Kea Calculus
June 3, 2024
By NZB3
New Zealand’s alpine parrot the kea (Nestor notabilis) was once hunted as a pest at the behest of The State. The government bounty was at “$120 a head at one stage. More than 150,000 were shot before the bounty was removed, and they were protected in 1986.” Ref. North & South (2020,) Wayback Machine
These days the government kill program for the kea is more nuanced. For one thing, we all agree now that it is desirable to share the country with its native parrots rather than wish to drive them out. We don’t hear of them harming sheep so much as playfully vandalising our cars and equipment like naughty children who we still love and want to have around. Why, then, is the Department of Conservation actively and deliberately and transparently killing keas at all?
For, they are.
Bill Wallace of the Anti-1080 Campaign used an Official Information Act request to find out that 33% of the tracked population in Otira-Taipo were destroyed by DOC’s poison drop ‘experiment’ in September 2022. Ref. Ban 1080 – South Island, Meta (2024)
Ben Reddiex of DOC seems unbothered by the 33% figure saying that 15-32% is expected in a high risk area like this one due to the human presence at Arthur’s Pass. This is so much Sophistry in service of defending DOC’s PR image. Suppose we were talking about broken plates or murders or lost luggage. Would it really be OK for the government to contribute deliberately to those bad outcomes by causing them only to say that these things were happening anyway? If up to 32% of birds are dying then that’s a good reason not to contribute a further 33%. It’s not an excuse for why the kea kill is within the “predicted range” and therefore mitigated. This sort of thinking betrays a Managerial mindset and it’s this I challenge.
DOC’s locus of interest is not on a kea or a kea breeding pair or nesting clutch or even a circus (kea social group.) The government’s Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is population numbers. It follows, then, that it’s acceptable to cause the deaths of kea groups that are below the population level on the organisational chart.
In this chart (image, right) we can say that to help the Species Level they would accept damage (even 100%) of a population. Wiping out some identified, tagged, known Mr and Mrs Kea or their entire social group to increase the total number of animals in the species is good! Those are the KPI being sought, that’s what will get a DOC officer in charge promoted.
But population and organism are not the only Levels in the firing line. The genetics of the parrot are also sacrificial to the greater KIP goal. Creating an evolutionary bottle-neck by reducing genetic stock is the price to pay then DOC will do that too. Their KPI is not quality of kea but quantity. So we end up with a bunch on in-bred retard parrots? Not their problem.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” – Goodhart’s Law
We saw the same thing when the government tried to “save” the notornis by taking chicks away from their parents and having them attach to hand-puppets. The numbers improved but the organisms produced were functionally and socially retarded and did not lead to a larger sustainable population or species.
Government by Utilitarianism
The basic mantra of our State is Utilitarian: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In forestry or farming that’s acceptable. You would cut bobby calves from your dairy herd because your KPI is milk. You would cut down or burn off sections of trees to save an entire forest from wildfires or disease. But ought people be farmed? Ought kea?
In the Collectivist paradigm this certainly is done. Winston Churchill, so the story goes, allowed Coventry to be bombed in the War despite his foreknowledge because he didn’t want to tip his hand to the Germans that we had broken their codes. Better to only reveal that by responding to gathered intelligence when the pay-off was very large. In that case, if you were a family or a village or a kid in Coventry your government would, and did, effectively kill you for the ‘greater good’. Same way DOC do to keas. You would be justified in asking, then, if the German or British government were your greater enemy?
Less hypothetically, we also have KPIs for students in our schools. I’m sure teachers and headmasters already think nothing of triaging the students in their care to achieve the best scores. They cannot drop 1080 on the kids who are dragging down the averages, nor look the other way if Hitler firebombs their houses. But it’s fair to accuse our educationalist community of drugging or diverting the outliers (both the very clever and the very dumb) in our classrooms in order to achieve their KPIs. Perhaps by streaming the “cabbage” kids out of education by corralling them into dumb-kid classrooms. Perhaps by dosing them with Ritalin or giving them screens to vegetate with until class is dismissed. Perhaps, even, by sapping their energy with some useless and strenuous activity (maybe that’s what rugby and rowing really are about?)
Health too, not just education, is subject to Utilitarian thinking. If poor people were to die they could save the Collective a great deal in expensive care. The State, then, has a perverse incentive to lift average outcomes by culling the herd. One sort of cull is to propagandise individuals into not living their lives in ways that involve risk since that risk is perceived as a risk to the State’s KIP rather than to the individual. Our Government culls adventurous activity by rules that mandate the fencing off or private pools, endless ‘Safetyism’ campaigns, ubiquitous road cone use, helmets, high-vis vests, PPE, and media propaganda from the ACC to tell you what not to do in your own home. Ref. 2021: ACC: “Have a hmmm”, AHNZ
As an Anarchist I’m being quite controversial in saying individual people should not be treated this way at all. We are not fodder for the tribe!
It’s perhaps even more controversial to suggest that keas, like people, also ought not be farmed. That Utilitarianism is the wrong way to go about the project.
