The War on Foxes

MUCH HAS been made of the so-called fox skeptics, even down to public and private recommendations that they think very carefully about what they are doing. It applies more universally.

To understand our local war on foxes, it helps to compare it to some bigger wars on drugs and on terror. These “wars” have a similar basic pattern: implement government policies that are guaranteed to create a problem and then charge gullible taxpayers to fight a “war” against the problem (which of course can’t possibly succeed because the problem is perpetually sustained by the government policies). It tries to counter the problem and at the same time by its very nature can actually perpetuate it.

It is a worthwhile question to ask, have some become hooked on these wars? Money is a powerful incentive in all these cases, once it’s provided there is a tendency to perpetuate its flow. As long as government prohibition policies guarantee massive drug profits to millions around the world, the war on drugs will remain an expensive, endless exercise in futility and riddled with corruption.

Similarly, as long as US government foreign policies guarantee massive suffering to millions of Muslims around the world (who have little economic, military or political power) the so-called ‘war on terror’ will remain an expensive, endless exercise in futility.

As long as the spate of fox incidents continues — reports of a foot print or a sighting here, a real fox scat there — the war on foxes will continue. In all cases we are told to accept these realities or incidents on trust and yet the decision-making analysis of reliability is left to ‘the people in charge’.

How is the evidence gathered? How it is examined? And then how it is ultimately assessed and presented? All critical issues in closing any credibility gap.

Baseless or based on fabrication

In 2002 -03 the world was told Iraq had WMDs and intended to import uranium yellow cake from Niger. The two major justifications provided by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ for war?

What was the evidence that Saddam Hussein still had stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction that posed a threat to the world? What was the evidence that Saddam Hussein had intended to import uranium yellow cake from Niger in Africa?

In retrospect, through open and independent scrutiny (including good investigative journalism) both these fundamental justifications used by the United States (and its coalition partners — Australia & Britain) to wage war on Iran were proven to be without evidence — i.e. baseless or based on fabrication. But it took rigorous and persistent investigation to uncover the truth. There was no retraction from any one.

I, along with many others, understand that such credibility gaps develop because command & control establishments don’t have the ethic standards to undertake such frank and open audits of their processes and procedures. Generally once an issue has gathered sufficient momentum based on perhaps an unreliable or false understanding and is reported en masse, subsequent actions and reactions become necessarily tainted by that history. The last thing you can expect is a backdown or a retraction from a person in authority.

Chicken Little says, ‘the sky is falling’ … the sky is falling — trust me!

In our society the media plays a critical role in providing reliable information to the masses. If they have lost the ability to critically assess information they receive from all angles, then that medium can become a most powerful mechanism by which untested doomsday scenarios or unsubstantiated fears gain validity. These misunderstandings can allow uncertainty to remain and in the worst cases, allow long-standing conflicts to continue.

And that’s where it all comes down to trust. Who do you trust? Who do I trust? Who do we collectively trust to provide credible and reliable information? Do we trust our politicians? Do we trust our governmental bureaucracies? Do we trust one another? Do we trust ourselves? Social researcher, Hugh McKay in numerous interviews and recent publications talks about how distrustful our global and local societies have become in this brave new world that lacks the ability to independently audit itself.

Trust breaks down

Everyone knows from their own life and times what happens when fundamental trust breaks down between individuals, between groups in society, between countries. The longer that remains unresolved, separations occur … a sense of common ground, of common unity is destroyed.

A personal relationship breakdown over a misunderstanding or a failure to talk; a longstanding conflict because groups of people don’t talk to each other in the same language — both literally or metaphorically; the main world conflict zones Kashmir, Palestine/Israel, Taiwan/China, Tibet, Sudan … a sad and tragic list.

Back to that unwanted creature that has the potential to destroy Tasmania’s biodiversity. Yes, everyone agrees the likelihood and the potential for this animal to enter Tasmania remains. The consequences of the fox establishing and spreading are serious. And it’s not the only serious biological invasive threat we face.

Yes, everyone agrees that trying to prove that such a threat is present relies on having firstly, the incidents to examine and secondly, the means of reliable verification. Where people have disagreed is on the matter of verification of the evidence, the reliability of the proof, the approaches taken to investigate incidents and the overall analysis & decision making.

General trust increases when sightings are reported by credible human beings who are prepared to go public and whose motivation is pure trust increases when the technical information to support all investigations is provided in a structured and precise form. Trust increases when there is a universal feeling for collective action — a shared community responsibility.

And that takes genuine leadership. Attempts to covertly or overtly silence or diminish the voices of difference are not the answer. The answer is dialogue and openness.

I trust that the forthcoming fox review that the Tasmanian government is planning will address these fundamental issues, because, I believe, a new approach is needed in Tasmania. One that is bigger than just the threat of foxes.

Are you MAD, Dave? Yes, I’m trying to Make-A-Difference!

•There are still vital pieces of evidence that the State government has yet to provide on previous important fox incidents. They are:
(1) what happened to fox stomach content from the fox remains at Symmons Plains in September 2001 and examined by Hans Brunner and
(2) what are the results of DNA tests on ‘the fox in a box’, the ‘roadkill’ fox at Burnie in October 2003. Please read earlier postings to understand the background to these important questions:
HERE

David Obendorf is a veterinarian