WP1: The Fate of One-Sided Relationship
“Three… two…one.” A big splash suddenly filled up the vast ocean: Beebong, which suffered seventeen years of performing dolphin shows, finally met the seas of Jeju Island. I exclaimed, “Beebong, enjoy your freedom!” We could soon see him breach across the whirling waves. The tiny, shiny device tagged on his fin ensured that he was Beebong — the GPS tracking device. It intends to track his location and further check his rehabilitation status consistently. Nowadays, many ecology research teams have employed invasive monitoring methods, including GPS collars. While we expected those advanced technologies to minimize the gap between humans and animals, I doubt if our expectations align with reality. Examining the impact of GPS telemetry on the intimacy between animals and humans, I would like to discuss how we can incorporate GPS technology into the proper animal-human relationship.
As an intern at a marine animal research organization, I would follow the senior researchers taking millions of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins’ pictures at Jeju Island for hours under the scorching sun. Back at the research center, I had to analyze thousands of photo data and identify every dolphin among 120 of them manually. Compared to this traditional noninvasive monitoring method, GPS technology offered ecologists the freedom from the substantial time investment of manually identifying the location and behavior of each animal. Beyond convenience, its real-time, highly precise, and sophisticated data enhanced our understanding of ecology and animal behavior, enabling ecologists to observe the very private lives of animals.
These advantages of invasive location-tracking methods result in successful conservation projects in modern society. For example, the radio collar data of pronghorns in Wyoming revealed that their movement corridors were seriously threatened by oil and gas development. For ecologists dedicated to gaining the most detailed insights into wildlife, GPS trackers are one of the most innovative and exciting tools. However, I am concerned that the successes of GPS trackers do not apply to every case.
Let’s get back to the story of the dolphin, Beebong. It was the next day, but we could not find Beebong anywhere; its GPS tag had fallen off. Coincidentally or not, every time the Korean research team released a captive dolphin on the coast of Jeju Island, its GPS tracker fell off in a few hours or days. Witnessing this incident made me delve into the limitations of GPS technology. Perhaps animals instinctively get rid of the GPS tags, distancing themselves from humans. Regardless of the truth, there were multiple barriers that limited the extensive application of invasive surveillance technologies.
The most significant obstacle is the high cost. The GPS unit involves various sources of money, including capturing many animals, purchasing and installing collars, and analyzing a substantial amount of data. Therefore, only massive research organizations with sufficient funding and expertise have access to location-tracking technologies. The budget issue causes another critical barrier as well: the small sample size that fails to represent the population. One study concluded that more than 75 animals are necessary to make a reliable statistical inference for realistically complex studies. (Lindberg & Walker, 2007) Nevertheless, the mean sample size of the number of animals in 30 GPS-based studies was 18.1. (Hebblewhite & Haydon, 2010) The trade-off between sample size and cost makes us skeptical about the statistical reliability of ecological research.
Furthermore, the GPS collars themselves might alter the most natural animal behavior, resulting in biased data. Although there is a rule that the instrument’s mass must not exceed 5% (or 3%), this approach is way too simplistic. “For example, transmitter weights based on a fixed percentage of body weight affect flight characteristics of large birds more than those of small birds because they have proportionally less surplus power” (Casper, 2006). Not only mass but buoyancy, color, acoustic frequency, or light spectra of the device might restrict their normal movement. Due to these impediments, many scientists failed to maximize the use of GPS trackers and create as close relationships with wildlife as they desired. GPS technology was expected to function as an animal-friendly tool that provided intimacy without proximity. After all, there was a particular gap between animals and humans that could not be narrowed anymore — perhaps a necessary boundary between living things.
These results leave us with an essential ethical question: Where should we draw the line between wildlife and humans? The appropriate man-nature relationship has always been ambiguous and controversial throughout history. Ecocentrism, anthropocentrism, and biocentrism — among the divergent philosophical assertions about the moral relationship — which one should we adhere to? To determine this issue, we should consider our current unusual circumstance: the climate crisis. It is an urgent issue. And one of the countermeasures to relieve the impact of anthropogenic stressors on Earth is wildlife conservation, our primary motivation to get closer to animals. To quickly overcome the crisis, humans should take a more pragmatic and straightforward approach than a deontological approach when setting ethical standards for GPS-involved wildlife conservation projects. Taking every single argument to a philosophical discussion or a logical conclusion should be avoided.
