I should have been more thoughtful with my language in the original book review: "bad" was too simplistic, and "no one really cares" much too dismissive. I agree with you that the loss of the California condor louse was quite likely consequentially bad in ways we now may never understand, in that a unique life-form role with unknown ecological interrelationships was lost.
However, I'm still not sure if delousing the condors was a *morally* bad action given the condor caregivers' perspective at the time: 27 individual birds left, extinction looming, and the belief (even if untrue) that delousing was the right thing to do for their health.
I suppose the mental disconnect I'm trying to put my finger on is that the loss of the California condor louse seems intuitively not nearly as bad as the near-loss of the California condor itself, and trying to generalize from that to determine what we really value when conserving species.
That's a really excellent and thoughtful point. The history of ecology is indeed one of finding more and more complexity and connectedness, often where we least expected it.
I really appreciate your insightful comment! Thanks for writing here.
I should have been more thoughtful with my language in the original book review: "bad" was too simplistic, and "no one really cares" much too dismissive. I agree with you that the loss of the California condor louse was quite likely consequentially bad in ways we now may never understand, in that a unique life-form role with unknown ecological interrelationships was lost.
However, I'm still not sure if delousing the condors was a *morally* bad action given the condor caregivers' perspective at the time: 27 individual birds left, extinction looming, and the belief (even if untrue) that delousing was the right thing to do for their health.
I suppose the mental disconnect I'm trying to put my finger on is that the loss of the California condor louse seems intuitively not nearly as bad as the near-loss of the California condor itself, and trying to generalize from that to determine what we really value when conserving species.
That's a really excellent and thoughtful point. The history of ecology is indeed one of finding more and more complexity and connectedness, often where we least expected it.