MANAGING WILDLIFE WITH CONTRACEPTION: WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG? Author(s): Allen T. Rutberg , Ph.D. Source: Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine, 44(4s):S38-S46. 2013. Published By: American Association of Zoo Veterinarians DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1638/1042-7260-44.4S.S38 URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1638/1042-7260-44.4S.S38

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Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine 44(4S): S38–S46, 2013 Copyright 2013 by American Association of Zoo Veterinarians

MANAGING WILDLIFE WITH CONTRACEPTION: WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG? Allen T. Rutberg, Ph.D.

Abstract: Biologists have been testing wildlife contraceptives in the field for nearly a half century. Although effective new contraceptive agents have been identified, new delivery technologies developed, and some success with population management demonstrated, progress in this area should be further along. Why is it taking so long? First, the task is complex. Most drugs and vaccines fail in development. The technical leaps from in vitro to in vivo, from controlled studies to field studies, from effectiveness in individuals to management of populations, are all formidable and frequent failures are inevitable. Testing the long-acting contraceptives required for successful population management demands experiments that take 3–5 yr to complete. Development of wildlife contraceptives has been further hampered by the lack of large-scale investment and the complex and shifting regulatory landscape that often greets novel enterprises. But there has also been focused resistance to the implementation of wildlife contraceptive studies and to the dissemination of results such studies have produced. This phenomenon, which sociologists label ‘‘socially constructed ignorance,’’ has taken a variety of forms including denial of research permits, omission from research reports and management documents, and repetition of misleading or false information in public forums and the media. The persistence and effectiveness of this social resistance suggest that the ethical foundation of wildlife contraception is incomplete. As the institutional affiliations of participants of the 7th International Conference on Fertility Control for Wildlife confirmed, wildlife contraception has its ethical roots in the animal welfare and integrated pest-management communities. Absent from the discussion are the conservation community and the values they represent. To secure societal acceptance of wildlife contraception as a management technique, researchers and advocates for wildlife contraception must address conservation issues and build an ethical foundation that balances concern for individual animals and human needs with concern for the health of biologic communities. Key words: Animal welfare, conservation medicine, immunocontraception, population management, uncomfortable knowledge, undone science, wildlife ethics.

INTRODUCTION By the time the First International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife convened in Philadelphia in 1987, researchers had been conducting laboratory, captive animal, and field trials on wildlife contraception for more than 20 yr. Tests of nonhormonal contraceptives, especially on birds, date back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the research really took off in the 1960s with the development and widespread medical use of steroid contraceptives.27,29,39 During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, steroid contraceptives were tested on a wide variety of species including deer, coyotes, foxes, prairie dogs, exotic cats, wild horses, and others.27 The proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife in 1996 and onward show that wildlife contraception research subsequently became dominated by immunocontraceptives and GnRH From the Center for Animals and Public Policy, TuftsCummings School of Veterinary Medicine, 200 Westboro Road, North Grafton, Massachusetts 01536, USA (Rutberg). Correspondence should be directed to Dr. Rutberg ([email protected]).

and LH agonists, although steroids and novel agents also continued to be explored.7,24,30,51 By the 7th International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife, a great deal of research on wildlife contraception had been conducted; a Google Scholar search using the key words ‘‘wildlife contraception’’ conducted on 24 July 2012 yielded 4,950 hits, a cursory inspection of which indicated that most were on point. Despite half a century of research on many agents and many species, and widespread use to control reproduction in zoos and sanctuaries, management applications of contraception in the field—as defined as successful attempts to control free-ranging populations rather than just treat individuals—barely reach the double digits. The 7th International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife featured a handful of population control successes including half a dozen or so wild horse (Equus caballus) populations, three white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) populations, and two African elephant (Loxodonta africana) populations.9,28,49 Those reports don’t seem like much to show for half a century of research and development. If participants in the seventh iteration of this conference are growing a little

