S5 E12 - Animal Lovers - Not Rock Throwers - are Killing the Seals

Rock Thrower vs. Monk Seals: When Animal Love Becomes the Threat

Kevin Travis contrasts federal prosecution of Igor Litvinchuk for throwing a rock at a Hawaiian monk seal (missing and causing no injury) with broader failures in conservation and legal proportionality, including a state senator commending a man for beating Litvinchuk. He argues the animal-rights culture prioritizes performative outrage and individual-animal sentiment over species-level conservation, criticizing the naming and quasi-pet treatment of a seal called “Lani” and a “priesthood” that controls information. Travis says monk seals are increasing about 2% per year, while a major documented threat is toxoplasmosis spread by feral cats; yet laws and enforcement protect cats and even de-prioritize penalties for feeding them. He also blames activists who habituate seals to humans, concluding the system punishes solutions, protects problems, and substitutes theater for conservation.

00:00 Rock Throwing Outrage
01:54 Federal Crackdown
04:46 Vigilante Rewarded
06:13 Moral Authority Question
07:05 Naming Wild Animals
10:19 Nature Versus Man
11:49 Species Not Individuals
13:41 Real Threat Revealed
15:57 Cats And Bad Incentives
17:42 Activist Factions Clash
18:40 Habituating The Seal
20:02 Theater Not Conservation
20:53 Closing Thoughts

#MonkSeal #LaniTheSeal #igormykhaylovychlytvynchuk #FeralCats #WildlifeConservation #Toxoplasmosis #LanaiCatSanctuary #AmbassadorOfAloha #HumaneHawaii #RichardBissen #MauiMayor #BrentonAwa #HawaiiSenate #TheTenthMan #KevinTravis #ConservativePodcast #TrapNeuterReturn

