With increasing awareness of the society for the problem of invasive animal species, ethical issues concerning how to deal with these animals also come into focus.
The
Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research participates in this
dialogue with a public relations project that is funded by the Ministry of
Science and Culture of Lower Saxony as part of the program Future Discourses.
With the project title “Alien species – a
Discourse: how do we deal with introduced species, and how do we want to deal
with them in the future?” the issue of ethics has already being faced. The
project aims to establish a dialogue between different interest groups and shed
light on society´s attitude towards invasive species.
The
kick-off event took place on September 24, 2020 at the University of Veterinary
Medicine Hannover, in compliance with hygiene regulations in effect. Teachers
and interested citizens were invited additionally to representatives from
research, hunting, water associations, nature conservation organizations and
politics. Partners from the German project areas of the Life-MICA project took
part as well.
After short initial presentations, in which the opinion of the individual stakeholders were presented, there was an active discussion on various conflict topics, as for example: the conflict about the repartition of responsibilities between hunting and pest control, the problem of by-catches of protected species by trapping and the lack of awareness in the society for the threats imposed by invasive species. A further deepening of certain discussion contents and the development of a questionnaire will represent the next steps towards an impulse paper with which the project aims to raise a question mark. The topic of neozoa will be also made accessible to young people. For this purpose, a workshop box with exercises and illustrative material on the subject neozoa was prepared and will soon be worked on by students from different regions in Germany. Moreover, an informative short film on the subject of neozoa was made.
Additionally, you can find the recording of the event here.