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frustrated, no one would be shocked. So why is it taking so long to see progress? Some of the reasons, familiar to most of the attendees at this conference, are technical, practical, and utterly mundane, and a few of these will be summarized. But there are deeper reasons as well. First, the processes of acquiring and disseminating scientific knowledge are constrained, deflected, and shaped at all levels by constituencies affected by the outcome—and not just the scientists themselves, though scientists may wish it were so, but interest groups, government agencies, and the media. The result may be what sociologists have named, ‘‘undone science,’’ i.e., ‘‘areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored, but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research.’’16 More colorfully and broadly, sociologists write of ‘‘socially constructed ignorance,’’ which in addition to undone science incorporates the socially mediated denial of research findings that may undermine the organizing principles of society, institutions, or particular stakeholder groups.42 This phenomenon has played a significant role in discouraging attempts to introduce contraception as a wildlife management tool. Exploring more deeply, it could be argued further that the glacial pace at which management by wildlife contraception has progressed can be traced to the tangle of ethics and values on which modern wildlife management rests. In particular, wildlife contraception lacks a sufficiently encompassing ethical home in wildlife management. This home will not be easy to locate, but one could venture some suggestions as to what it might look like. Technical, logistic, funding, and regulatory challenges Under any circumstances, drug development is risky, expensive, and time consuming. In one widely cited study of compounds tested by 10 pharmaceutical companies, nearly 80% of drugs failed during human clinical trials;10 another study put the clinical testing failure rate at closer to 90%.32 Many more presumably failed in preclinical testing. Average time in preclinical testing was estimated at about 5 yr followed by about 6 yr of clinical testing.10 So there are reasons to expect a high failure rate and a long time lag from development to approval for wildlife contraception too, even with the research and development resources available to major international pharmaceutical companies.

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Wildlife contraception research and development also operates under its own particular set of constraints. Most obviously, without insurance companies, government entitlement programs, big corporate customers, or wealthy patients to pay for drugs, the potential for commercial application of wildlife contraceptives is very limited. Hence, prospects are dim for finding private investors to offset the formidable costs and risks of drug development. Incorporating the costs of the many failures, out-of-pocket costs of traditional pharmaceutical development and testing have been estimated at US$282 million per approved drug.10 Expensive or not, the regulatory path to new drug approval is fairly clear in most countries. In the United States, wildlife contraception spent many years drifting between agencies.14 It does not fall under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) mandate to regulate vaccines that prevent disease. However, the conditions for manufacture, quality control, record-keeping, and preapproval testing set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are both inconsistent with field testing and use as well as wildly disproportionate to the scale of actual conditions of production and use, even under rules established for minor-use drugs, effectively making the FDA an impenetrable barrier to use.13 In 2006, the regulation of field applications of wildlife contraception finally found its way to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which registers wildlife contraceptives as pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. This is not an ideal fit either. For example, some wild horse advocacy groups have vigorously protested the designation of wild horses as ‘‘pests’’ by the EPA, but the EPA has now registered three wildlife contraceptives as pesticides: OvoControlt (Innolytics, Rancho Santa Fe, California 92607, USA), GonaConTM (USDA National Wildlife Research Center, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521, USA), and ZonaStatHt (Science and Conservation Center, Billings, Montana 59106, USA).14 However, individual states also have their own pesticide registration requirements. The regulatory landscape in the European Union is at least as complex as that of the United States.21 Finally, there are issues with delivery of wildlife contraceptives that don’t exist with people. There are certainly challenges of cost, transport, training, organization, and patient compliance when it comes to delivering medicines to people, especially in developing countries. However, people