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Transcript

 , . A man threw a rock at a seal in Hawaii, missed it, and is facing federal prison. The ones doing the most damage to that seal are protected by law, today on The Tenth Man. Last week, we talked about Iran throwing rocks, figuratively speaking, in the Strait of Hormuz at tankers with mines, the occasional missile, actually killing people- And the world treating it as an understandable expression of frustration. Last week, a man threw a rock at a seal in Hawaii. Didn't even hit it, but the federal government mobilized. Now, we're not here to defend his rock-throwing, so throwing rocks at animals, not something we necessarily recommend. Write that down. But the so-called animal rights movement has inverted its own purpose. Their supposed love for animals has become so loud, so performative, and so expensive that it has become, in measurable and documented ways, one of the primary threats to the animals it claims to love. There's another animal on that island doing far more damage to the monk seal than any rock ever could. We'll get there, so stick with us. This is The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis. And if you know someone who has never once questioned whether the loudest animal lovers are actually good for animals, tell them about this episode. The man, Igor Mikhailovich Litvinchuk, threw a rock. He did not hit the seal, and the seal, who weighs approximately four hundred and fifty pounds, continued her day uninjured and apparently unbothered. No harm, no contact, no lasting trauma, at least not to the seal, despite what people claimed. Now, the federal government, which we are regularly told is underfunded, understaffed, and just one continuing resolution away from shutdown, found this man. They arrested him near Seattle, and they're now threatening him with up to fifty thousand dollars in fines under the Endangered Species Act, up to twenty thousand more under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and potential federal prison time. The Maui mayor, Richard Bissen, said personally on the record that he would see to it that the man is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Now let that sit for a moment. We have cities where a man can attack a stranger on a subway platform and be back on the street before the victim's paperwork is filed, let alone before he's healed. We have jurisdictions where property crime below a certain dollar threshold is effectively legal by prosecutorial policy. And yet somewhere in the enforcement apparatus of the United States federal government, someone looked at his caseload and said, "The rock thrower, him, that's our case." Now, if this man were an undocumented immigrant who had thrown a rock at a woman in New York City, the conversation would be very, very different. The advocates would be talking about root causes and systemic pressures and the importance of proportionality. But this guy threw a rock at a seal and missed, and two federal statutes are now aimed at him simultaneously. Speaking of proportionality, travel a few thousand miles north to the communities that have hunted seals for food and survival for centuries. They would look at this story and have some interesting thoughts. And our man, Igor, could, with sufficiently creative lawyering, argue that he was honoring an indigenous subsistence tradition and simply had poor aim. And if he changed his last name, it just might work. Before the federal arrest, someone on the beach took matters into his own hands, and that video went viral too. The man who had just thrown a rock at a seal was beaten. Hawaii State Senator Brenton Awa then took to the floor of the Hawaii Senate and presented a letter of recognition to the man who did the beating. He called him the Ambassador of Aloha. Let's be precise about what happened here. A United States state senator, in an official proceeding, formally commended a man for committing assault, basically for vigilante justice. A rock thrower faces up to seventy thousand dollars in federal fines and federal prison and didn't hit anything. The man who beat him received a state commendation. I'm not here to mourn for the rock thrower, but the legal and moral architecture of this moment is worth examining because the same culture that cannot bring itself to remove the animals that are actually killing the monk seals finds no difficulty whatsoever in celebrating a man who beat another on a beach. They call it the Aloha spirit. So just file that away for a moment. Robert Heinlein, a science fiction writer and kind of an underappreciated philist- political philosopher, once asked a question worth repeating. He asked, "Is it moral for the government to compel you to do something that your neighbor could not morally compel you to do?" Now, think about that here. Your neighbor loves seals, genuinely, deeply, sincerely. Does that love, however earnest, give your neighbor the right to put you in prison for not sharing it at the same intensity? Does the depth of someone else's feeling for an animal create a legal obligation on your part? If it does, what's the moral basis of that right, and is it absolute? I'd like you to keep that in mind as we go along, because this seal has a name. Odd, most wild animals don't. But the locals have named her Lani, drawn from the language and culture of the human civilization that happened to settle those islands. Don't think the seal knows this. The seal did not select this name, or the seal's parents, I guess, would be more logical, and the seal has not expressed an opinion on it. And this matters quite a bit because animals don't actually take names, nor do they give them. They recognize each other by scent and sound, but they have no mechanism for referring to another animal in the third person, which is what a name is. So there's kind of an irony here in a cultural moment that debates appropriation with great seriousness, yet casually appropriates Hawaiian naming traditions for a marine mammal with no cultural affiliation whatsoever. Actually assigns that cultural naming. Because if Lani were inclined to choose a name at all, there's no particular reason to assume she'd go Hawaiian over, say, Heather or Tiffany or Maria, or maybe just no name at all in her own cultural tradition. And don't underestimate what happens when people adopt individual wild animals as pseudo-pets in their minds. Because pets are special, we adopt them, and animal control picks up strays, dogs that don't belong to anyone. But wild animals are not pets treating them that way converts a conservation question into a personal relationship, and personal relationships make people do things that conservation science would never recommend. Lani the seal does not have a Hawaiian culture. She has a feeding range and a nesting beach that happens to be in Hawaii, and the location of that nesting beach is kept secret. It's known only to the inner circle of the local animal protection community. Ordinary members of that same community, people who also love and cherish the seal, who also donate, who also show up, are not told where she nests. Because they love her so much, they might disturb her. So the people who love Lani enough to protect her location are protecting it from other people who also love Lani. The hierarchy of animal love has produced a priesthood, and the priesthood does not trust the congregation. And that is not a unique phenomenon in the history of organized religious belief, but it's a telling one. It tells a lot about the movement. There's a philosophical assumption buried in all this that doesn't survive close examination. It goes like this: Nature is good. Man is the intruder, and the