Lions and Tigers and Elephants - oh my!

There is a proposal to relocate nearly-extinct African animals to middle America. This has been done on small scale projects such as The Wilds in eastern Ohio. The proposed project is to be big enough to sustain a breeding population. The hope is that, while these animals may go extinct in their native habitat they will continue on in America. There is also some talk that they will replace the megafauna that used to exist in America.

This proposal is kind of strange. For years ecologists and naturalists have warned against introducing foreign species. This would be introducing them on a huge scale. The animals that used to live here might be similar to the ones being introduced but they are not the same. Will an African elephant occupy the same ecological niche as a woolly mammoth did in post-ice age America? Does that niche even still exist?

Then there is the introduction of large predators. In today's news there was a teen ager killed by a tiger in Kansas and a plan to curb lion attacks in Tanzania. You simply cannot fence in a large population of predators in a huge area and expect that they will not eventually escape. (Hey, we've all seen Jurassic Park.)

I suspect that proposed lands will turn out to intersect with Indian reservations which further complicates things.

For more thoughts, see here, and here.