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can reasonably be expected to show up at a clinic and take their pills. Necessarily, wild animals are less compliant; in particular, wild animals cannot be expected to make themselves available for repeated treatments. Thus, wildlife contraceptives must be long-acting, which in itself is a challenge and requires multi-year trials to demonstrate multi-year effectiveness.15,18,54 The challenge of how to deliver contraceptives to wildlife, and how to design contraceptives that can be so delivered, has been addressed in every meeting of the International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife, and scientists are still working on it.6,33,45,55 Thus, there is no shortage of perfectly plausible, practical reasons for why wildlife contraception is taking so long to reach full fruition. ‘‘Socially constructed ignorance’’ Since at least the 1980s, sociologists have recognized that some paths in scientific inquiry are not followed and that the reasons why those paths are not followed can be socially interesting and worthy of study.16,41,52 Some science remains ‘‘undone’’ for historical reasons, including professional traditions which may be institutionalized into regulatory frameworks such as the continued reliance in environmental toxicology and associated EPA regulations on simple, controlled experiments measuring the effects of specified concentrations of single chemicals against simple measures of harm, such as mortality. This reductionist approach is still favored over more-holistic ecologic approaches that account for the multiple chemical, biologic, and environmental effects exerted under field conditions, despite growing evidence that such interactions are important.16,17,31 Power and resource asymmetries also affect what science gets done and what doesn’t; government agencies and resource-rich industries play a powerful role in determining the structure of scientific inquiry.19,31 The acquisition, dissemination, and interpretation of knowledge may also be strategically resisted or manipulated by stakeholders who perceive that acceptance of the knowledge may cause them to suffer harm or challenge fundamental principles or beliefs.16 The systematic effort of the tobacco industry in the 1950s and 1960s to ‘‘manufacture doubt’’ about the emerging science connecting smoking to disease is the most notorious case, but other attempts to spread ‘‘strategic ignorance’’ have been asserted.53 Strategies of resistance to such ‘‘uncomfortable knowledge’’ may include denial, i.e., refusal to

acknowledge or engage with information; dismissal, i.e., sufficient engagement with information to find reasons to reject it; and other approaches.42 Tactics of resistance range from simply ignoring existing studies to aggressively attacking the researcher’s motivations and methods, funding contrary studies, offering alternative interpretations without supporting data, or reframing the study’s objectives to make it appear inadequate.53 Deer contraception: a case study in ‘‘uncomfortable knowledge’’: In the author’s experience, the strategies and tactics of resistance to uncomfortable knowledge have been manifest and persistent with respect to the conduct, dissemination, and interpretation of research in deer contraception. A widespread public awareness that deer contraceptives are effective and can control deer populations under some circumstances would threaten one of the fundamental organizational principles of North America wildlife management agencies: that wildlife management and hunting are synonymous.47 The identity of wildlife management and hunting is also understood to be crucial to acceptance of hunting by the public, which supports hunting as a management tool but is far-less supportive of recreational or ‘‘sport’’ hunting which may be perceived as frivolous.37,47 Therefore, public awareness of alternative, nonlethal population management techniques is resisted. Because state wildlife agencies have legal authority over what is done with wildlife, including regulating take and scientific research that involves handling or manipulating wild animals, they are well positioned to suppress research that might yield such uncomfortable knowledge. Several have done so repeatedly with the author’s own research groups and others. Credible applications for field research permits, with no associated request for funding, have been denied or delayed by several state and federal wildlife management agencies. One state agency went so far as to solicit assistance from the Congressional Sportsman’s Caucus to threaten the budget of a federal agency (and major local employer) if it proceeded with a plan to carry out a deer contraception project on its property.25 Other permits have been approved with conditions that made the research infeasible (e.g., a requirement to build a facility to hold each wild deer captured for treatment until the end of a withdrawal period) or changed the research objectives and undermined community support (e.g., by adding needless untreated controls which would then

