Subject: Re: collecting

From: Neil Jones <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 19:05:49 GMT

Of course there are things you have to net to identify some you even need
to kill to examine but this is not what people call collecting.
Perhaps we need a new word. Posters from a few months ago may remember that
I did some digging in the Oxford English Dictionary and came up with the
rather ugly verb "To collectionise" to gather and make into a collection.

This is the point. Surely one does not need to collect Pieris rapae or
Danaus plexipus in order to identify them. One would not do much
harm if one did but with some people it does not stop there they have
to have as many as possible of all the rarities.

Everyone agrees that it is habitat destruction that is the problem and that
it needs to be stopped. The only way to achieve this is to get more people
interested in conserving them.

A century ago bird conservation was not taken seriously here
in the UK but fortunately a group of conservationists got together and
formed the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Now
they are a formidable conservation body claiming a membership of 1 MILLION!
It is accepted many people in the UK that birds should be respected and
looked after. Consequently it is easy to get politicians to listen to the
cause of conserving birds.

This is not the case with butterflies. A recent case here in the UK involving
the destruction of a colony of an internationally recognised threatened
species comes to mind. Here politicians were heard to laugh and talk about
"bloody butterflies." We need more people interested in them.

People might argue that these new people might as well be collectors but
we have already seen what some obsessives are like. One well known
example had over A HUNDRED AND FIFTY specimens of just ONE protected species
in his possession and actively argues for the habitat protection legislation
to be removed to that he can collect!

I am not naming the individual concerned because the identity of the person
is not the point. I have also discovered that if one stands up and condemns
criminals and those who seek to facilitate the genocide of dozens of other
life forms one gets accused of having bad morals.
What a funny world we live in. ;-)

The way to conserve butterflies is to get people to respect them. This
is not to say that they should never be killed. There are justifications.
I accept that, but collecting is not the way forward for habitat conservation.

--
Neil Jones- [email-masked] "The beauty and genius of a work of art
may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed, but when
the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more another heaven
and another earth must pass before such a one can be again." William Beebe