"Just another flavor of meat"

It was in trying to protect our sheep and cows that we decided that the big predators had to be killed. Predators were doing what was natural, and that was preying on the big vulnerable animals, since we killed off the bison and essentially replaced large herbivores in a lot of these areas with our own domesticated herbivores, and the predators preyed on what was there -- sheep and cows. And therefore they had to die.

Romania offers a model of how people can raise sheep in bear country without using guns, without using poison, without exterminating the bear.

How do they do it?

First of all they use good, really nasty, dangerous dogs. Second, they have a lot of shepherds out there living with the sheep, so it's labor intensive, unlike sheep ranching in the Western U.S. And third, they have a little bit more of a stoic acceptance of the fact that they will lose sheep occasionally. That does not justify the feeling that the bears must all be exterminated and the government owes them a predator-free landscape. They have essentially a different conception of what is acceptable risk.

You express distaste at the prospect of hordes of eco-tourists overrunning the breeding grounds of the saltwater crocodiles in Australia. Is there any good role for eco-tourism in saving these predators?

I think eco-tourism is very valuable in some situations. My only quarrel is that it gets oversold. It's sometimes thought of as the solution for every conservation situation around the world.

One of the places that it fits extremely well for big predators, among others, is in East Africa, because it's mostly savannah. It's very open. The lions and the cheetah and the leopard are out there, visible, hunting on the savannah, stalking these big herds of native ungulates. And it really lends itself to eco-tourism, because people can go there and they can see a lot, sitting in a Land Rover as it drives across the savannah as it follows a family of cheetah or a pride of lions while they chow down on a wildebeest.

But it's very different, for instance, in the case of the tiger in the Russian Far East. I can't imagine that's going to be an eco-tourism spot, because there are Udege people who I talked to out there who have hunted and trapped in those areas for 40 years, and who've never seen a tiger, despite the fact that they know that the tigers have been around them all the time.

If we do lose these alpha predators, what are some of the likely ecological consequences?

Large predators, in many cases, seem to be what the ecologists call a "keystone species." My analogy is the keystone in a stone arch: It's that wedge stone at the top that balances the opposing gravitational forces, and if you pull the keystone out, then the arch collapses. If you eliminate the keystone species, its absence has effects throughout the ecosystem. In the case of a big predator, you might eliminate a big predator that's preying on middle-size predators.

So the population of middle-size predators booms, and they are preying on ground-nesting birds. Suddenly, you find that your populations of ground-nesting birds are going extinct. Why? Because you've eliminated the big predators.

That's one of the sorts of ecological ramifications, but I'm as interested in the spiritual and the psychological consequences of the elimination of these things as I am in the ecological consequences.

What do you see as the psychological and spiritual consequences?

Big predators have for more than a million years reminded us humans that we're part of a food chain. We're not separate from nature, we're not above nature, we're not detached from nature, we're part of nature. We're part of a food chain and not necessarily always the top link on that food chain.

They've reminded us that, among other things, we're just another flavor of meat. You take away these big predators, and suddenly that reminder disappears. I think that already we have enough tendency to believe that human civilization and nature are two separate things. And we don't need any more reasons, excuses or license to embrace that false perception. The loss of the big predators is a huge step toward losing that awareness that we're a part of nature.

Why do you think we have a greater fear of being eaten by a grizzly or a crocodile than being trampled to death by an elephant? What's so bad about being meat?

Maybe it's a more vivid reminder that when you're dead, you're dead, and your molecules dissipate and go their ways. Whether or not you believe in an afterlife, it's a little bit scary for your corpse to be dishonored. And there's no more vivid form of dishonoring the corpse than predation by a man-eater. That sense of the importance of honoring the corpse goes back hundreds, thousands, of years in all sorts of different cultures. And so if a man-eater kills you and eats you, it's sort of the ultimate horror.

Why do you predict that by 2150 all the big predators will be gone?

I don't have a crystal ball, but if the human population increases from 6 billion to 11 billion, as projected by the U.N. population division, I just don't see any large enough, wild enough spaces to support genetically viable populations of these big predators. Sadly, I think that they'll be gone.

I don't think that they'll be gone entirely. We'll have them in zoos, and we'll have them in test tubes. But there will be no place where you can have the experience of walking out through forest and subjecting yourself to the wonderful, terrible, titillating sense that you're a potential prey item for a creature that's bigger and scarier and more majestic than you are.

I think that that will be really bad and depressing and boring for our great-great-great-grandchildren.

It will be like a sanitized-for-your-protection world.

The planet will be more convenient and safer in the most basic, reductionist sense. It will also be uglier, more boring and more lonely.

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