0:00 What if one animal had all the power
0:02 to protect millions of lives?
0:05 And what if that animal
0:06 was one of the most common
0:07 birds in the country?
0:09 That sort of thing happens
0:10 more than you think.
0:12 But sometimes you don't realize that
0:14 until they're gone.
0:16 China found this out the hard way.
0:18 When they went to battle
0:19 with the Eurasian sparrow.
0:21 And by winning the battles,
0:23 they lost the war.
0:25 This is China vs Sparrows.
0:35 Hi, I'm DDanielle Dufault
0:37 and you're watching Animalogic.
0:39 Today we're talking about
0:40 one of the most devastating cases
0:43 where people tried to
0:44 ecoengineer ecosystems
0:46 for their advantage
0:48 and failed
0:49 more than failed, really.
0:51 They caused an environmental collapse
0:53 that killed millions of people.
0:56 The year was 1958.
0:58 The Chinese government
1:00 under Mao Zedong
1:02 launched the Great Leap Forward,
1:03 a massive campaign
1:05 aimed at transforming the country
1:07 from an agrarian society
1:09 into an industrial superpower.
1:11 The idea was to boost steel and food
1:13 production beyond
1:15 what the West could do.
1:16 It was a noble goal,
1:18 but it had one gigantic problem.
1:21 It included a nationwide sparrow cull.
1:25 Questions like that, that really keep
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3:35 If you're wondering how the heck
3:37 the death of sparrows
3:38 would help them industrialize,
3:40 you're not alone.
3:42 After all, sparrows
3:43 are some of the most common
3:45 birds across North America
3:46 and Western Europe,
3:48 so surely they're not the problem.
3:51 The argument was that sparrows,
3:53 specifically
3:54 the Eurasian tree sparrow,
3:56 ate too much grain
3:58 and decimated their farms.
4:00 These little birds are close
4:01 relatives of the house sparrow.
4:03 the adorablypudgy bird
4:05 you might see
4:06 around your neighborhood,
4:07 but this tree sparrow
4:09 is even tinier than the bird balls
4:11 that have taken over
4:12 almost every city in the world.
4:14 A house sparrow
4:16 is around 30g,
4:17 or about the weight
4:18 of an ounce of water.
4:20 The tree sparrow weighs
4:21 just 20g,
4:23 which means a cup of tea weighs
4:25 the same as 12 tree sparrows combined.
4:29 You can tell them
4:29 apart by a couple of telltale signs.
4:32 Tree sparrows
4:33 have a black patch in their cheek.
4:35 Well, house sparrows have solid
4:37 gray cheeks.
4:38 A house sparrow
4:39 also has a gray cap,
4:41 and the tree sparrow
4:42 has a chocolate cap.
4:44 They can eat a wide
4:45 variety of food.
4:47 They eat a lot of bugs,
4:48 especially when they're breeding
4:50 to feed the chicks,
4:52 but they also eat
4:53 a lot of grain.
4:55 Which leads us back
4:57 to the main story.
4:58 Because of their grain
5:00 consumption, the Chinese government
5:02 bunched them up with rats,
5:04 flies, and mosquitoes as pests
5:06 to be eliminated in a campaign
5:08 called
5:10 the Four Pests Campaign.
5:12 You'd think that
5:13 they’d give it a catchier name.
5:15 So was their argument legit?
5:17 Do sparrows really eat
5:19 that much?
5:20 Let's do the math.
5:22 According to the Chinese government,
5:24 each sparrow eat approximately
5:26 2 kilograms of grain annually,
5:29 multiplied by millions of birds.
5:31 Officials believed this meant
5:33 a loss of thousands of tons of grains.
5:36 They could feed many hungry mouths.
5:39 To a degree,
5:40 this is plausible.
5:41 There are billions of sparrows
5:43 in China, and their total combined
5:45 grain consumption is massive.