Sympathetic Magic and Sacrifice
Utilitarianism and farming is not the only angle to consider when questioning The State’s motivation.
It’s worth a very brief tangent to note that the slaying of kea for the greater kea good is also a match for the savage mindset.
Have we really come much further than our primitive ancestors who considered it a magical act to kill animals and even people? The outcome being some desirable change the the world such as a good harvest or good climate or good prospects in war, etc.
I’m quite aware of the fact that DOC and the adherents of its policy do think in these primitive terms. And, that where we cannot find evidence of rational causal thinking that we ought to refer to the probable presence of magical thinking.
James Fraser covered Maoris and Aztecs at length in his book The Golden Bough but I’ve yet to read a book about how these silly superstitions are alive and well in our own culture today (Perhaps I should properly read Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World?) Ref. 2015: Superstition and Kiwifruit, AHNZ
Maybe if we scratch the surface of some irrationality and Cognitive Dissonance what’s really motivating the Kea Culling is superstition?
By killing some keas to the Conservation Gods the idea may be that the greater species will be protected.
Fraser called Sympathetic Magic the idea he observed that abstract qualities could be acted on via entities that shared that abstract. For example, you could take “luck” or “speed” by touching or wearing parts of people or animals who were lucky. Perhaps on some level the Conservationists’ spell involves the idea they’ve made the species poisonous to predators by literally poisoning instances of the species?
Kea Calculus
Even if we accept this nasty calculation about killing keas to achieve Kea KPI…. Aren’t they running a Red Queen’s Race here?
In other words, working very hard just to stay in the same place. Or, perhaps worse. We may be going backwards.
This would have to be decided by mathematics. I’ll take a rough shot at a beginning these calculations now.
The Department INSTAKILLs 33% according to the (as yet unpublished) Official Information Request response.
Let P represent Population
Let P/2 represent the number of breeding pairs (aka nests) as keas are monogamous (assuming there is a perfectly equal sex ratio)
Keas hatch 2-5 chicks, so an average of 3.5 per nest
Remaining population after poisoning, P = (1 – 0.33) = 0.67
DOC say that their intervention improves nest success from 40% to 70%
Before Intervention nest production will be: P/2 x 0.4 x 3.5
After intervention nest production will be: P/2 x 0.7 x 3.5
Before intervention kea population will be P + (P/2 x 0.4 x 3.5) = 1.7P
After intervention kea population will be P + (P/2 x 0.67 + (P/2 x 0.7 x 3.5)) = 1.49175P
Clearly DOC has sacrificed individual keas and destroyed a certain amount of genetic variation and squandered our tax dollars for the outcome of reducing this kea population by 20% at best.
It’s worse than that if there isn’t an equal sex ratio of male and female keas, which there probably is not.
It’s worse too if the keas killed were not complete breeding pairs but a mixture among kea ‘families’. Killing one mother in the model kills just one reproductive unit but in a more realistic model it costs us a breeding pair as well as their born or unborn chicks!
It’s worse too because the breeding age of a kea is 5 years at best so P/2 is actually much too generous as a variable for how many birds are breeding.
It’s worse too because those keas with broken homes wont be doing the rest of the population any good. I don’t know what passes for moral in the kea universe but they’re very social animals. If a male or female loses its partner it’s fair to assume they’re only going to cause stress and sorrow to the rest of the population as they mourn DOC’s killing of their loved ones for the greater good. Good luck incorporating that effect into a population model.
I think I would have paid more attention in math class and have done less of a rough job of this if we had handled such interesting applications. At school nothing quite as interesting or important as this ever came up and I wonder why? I wonder if DOC is doing math like this? Or if we’re not supposed to?
It turns out that killing 20% of the birds they’re sent to help is a best case scenario when the government shows up and say “we’re here to help.”
Toward an Anarchist Solution
I mean, really! Imagine rounding up 33% of the poorest performing students from a high school class and shooting them dead behind the classroom. Then you tell the survivors they can do better now because distractions have been removed. What would really happen for kids, and keas, is that the stress of this would have a very negative impact on the community. This is farming and it doesn’t bother trees or, if you do it right, domestic cattle.
I don’t think keas, or humans, do well in even this form of captivity. We should get rid of the managerial mentality and not just because it fails at its own targets.
The real problem is predators? Very well then, target them. This might take the form of traps or protected nesting sites. The thrust of the effort ought to be to confront the problem rather than cut through the ‘client’ in order to make the balance sheet of KPIs look good. We shouldn’t be killing keas to help the Platonic form of Kea out.
Yet this is the same mentality that marks Western Culture these days.
In the same way, the police will shut down an individual’s rights because that’s the easier way to keep the peace. They’d rather appease the bully than defend justice.
Or, bad parents demand that kids repress and suppress their genuine emotions and experiences so as to ‘not rock the boat’.
The way we treat keas is just the tip of a larger ice berg of disfunction.
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Image ref. Arthur’s Pass Kea, AHNZ Archives (2021)
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