Instead, it is more reasonable to temporarily shift the focus from obligation and moral values to outcomes and profits concerned with climate change. Both subjects — humans and animals — must benefit from the particular boundary we adopt; this straightforward standard would provide us with efficiency yet efficacy.
Humans enjoy countless opportunities and advantages from employing current GPS technology. Through the lens of GPS trackers, we gain deep insights into animal behavior, migration patterns, and habitat preferences, satisfying our innate scientific curiosity about the natural world. Above all, the information substantially supports humans in identifying effective conservation strategies and protecting endangered species, contributing to climate change mitigation. Now, what profits do animals earn from the recent GPS wildlife system? In the long term, wildlife could relish a better-preserved environment with GPS data-driven conservation projects. Nevertheless, they simultaneously undergo a severe loss: a lack of freedom and privacy. The recent benefits of surveillance technologies are explicitly oriented toward humans’ well-being and priorities. Although it is challenging to quantify and equalize each side’s profit and loss precisely, at least we should make efforts to seek a balance.
Minimizing unnecessary invasions would be the initial step to achieving that goal. Some ecologists argue that there is an overemphasis on the importance of fine-scale data. “In the case of threatened, woodland caribou declines, the bulk of research strongly suggests declines are caused by large spacial scale anthropogenic disturbance that has increased predation” (Hebblewhite & Haydon, 2010). While fine-scale knowledge often helps us solve critical conservation questions, it is not necessarily true in all types of research.
In a similar vein, humans should not utilize GPS collars for the reason that modern technology just allows them to do so. Instead, specific conservation purposes should be the starting point for determining the use of GPS. Technology is supposed to be aligned with positive societal values and purposes that benefit both humans and animals. It is also significant that research teams question whether they have sufficient funds and expertise to capture animals and analyze sophisticated, complex environmental data in advance. These several checkpoints could filter out the unnecessary and impractical utilization of GPS collars.
Developing less invasive location-tracking methods is essential as well. For instance, the newly introduced solar-powered animal trackers have the potential to improve animal welfare significantly, minimizing the close contact with wildlife that occurs during the exchange of the battery. Humans should search for innovative ways to give wildlife more personal space.
Whereas GPS technology was predicted to lead to close relationships with wildlife, humans ended up facing barriers that blocked intimacy. These outcomes encourage humans to discuss the proper distance between animals and humans. Considering the pressure of wildlife rehabilitation and the climate crisis, I believe it is crucial to employ a pragmatic ethical standard when applying GPS collars to wildlife; a healthy give-and-take relationship is needed. Regardless of the type of relationship, one side can’t always give while the other one takes. A one-sided relationship is destined to fail.
Works Cited
Berger, J. (2004). The Last Mile: How to Sustain Long-Distance Migration in Mammals. Conservation Biology, 18(2), 320–331. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2004.00548.x
Casper, R. M. (2009). Guidelines for the instrumentation of wild birds and mammals. Animal Behaviour, 78(6), 1477–1483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.09.023
Hebblewhite, M., & Haydon, D. T. (2010). Distinguishing technology from biology: a critical review of the use of GPS telemetry data in ecology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365(1550), 2303–2312. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0087
Latham, A. D. M., Latham, M. C., Anderson, D. P., Cruz, J., Herries, D., & Hebblewhite, M. (2014). The GPS craze: six questions to address before deciding to deploy GPS technology on wildlife. New Zealand Journal of Ecology, 39. https://newzealandecology.org/nzje/3204.pdf
Lindberg, M. S., & Walker, J. (2007). Satellite Telemetry in Avian Research and Management: Sample size Considerations. Journal of Wildlife Management, 71(3), 1002–1009. https://doi.org/10.2193/2005-696
