Pinnipeds are verily food

Not a pinniped 

 

I´ve read some more in "Wilderness and Political Ecology", a semi-technical scientific work edited by Charles Kay and Randy Simmons, published by the University of Utah Press in 2002. This time, I tried to digest the contribution by William R Hildebrandt and Terry L Jones, "Depletion of Prehistoric Pinniped Populations along the California and Oregon Coasts: Were Humans the Cause?". After analyzing archeological sites and later eye witness reports, the authors reach the conclusion that the answer is indeed yes. This is controversial, since the humans in question were pre-contact Native Americans (American Indians), who according to received wisdom were supposed to be deeply spiritual and live in perfect balance with Mother Nature. In reality, the coastal Native tribes hunted and killed sea lions and fur seals to such an extent that it impacted their numbers and breeding habits. 

Originally, there were pinniped rookeries (breeding colonies) on the actual coast, but after sustained Native hunting, the sea lions and fur seals abandoned the mainland and instead established themselves at offshore islands. Or left the area altogether! Natives living in areas that lacked offshore islands had to switch from hunting sea mammals to killing terrestrial game instead. In one particular area, permanent coastal settlements were abandoned as the Natives moved inland to hunt land mammals or harvest acorns, which permitted the pinnipeds to re-established rookeries along the coast. 

In areas where pinnipeds were breeding on islands to escape the human hunters, the Natives developed their technology to go after them. This included harpoons, which gradually become more sophisticated. Above all, it included the building of large canoes. This in turn led to increased stratification within the Native tribes, as only an elite could afford to invest in such an enterprise. The person owning the canoe was expected to distribute food and drink to the canoe-builders and the crew members. An 18th century Spanish explorer reported that the canoes carried a crew of about 30 people, and Native informers apparently have a tradition that the boats were about 30 feet long. The concept of private ownership seems to have developed among the Tolowa, Yurok, Hupa and Wiyot tribes. Wealthy elite families owned boats, acorn collection groves, eddies for netting fish, and shares in offshore rookeries. Native groups which concentrated on hunting terrestrial animals had less social stratification, perhaps because this could be done without the elaborate organization needed to hunt marine mammals. 

According to the "optimum foraging model" of hunter-animal interaction, hunters should take the most nutritious specimens first, regardless of whether it´s ecologically sound to do so. Cultural or religious ideas about "sacred animals" should have no power to stop this. In other words, the model predicts that Natives aren´t "natural conservationists". Hildebrandt and Jones believe that the archeological record proves the model. Native hunters seems to have primarily killed female and juvenile pinnipeds, which makes no sense if the mission is to conserve resources, but makes perfect sense if the goal of the hunt is to obtain optimum food with the smallest expenditure of energy possible. When the pinniped populations were depleted, the hunters switched to sea otters, a pelagic species which is more difficult to hunt down and kill. There is even an example of a Native group which switched to sea otters after first having depleted the elk population! The archeological record from the Channel Islands in southern California show that the pinniped population fluctuated in response to the density of human settlement. Life on these particular islands was always hard, leading many human sites to be abandoned, at which point the pinnipeds came back - once again, an inexplicable fact if you think American Indians were "natural" or "spontaneous" conservationists. 

Curiously, the ethnographic record *does* suggest that the Natives actually were conservationists. However, the authors believe that these are biased samples, showing how one particular group acted at one particular point in time. Archeology looks at the broader picture, including chronologically, and then a very different scenario emerges. Also, there is a difference between "conserving" certain plants and doing the same thing to animals. The plant species most often used as examples of Native conservation ethics are the ones that reproduce and spread most easily and swiftly, often benefitting from large scale human-induced burning. Thus, seemingly paradoxically, increased human use of such a plant can permit it to spread even faster, for instance by causal dispersal of seeds or bulbs, regardless of the ethical convictions of the humans involve. Game animals, alas, don´t follow such a pattern...

The article also points out that pinniped populations have virtually exploded during the 20th century, as large scale (Euro-American) hunting of these creatures ceased. The pinnipeds have even conquered areas where they haven´t lived historically. The most ironic fact is that some elephant seals have established themselves at coasts with archeological sites, destroying them in the process! These would be sites of Native settlement. Remove the apex predator, and soon you have pinnipeds dancing on your grave...

With that somewhat bizarre observation, I close this little blog post.