The influencer might be defined as a modern, junked cretin of arrested moral and ethical capacity – with specific skills. Such an individual, for instance, is often able to use technological platforms with aptitude for two mundane purposes: to manipulate the gullible and rake in the cash. The essence of this effort lies in the technology. Drone drumming feeds, instant imaging, updates on the guff and drivel of a visit (probably false) to some venue or location, a product’s claimed merits (almost certainly false) and some scientific proposition (absolutely false).
Sam Jones, who claims to be such an influencer, and a wildlife biologist and environmental scientist to boot, thought it wise to pick up a young wombat, thereby separating it from its distressed mother. The whole episode was, unnaturally, filmed. Even for someone of Jones’s sparse intellect, she at least observed the following: “Momma’s right there and she’s pissed. Let’s let him go.” She makes some effort to beef up her credibility by claiming the following: “I ran, not to rip the joey away from its mother, but from fear that she might attack me.” At the end of the now deleted video, she claims that she did reunite the mother and joey, though did so by essentially making them potential roadkill victims.
Her account remains inconsistent and contradictory, something not helped by her record of images on Instagram displaying an evident, bloodthirsty delight for the hunt. Carcasses of slain animals feature, suggesting a desire to accumulate trophies rather than promoting any keen environmental interest. Jones remains, in that sense, rather traditional: the exotic, the bizarre or the dangerous shall be killed, snapped by camera or just teased for social media purposes. There is no evident awareness about the cruelty inherent in these measures.
The response to Jones in Australia proved heated. A petition seeking deportation was launched, receiving over 40,000 signatures. The Wombat Protection Society expressed shock at the “mishandling of a wombat joey in an apparent snatch for ‘social media likes’.”
Even the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, thought it worth mentioning. “It’s a shocker. You know, a wombat is a slow moving, peaceful animal, and to take a baby wombat from its mum was distressing, quite clearly,” he spoke in a radio interview. He also claimed to have found the video “really distressing”, wondering “what the hell this woman thought she was doing.” Jones herself claims to have been threatened by “thousands” of the irate.
A number of academics from Australian universities tell us, in tepid language via The Conversation, that this sort of behaviour is becoming ever more frequent. “Unfortunately,” they lament, “we are seeing a rise in people directly interacting with wildlife through feeding them or taking risks to get close to them, often driven by the pursuit of social media attention. These interactions can hurt wildlife in many different ways.” They also note that Jones was fortunate not to receive injuries, given that wombats can “weigh up to 40 kilograms and have teeth and claws they can use for defence.” Furthermore, she might (here, the delight is barely concealed) have gotten scabies, given the mange many wombats have caused by the relevant parasitic mite.
The incident does give us some room for pause. Mighty moralism about Australia’s treatment of animals is certainly something to question from the start. Foamy indignation at the behaviour of a visitor offers mighty distraction given Australia’s less than comfortable relationship with its various species. Jones herself alludes to this by pointing out the “treatment of its native wildlife”, which includes the expenditure of “millions of your tax dollars to mass slaughter native Australian animals, as well as Snowy River and Kosciuszko brumbies, wild pigs and numerous deer species.”
Peter Singer, the noted Australian bioethicist and author of the seminal tract Animal Liberation, feels that Jones is on some sensible ground. He takes particular issue with harvesting kangaroos for commercial profit and reducing their numbers as competitors for pasture. He also notes, however, that the destruction of wombats remains less widespread, while also grudgingly conceding that culling pest species that pose a threat to native habitats and wildlife may be necessary.
Jones could also count on partial agreement from Tania Clancy of Wombatised, a volunteer wildlife rescue and rehabilitation group. “Thousands [of wombats] each year are shot, poisoned to suffer, and trapped legally,” she notes. “Landowners rip up wombat burrows with heavy machinery, poison them with fumigation and shoot them whenever they can.”
For a continent that tops the league table of species extinction, indignation at such acts of stupidity and exploitation requires some cooling. The animals of Australia are superficially revered for their singular qualities but their treatment by the human populace has been less than admirable. Be it debatable culling practices, expansive land clearing, the ongoing and insatiable hunger for exporting commodities and the unshakeable power of the mining industry in politics, Mother Nature Down Under has been, and continues to be roughed and violated.
The current federal government also demonstrated an almost head-high contempt in abandoning the creation of an Environmental Protection Agency, something that arose, in large part, from state premiers worried about a puncture in mining profits. Besides, animal species don’t tend to go to the ballot box.
At the very least, the insufferable, trophy craving simpleton who took that wombat joey from its mother for sporting shots brought some attention to the fraught relationship between humans and Australia’s beleaguered animal species.