Guadalcanal Moustached Kingfisher (1 Viewer)

lewis20126 said:

BTW I think you need to review the definition of false equivalence.. and stop the whataboutery on Carbon.

cheers, alan

Click to expand...

"A logical fallacy in which two completely opposing arguments appear to be logically equivalent when in fact they are not"? (Yes, I looked it up in Wikipedia).

Here is the logical fallacy you're implying, at least as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong):

Paul Sweet/AMNH is arguing in favor of continued scientific collection. His statement "while we still can" acknowledges that bird populations are declining sharply worldwide. Therefore, scientific collecting is contributing to these population declines.

I believe that's very misleading. If you had other reasons for bringing up "while we still can", please explain.

And yes, bringing up carbon is whataboutery, you are absolutely right. It just seems to me that as birders we should be looking at the behaviors we engage in that contribute to harming the environment (and I engage in some of these enthusiatically, hence the "I shouldn't talk") before pointing the finger at the scientific/museum community who, on the whole, are doing far more for conservation than we birders are.

While we can

I take this to mean that collecting effort should be maintained (accelerated?) against as biodiversity 'vanishes' Any collecting effort in small increasingly isolated populations of an already threatened species has a greater potential to adversely impact the viability of a population. That is why, in the UK at least we don't collect rare butterflies in (now) isolated habitats.

Nobody should be collecting Bugun Liocichla or the critically endangered Blue-throated Hillstar http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.1642/AUK-18-58.1 where other threats are severe and ongoing and unquantified for the same reasons. Some lovely reasoning in the Hillstar paper, summarised as 'it was acceptable to collect the species because when we collected one, another one took its place.' I'm not sure what would have happened to the justification if that hadn't proved to be the case!

Anyone want to collect a few Bugun Liocichla and see what happens?

cheers, alan