000-9000 old deposits in our soils
suggesting an open savannah-like landscape. A thesis now
controversial and attacked from various disciplines, not only
palynology but also entomology. Not in the least by other leading
Dutch ecologists, such as Van der Maarel, professor-emeritus of
Groningen and Uppsala.
Your own discipline is not palynology, a highly specialized
floristic discipline, and in my opinion this was a step too far. It
would not have been noticed, if not Vera’s theory became the leading
hypothesis for developing “wildernis”. Most likely no other of your
students has initiated such a huge flow of money to convert the
land. And it turned out to be more and more controversial with
herbivores showing up in twenty procent of our nature reserves, even
smaller than ten hectares. And their positive effect on biodiversity
in such small areas is highly dubious and not always positive, if at
all.
Reading through your CV, your main scientific discipline and your
research focus is understanding herbivores in a spatial context. How
food plants react to grazing, how wild herbivores, especially in the
African savannahs, can gear their revisitation interval to the
regrowth speed of their resource.
Being the lead author of “Principles of the Ecosystem Approach”,
adopted by all 170-odd nations of the Convention on Biological
Diversity, your are clearly in the world top of ecologists,
undoubtedly proposing that talking about the world’s economy has
become foolish without taking into consideration the world’s ecology.
Today’s main issue in a globalizing world.
Needless to say that you may be the man who could – if he believes
in it and wanted to – correct things which went wrong in our
handling of nature, its access and use. Which went wrong also due to
ethical considerations of city dwellers detached from nature in
their everyday life, with a notorious lack of knowledge of the laws
of nature in its historical context, having emerged through deep
evolutionary time.
Needless to say that most if not all farmers, hunters, fishermen,
horsemen, falconers, duck decoyers and other people of the
countryside are in great anticipation of the future with you and
your new colleague at the scientific helm. The way we should
interact with nature, more specifically the balance between game and
its predators in their specific habitats and biotopes, has now
officially become a science. Almost an irony in this greatly divided
country when it comes to our relationship with the animal kingdom of
which we ourselves are an integral part.
And – who knows – eventually the science of ecology, where field
studies have so many variables and are so hard to interpret into “basic
laws and rules”, predicting the future development of our habitats
and their fauna in a warming climate, will yield a Nobel Prize.
In the mean time, it’s about time, common sense in using the land
and caring for the land, returns to the low lands on the North Sea.
Sincerely Yours,
Dr. J.H.M. Hilgers (biologist)
Chairman of Plattelandsalliantie Nederland (Dutch Countryside
Alliance)
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