Lizzie Wade questions the practice of raising endangered birds with puppets before releasing them into the wild:
These animals don’t cause as much trouble as marauding gangs of adolescent condors, but they can wind up with their own mysterious behavioural issues. Puppet-reared whooping cranes, for example, have trouble incubating their eggs in the wild; they will often abandon their nests mere days before the eggs are due to hatch.
John French, Patuxent’s research manager and head of the crane programme, has a couple of different theories about the crane’s parenting problems.
In the wild, nesting cranes are often swarmed by black flies; perhaps the puppet-reared cranes, raised in relative comfort, can’t tolerate the parasites and are driven off their nests. Or perhaps their own puppet parents failed to pass along a crucial piece of information about the breeding process. What the missing piece might be, French told me, ‘I have no idea.’ Meanwhile, the cranes’ failure to raise the next generation on their own guarantees, somewhat ironically, the need for more puppet-rearing.
It’s tempting to see puppet-reared California condors and whooping cranes as victims of a horrific real-life version of Plato’s cave: after living in a shadow world since birth, they are suddenly dragged out into the blinding sunlight and forced to cope with an incomprehensibly rich and complex reality. Ill-equipped to live in anything but a carefully managed simulacrum of nature, they crack under the pressure. When viewed from this angle, it is hard to imagine why keepers thought puppet-rearing would produce psychologically healthy animals.
[L]ike all intensive, hands-on conservation programmes, puppet-rearing was never really about the animals. While the stated goal of any captive breeding programme is to create self-sustaining populations of wild animals that can survive and thrive without human intervention, the true reason for their existence is guilt of a very human variety.
The Dish 