Australian magpies help each other to remove tracking devices

I disagree. We go deep sea diving and shine over 100k lumens in the face under the guise of science. And we dress up tons of birds with archaic trackers. That are heavy and irritating and downright detrimental to the individual. We have a ton of counting devices and measures and it is only gaining more and more traction. We should keep on expanding that now the means are available and stop invading birds and other animals lives with invasive tools.

Or another thing the university here close by holds roughly 20 grey parrots in an enclosure that is downright hostile for the animals yet it does research towards the well being of said animals. It’s beyond comprehension that we ended up in this place. I don’t even understand how one can perceive such science in such environments as reliable. We don’t consider testimonies from tortured inmates trustworthy yet research on these entrapped we somehow do because some rigor has been applied.

There are a lot of good scientists and almost all with good intentions but academia has a lot of shortcomings as well.

I just find this strange, someone who liters the environment is clearly an ignorant person, but if scientists come together and are harmful it is ok because it was reviewed by a bio-ethics comity that did some cost benefit analysis and was like yea I guess this is alright otherwise we're out of a job.

I’m inclined to ask how much more understanding do we need? What does a tracker on a bird adds when we can easily tell that 90% of the deaths are caused by either indirect or direct human actions? Why do we bother tacking on a tracker if we can also tack the same trackers on fishing nets and boats that do the actual damage?

I am phrasing this as an Or statement as I do view the allocated resources for this kind of research as some kind of dichotomy. Sure the allure of animal tracking is more interesting but I can only imagine they it’d be vastly more effective for the overall well being by applying said invasive tracking to the commercial organisations that are more directly responsible.