ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

America’s “Global Goose-Chaser”: Nelson Gardiner Bump, the Foreign Game Introduction Program, and the Scientific Theory of Wild Animal Introductions

• In Event: (Mis)Understanding Animals? Biology, Epistemic Uncertainty, and Non-Human Animal Management in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

English Abstract

The contemporary hegemony of the discourse of “invasive species” makes willful introductions of non-native species seem to belong to a distant, unenlightened past. Indeed, historians have generally viewed the organized, intentional introduction of non-native species – what contemporaries called “acclimatization” – as a misguided nineteenth-century phenomenon. According to this narrative, acclimatization abruptly lost scientific credibility and popular support with the proliferation of unwanted species, like house sparrows and European starlings in North America, in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet the introduction of new foreign game species – particularly birds – became a core component of America’s twentieth-century wildlife management regime. Indeed, American government biologists spent millions of dollars attempting new animal introductions until the late 1970s, all while articulating sophisticated scientific justifications for acclimatization projects.

I assess the persistence of animal acclimatization and its enduring scientific credibility in America by examining the career of the biologist Nelson Gardiner Bump. Celebrated by the media as America’s “global goose-chaser,” Bump traversed the world for 25 years as head of the federal Foreign Game Introduction Program (FGIP, founded 1948). Ranging as far afield as Argentina, Finland, India, and Japan, Bump investigated over 100 birds for possible introduction to America. He and his colleagues ultimately facilitated the American introduction of hundreds of thousands of individual creatures drawn from several dozen distinct species. Throughout, Bump argued that FGIP was “slow, careful, and scientific,” bringing “reason and order” to the practice of animal acclimatization. Indeed, Bump espoused ecological rationales that legitimated animal acclimatization as a scientific wildlife management technique. While Bump’s acclimatization attempts rarely succeeded, he was largely successful in defending the scientific validity of acclimatization during his career. Thus, his life offers an aperture into the complexities of scientific authority as well as the abilities of animals and nature to defy human control.

Author

• Barrie Blatchford, University of Northern British Columbia