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Asked by nile1 to Thomas, Thad, Emily, Adam on 10 Mar 2015.
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anon answered on 11 Mar 2015:
I’ve never intentionally harmed an animal as part of my work. Accidents can happen – like when a friend of mine stepped on a tadpole – unpleasantly squishy!
But sometimes when you work as a conservation scientist you find animal species in areas where they shouldn’t be. Because the other animals and plants in the area aren’t used to having that species around the ‘invasive’ species can cause a lot of damage. For example rats quite often cause chaos when they get onto islands by stowing away on boats. The rats eat the eggs of ground-nesting birds who aren’t used to protecting their nests from hungry rats and this can cause whole species to die out.
This means we have to think very carefully about whether we have to remove that particular animal from the area. That can involve killing animals, which is very tough for people who choose to work in conservation science because they love wildlife! But I know that the people who do end up having to remove animals from an area follow careful guidelines to make sure that the animals suffer as little as possible – and sometimes they don’t kill any of the animals at all – there was one project where 5000 hedgehogs were airlifted off some islands on the Scottish coast instead!
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