Abstract
THE institution of animal reserves, on a large or small scale, eventually raises a question as to whether artificial control of conditions should be encouraged or abolished. Everyone will agree with the dictum that the object is “to preserve National Park areas in as nearly as possible their natural condition and at the same time to make them accessible to the people for study, for recreation, and for play”. Dr. Joseph Grinnell quotes with approval, and suggests (in a short article in the Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Empire, Jan. 1935, p. 61) that animal life in national parks should simply be left alone. “It can be encouraged in amount and variety most practically by desisting from any avoidable interference with the full range of natural conditions of food and shelter. A do-nothing policy is the soundest policy.… Also introduction of non-native kinds of animals should be guarded against like the plague.” In general, Dr. Grinnell is correct, but the guardian of reserves, especially of those on a small scale, must be on the alert to correct any tendency to extremes in the population. The reason is that no reserve is a thoroughly ‘natural area’; it has somewhere a boundary, and at the boundary natural migrations are checked, and unnatural slaughter takes place which rebounds upon the reserve population.
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Balance of Life in National Parks. Nature 135, 502 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135502c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135502c0