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reproduce and frustrate population-control efforts).25 In the late 1990s, one state wildlife agency issued an unflattering public report about an ongoing project, without consulting with or even notifying the principal investigators, and subsequently mischaracterized the research’s objectives in publications and public comments to imply erroneously that the research had failed. Another agency simply shut down three ongoing projects, by two different research groups, over the strenuous objections of local officials who were actively participating in the projects. Once the research has been conducted it has been ignored, dismissed, and mischaracterized. It is personally discouraging that the first published paper demonstrating a population reduction associated with contraception in deer,38 which seems consequential, had only been cited 20 times 10 yr later. Even more discouragingly, 16 of the 20 citations were included in papers by researchers who regularly attend the International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife, including the author’s own research group, which accounted for half of the 20 citations (Web of Science, search conducted 27 July 2012). The next such demonstration50 did slightly better with 25 citations, 60% of which were derived from articles published by regular conference attendees. No other publication of data on effects of contraception on deer populations has reached even 10 citations so far, in spite of the fact that they are easily accessible electronically; most were found in the first few pages of a Google Scholar search using the key words, ‘‘deer contraception’’ (search conducted 20 July 2013). The author’s routine review of environmental assessments and policy documents addressing management of deer populations by contraception has found that they cite published models and make unsubstantiated assertions but do not cite any of the existing data published in peer-reviewed journals. It appears that researchers at this conference are speaking mostly to each other rather than having the research disseminated. The media play a key role in presenting and interpreting science for the public.53 Dismissal of contraception is rampant in media quotes. To cite three examples (derived from a Lexis-Nexus search with the keywords ‘‘deer contraception,’’ conducted 27 July 2012): 1) ‘‘As for deer contraception, he said, it is too expensive and ‘doesn’t work here because this is an uncontrolled, freeranging population.’’’ New York Times (USA), 15 February 2008; 2) ‘‘. . .drugs and a vaccine have been created that keep deer from reproducing but

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those are experimental and are still being studied to make sure they are safe and effective.’’ Olathe News (Kansas, USA), 10 February 2010; and 3) ‘‘The deer must be tranquilized and then injected annually with a fertility hormone to control reproduction. The process can cost about $1,000 per deer per year.’’ Island Packet, Hilton Head, South Carolina (USA), 24 April 2008. Dismissals aren’t always factually wrong. However, they are characterized by claims of fact without supporting evidence (quote 1) or they reframe the facts to produce an unwarranted conclusion (quotes 1 and 2). Quote 3 is notable because it referred to the ongoing study on Fripp Island, South Carolina and is either misleading or outright wrong in every respect. In that study, the deer only needed to be captured once for treatment; annual retreatment was not needed; the contraceptive agent, PZP, is not a hormone; and per-deer treatment costs of the study averaged about $500/year for initial capture and treatment and $100–$200 per deer for remote boosting, depending on the contraceptive agent. While publishing such dismissals, the media sometimes draw on misstatements by state wildlife agency representatives in perpetuating a set of myths about immunocontraception. Most notable among these myths is that eating meat from treated animals could cause infertility or hormonal imbalances. The survival of this myth is surely grounded in the widespread public association of contraception with steroids. Yet it has been well understood, documented, and reported for over 20 yr that immunocontraceptives, including GonaCon and ZonaStat, are proteins whose biologic activity is lost during digestion.4,35 Reports of failed attempts to develop oral delivery mechanisms for immunocontraceptives have featured regularly at the International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife.5,12,21,36 Nevertheless, shortly after the 2012 International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife was held, a Midwestern newspaper reported, regarding a public discussion of immunocontraceptives, that ‘‘the DNR fears that the use of drugs on a deer could potentially be harmful to humans who accidentally consume the meat.’’ EPA registration of deer contraceptives was brushed aside, ‘‘. . .because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drug as being safe for humans, DNR does not condone its use’’ (Herald-Times, Bloomington, Indiana, 16 September 2012). As noted above, the FDA has relinquished authority over contraceptives in

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free-ranging wildlife to the EPA which does, indeed, weigh issues of food safety and secondary consumption in its registration review. The myth lives on in the public mind. The gap in the ethical foundation of wildlife contraception It is now widely accepted that the utilitarian consensus underlying traditional wildlife management has broken down. The view that wildlife exists primarily as a resource to be used by people is still widely held but it is far from universal, especially among the urban and suburban public.11,23,37 Stakeholders in wildlife policy conflicts have become far more diverse, mutable, and context-dependent in their attitudes toward wildlife.22 For example, some urbanites whose septic systems have been swamped by beaver, or farmers whose field crops have been devastated by deer (or elephants!), may construe wildlife as pests, as valueless: a ‘‘negativistic’’ view. Those who assume a principled animal-rights position oppose management of any kind based on their belief that animals should live their lives free of human interference, instrumental or otherwise.11,44 Conservationists and ecologists may view wildlife as crucial ecosystem components, or if overabundant or nonnative as dangerous perturbers of the biologic community. Animal welfarists, especially those with roots in the animal-sheltering community, base their views of wildlife on foundational values of care and compassion—sometimes to the extent of establishing what they perceive as a human–animal bond, a companion animal relationship with wild animals. Human–wildlife conflicts are classic ‘‘wicked problems,’’—problems in which different stakeholders frame the issues so differently that common ground for compromise may not exist.42 This is the ethical tangle into which wildlife contraception has been thrust. Perhaps tellingly, wildlife contraception is most commonly advanced as a management tool for species whose status is contested or confused. No one, except for hard-core hunting opponents, is suggesting contraception to control deer in the Wyoming hills; there, the values consensus for deer as useable wildlife remains largely intact. Nor are many proposing the use of contraception to control gray kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) in the Australian outback, which are killed on a large scale for commercial purposes. Rather, contraception is advanced as a solution in the