goal is to protect nature from man. The problem is that man is part of nature. Either you believe man was placed here by a higher power and given stewardship over the created world, in which case we have legitimate say in how that stewardship gets exercised, or you believe man is simply the most successful animal on the planet, in which case competing with other species for territory is exactly what every successful species does. The grizzly bear that killed a hiker in Glacier National Park last week did not file an environmental impact statement first. He was just being a bear, and we excuse the behavior. The rock-throwing man, his behavior should be excused too on the same grounds. You can't build a worldview that treats man as simultaneously part of nature and yet uniquely guilty for existing in it. The logic doesn't hold, particularly when you set yourself up as super ruler, ruling over all creatures, including all other men. What science does support is this. If you're going to protect animals, protect the species. Individuals don't have ecological significance. On the contrary, giving an individual wild animal a name and an identity causes problems, it doesn't fix them. A single monk seal getting a rock thrown at her, reprehensible as that behavior might be, and yet the seal's walking away fine, swimming actually, it's being treated as a conservation crisis when it is nothing of the kind. The species trajectory is the question. So here's where the facts get interesting. The Hawaiian monk seal is on the endangered species list, that is true. It is also true that the population is increasing approximately 2% per year. The trend is upward. Has anyone heard that? Because in most areas of human endeavor, a population going up, an endangered population increasing, is considered good news. But in the endangered species world, it gets complicated because a species that recovers is a species that no longer generates the alarm necessary to sustain the Organizations built around its recovery. And every organization's first goal, whether it's an animal rights nonprofit or a political party, is self-preservation. But a solved problem means an organization without a mission. Now, the biggest documented threat to Hawaiian monk seals. It is not a man with a rock. Well, you knew that. But it's also not jet skis. It's not tourism or any of the things that the Humane Society, PETA, or Greenpeace have been raising money to fight. We told you it would surprise you. It is a disease spread by an animal. An animal that is not native to the Hawaiian islands. An animal that was brought there by humans. Specifically, by the same kind of humans who tend to show up at candlelight vigils for marine mammals. That's right. It's the cat ladies. Well, not directly. You see, the feral cat population on the Hawaiian Islands is, by scientific consensus, one of the primary drivers of monk seal mortality. Toxoplasmosis, a parasite spread exclusively through cat feces, is killing these seals. Everyone in the conservation community knows this. The marine biologists know it. The wildlife agencies know it. The animal welfare organizations know it, and here's what they have chosen to do about it: to disagree and self-contradict. Because we kill rats, we kill mice, we set traps, lay poison, hire exterminators, and nobody holds a vigil. That's because rats and mice are classified as vermin, as disease vectors, and we have decided as a society that disease vectors get controlled. That is a coherent policy, and it has served public health , well for a long time, in fact, since the plague. Feral cats are also disease vectors. The science is not disputed, but they're appealing to look at. They respond to feeling, and people give them names, and so the rules are different. Now, hold a couple of numbers together, because here's the point. If you harm a feral cat in Hawaii, that unowned animal spreading toxoplasmosis to an endangered species, you face misdemeanor charges, fines up to two thousand dollars, and potential jail time, and the law is enforced. Well, it turns out that feeding those feral cats is also against the law. If you feed a feral cat on county property in Hawaii County, which concentrates the population, concentrates the disease, and sustains the vector that is killing the monk seal, the fine is fifty dollars. And the mayor of Hawaii County said publicly on the record that he hopes police will treat enforcement as a low priority. Two thousand dollars and potential jail for harming the disease vector, the cat, and saving the seals, and , fifty dollars, but please don't bother enforcing it, for feeding and sustaining the disease vector for decades in some cases. The law punishes the solution and protects the problem. The people most responsible for this, the feral cat feeders, and some of them feed hundreds of cats. They've sustained these colonies for years, concentrating the disease, but they're not in federal custody. One woman has been feeding feral cats on the Big Island for thirty-three years, over four hundred cats. She's not facing prosecution. She's considered a hero. But the man who threw a rock and missed, remember he missed, is in the federal system. Now, some activists want to do something, but they disagree and lack common sense. One faction of animal lovers wants to remove the cats humanely. Another faction, and it's the one with the most institutional support and money, wants to trap them and neuter them so they cannot reproduce, which still leaves on the islands a population of cats that cannot reproduce but can absolutely continue to spread disease and kill seals. That makes no sense. And how many cats do you have to fail to trap and neuter before the whole program fails? The answer is one. One cat you missed. There are at least four factions of animal lovers in this story, and we've covered three. There's one more. There's a group, well-meaning, devoted, entirely convinced they are helping, that has spent years habituating Lani to human presence, teaching her patiently not to fear people, encouraging a four hundred and fifty pound wild carnivore to treat populated beaches as comfortable habitat. Children play on those beaches. The people who made Lani comfortable around humans are part of the reason a tourist could get close enough to throw a rock at her in the first place. And in this story, the habituators are the heroes, and the rock thrower is the villain. People just don't understand that purpose matters. You identify what is important, you determine which one of two conflicting goals takes priority, and you pursue it. An animal lover who cannot make that calculation, who holds cats and seals with equal emotional weight and refuses to choose the endangered species over feral individuals that need birth control, is not protecting animals. They're protecting their feelings about animals, which is a different thing entirely, and the seals are paying for the distinction. Stated plainly, we have no problem with people loving animals, no problem with the idea that a species in genuine decline deserves serious attention and a serious policy response. What we have a problem with is the performance of animal love substituting for the practice of it, a movement so captured by its own emotion that it cannot remove the animal killing the seal, cannot acknowledge the seal is doing rather well, and cannot identify its own hands in the problem. The law is punishing the solution, and the law is protecting the problem, and a state senator gave a man who committed assault a commendation. That's theater, not conservation, and theater has never saved a single species. I'm Kevin Travis, and this is The Tenth Man: Connecting the Dots. Thank you for listening.