urban centers and their suburban fringes where the status of deer and kangaroos is ambiguous and contested. Observing the participants of the 2012 International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife and the species they study allows some generalization. Fertility control is being studied for four animal categories: Pets, such as dogs and cats: Pets where sterilization has been advocated as a humane solution to overpopulation by the animal sheltering community since the 1950s.3 Pests: Pests are defined broadly (as EPA does) as animals that are capable of environmental or economic damage (or both), ranging from rodents in rice fields and subway systems to brush-tailed possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) in New Zealand, Indian mongoose (Herpestes auropunctatus) on Okinawa, and feral pigs (Sus spp.) everywhere. While there may be ethical undertones for animals perceived largely as pests, including public revulsion at mass killing, contraception research is mostly driven by pragmatic concerns. Lethal control isn’t working adequately and more tools are needed. Pets that are pests: Feral cats, stray dogs, and wild horses straddle the line between companions and nuisances, again depending on the context and the observer’s perspective. All are the subject of intense policy conflicts and major fertility control research efforts. Nonsurgical fertility control for cats and dogs even has its own organization, the Alliance for Contraception of Cats and Dogs (www.acc-d.org/), as well as a major foundation specifically supporting this work (Found Animals, which sponsors the Michelson Prize and Grants, http://michelson. foundanimals.org/). Surgical sterilization has worked well to control dog overpopulation in many parts of the developed world, but in the developing world for free-roaming cats and dogs a cheaper and less labor-intensive solution is needed. Wild horses are in a class of their own for cultural ambivalence, being variously perceived as native wildlife, invasive nonnative wildlife, agricultural pest, genetic resource, cultural resource, work animal, companion animal, and more.43,48 Society can’t even agree about what to call these horses, wild or feral. It is no coincidence that contraception research and management is by far the most advanced for wild horses. Pests that are pets: When nuisance status is leavened with the potential for human–animal bonding, through mutual adaptation of human

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and animal behavior, population control through contraception offers the potential for an acceptable compromise solution. Cuteness (e.g., rabbits, brush-tailed possums, and Bambi) is one predisposing factor. But so also is the tendency of some individuals to bring wild animals into the domestic domain, such as those who reliably feed deer or Canada geese (Branta canadensis) and thereby encourage mutual dependency. There are individuals who, having bonded with ‘‘their’’ deer through feeding them and naming them, felt emotionally compelled to move out of their long-time homes when the community voted to control deer populations by killing them. For reasons discussed below, this is not a healthy situation from many viewpoints but it does invite contraception to play a role in management. Although the pet–pest axis explains nearly all fertility control research, it also explains the fragility of the ethical foundation of wildlife contraception. Virtually absent from this discussion are conservation values. Thus, contraception researchers have neglected the values and the people who are most influential in how society perceives, treats, and manages wildlife. It shows in conference participation: wildlife damage control and humane organizations were well represented at the 2012 International Conference on Fertility Control in Wildlife, but not a single state wildlife management agency representative registered or attended. In part, this is a case of ‘‘denial,’’ as described in the previous section, but the absence of the North American conservation community betrays a troubling gap in the ethical foundation of wildlife fertility control. How can conservation fit in? Overcoming the ethical stumbling block: For historical and cultural reasons, the wildlife protection community remains deeply divided over the question of whether the highest ethical duty is to protect the well-being and integrity of the individual animal—or the well-being and integrity of populations, species, and the biologic community. The author and others have advanced the pragmatic argument that animal protectionists and conservationists have more common interests in protecting wildlife and wildlife habitat than they have disagreements, and many opportunities exist for collaboration.37,40,46 But a focus on policy conflicts over wedge issues surrounding hunting, trapping, and other forms of lethal control, exacerbated by vehement attacks from both sides based on inflexible moral principles, frustrates attempts to seek common ground.

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There is no reason, however, why the individual–population divide has to be the ethical line in the sand across which battle lines are drawn. For wildlife contraception to succeed, and perhaps for wildlife protection to succeed, an ethical foundation within which both individuals and populations are valued is needed. Policy debates should be conducted over the balance of individual and population interests rather than fought across a moral chasm of opposing principles. Two ethical frameworks for accomplishing future success are proposed: Conservation medicine: With its roots in veterinary medicine, conservation medicine is a relatively new discipline founded on the principle that human, animal, and environmental health are closely linked.1,2 Closely related to the ‘‘one health’’ paradigm, conservation medicine distinguishes itself with its emphasis on promoting ecosystem health as a means to promote the health of all creatures, human and otherwise. Clinicians and researchers practicing conservation medicine investigate the links between animal and human disease and environmental disturbance, pollution, and the global wildlife trade and seek changes in policies and practices that will combat disease in an integrated fashion. Conservation medicine is a comfortable home for wildlife contraception because both individual and population health are valued by practitioners, and veterinarians (and public health officers in parallel fields) often must make judgment calls about the relative importance of individual versus herd or population health. There remains an ethical dimension to deciding outcomes where individual and population interests conflict, but this is more a utilitarian calculation than a locus of moral identity. Moreover, the health metaphor is attractive to the public and politically potent, and framing wildlife contraception in terms of population and individual health would broaden its appeal and its constituency. Wildlife guardianship: This proposal extends to the well-being of individual animals the concept of stewardship implicit in Leopold’s radical idea that ‘‘. . .a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.’’34 Leopold already affirms for wildlife and habitat ‘‘. . .their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.’’ A ‘‘guardianship’’ ethic adds accents of care and compassion to the moral concept of stewardship20 and to Leopold’s assertions that the land

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and its inhabitants have intrinsic value. Under a concept of stewardship, society has a moral responsibility to respect those values and to act to serve the interests of the land and the wellbeing of its wild inhabitants, at an individual and community level. As with conservation medicine, an ethic based on wildlife guardianship would accomplish the goal of wrapping individual and community interests in a single ethical framework within which it could be safely argued that a the balance lies without drawing deep moral divides. And as with conservation medicine, a wildlife guardianship ethic might also help to focus better on some of the environmental manipulations, from suburban development to rainforest destruction, that are the underlying causes of what society characterizes as wildlife overpopulation.46

CONCLUSIONS Compared to changing human value systems, drug development is easy. But perhaps researchers do not need to reframe completely the ethical fundamentals of the wildlife protection community open dialogues about wildlife contraception with colleagues in conservation. It is time for wildlife contraception researchers to start looking for situations where their tools might be uniquely useful in attaining explicit conservation goals, including habitat protection and restoration. It is probably not a coincidence that field applications of wildlife contraception are spreading most rapidly for African elephants.8,26 Sometimes pests but not pets and valued for many reasons, it could be argued that African elephants have benefitted most from contraceptive management in South Africa because its use has been explicitly tied to conservation objectives. These conservation objectives include conservation of elephants themselves: because of their elevated ethical and endangered status, and the association of elephant-killing with the commercial poaching that is threatening their existence, killing elephants as a management tool is hard to explain to the public. Contraception acts as a reversible management tool that leaves the elephants alive and largely untroubled, along with the genetic resources they contain. Beyond the elephants themselves is the biologic community that growing elephant numbers might threaten; controlling elephant numbers with contraception protects their habitat and the other wild species dependent upon it. Thus, the ethical foundation of African

elephant contraception encompasses humane values and conservation values and presents a road forward. It is time to follow the elephants.

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