5:48 But as we mentioned earlier,
5:50 their diets are much more varied
5:52 than what they thought,
5:53 especially in farmland
5:55 where there's plenty of bugs
5:57 full of juicy proteins,
5:59 and a lot of those bugs they eat
6:01 are even more voracious
6:03 crop eaters than sparrows.
6:05 We're talking
6:06 locusts, grasshoppers,
6:08 caterpillars, and beetles.
6:11 A single tree sparrow can eat over
6:12 100 insects a day.
6:15 When you add up all the grain sparrows
6:17 saved by controlling insects,
6:19 their grain consumption
6:21 is actually a net positive.
6:23 Or in other words,
6:24 if you have sparrows around,
6:26 you produce
6:27 more food than if you don't.
6:28 Unfortunately,
6:30 they didn't know that yet.
6:32 China declared war
6:34 on sparrows.
6:36 This campaign
6:36 against sparrows mobilized
6:38 nearly the entire population.
6:41 Schools, factories,
6:43 neighborhoods, and military
6:44 units were all enlisted
6:46 to fight the misunderstood avian foe.
6:50 The effort was
6:51 promoted through propaganda posters,
6:54 public rallies,
6:55 and newspaper stories
6:57 portraying the sparrow
6:58 as an enemy of the people.
7:00 The tactics were widespread
7:02 and brutal.
7:04 People climbed trees
7:05 to destroy sparrow nests,
7:07 smashed eggs,
7:08 and killed chicks.
7:10 Children were assigned
7:11 to guard fields,
7:13 and competitions were held to see
7:15 which groups could kill the most.
7:17 Birds.
7:18 One of the most famously
7:19 cruel strategies
7:20 was the noise campaign.
7:22 Citizens gathered in open areas,
7:24 banging pots,
7:25 pans, drums and gongs.
7:28 This created a wall of noise
7:30 to keep sparrows in flight
7:31 by making them too scared to land.
7:34 The birds would eventually collapse
7:36 from exhaustion
7:37 and fall to their deaths.
7:39 These noise assaults
7:40 lasted hours,
7:42 often involving thousands of participants
7:44 at a time.
7:46 We spoke with Professor Judith Shapiro,
7:48 an expert in China's
7:50 environmental policies
7:52 and one of the leading experts
7:53 on China's war on sparrows.
7:56 What was fascinating to me about that
7:59 campaign was the way,
8:02 everybody of a certain
8:04 age was involved in it.
8:05 When I was writing a book called
8:07 Mao's War Against Nature,
8:09 I simply, for that
8:11 piece of the book,
8:11 are simply able to find anybody
8:14 who is aged, say, 60 and over,
8:16 and ask them
8:17 if they participated in that campaign.
8:19 And they all had stories and memories
8:22 and those stories and memories were,
8:25 I would say,
8:26 in some ways a bit joyful,
8:28 but also a little wistful,
8:30 because the little kids
8:32 were taken off school
8:33 and the factories were closed,
8:35 and everybody went out together
8:37 and banged on pots and pans
8:39 and made great big noises.
8:41 The sparrows were not able to roost,
8:43 and then they would fall and die,
8:45 or the little kids were given, like
8:47 the equivalent of a penny
8:49 for every dead sparrow
8:50 that they brought in.
8:51 And you could see trucks
8:53 driving away full of sparrows.
8:55 So generally there was
8:57 this feeling of almost like a holiday,
9:00 to get rid of the sparrows.
9:02 But then occasionally
9:03 you met somebody saying, I don't know.
9:06 There's actually a famous little video clip
9:08 of the woman that she says,
9:10 I don't know what the sparrow did
9:12 to make Chairman Mao so pissed off,
9:15 she says, and she seems a little sad.
9:17 This happened all over the country,
9:20 and the results were catastrophic.
9:23 According to official estimates,
9:24 up to 1 billion
9:26 sparrows were killed
9:27 during the campaign.
9:29 In some regions,
9:30 the species was pushed
9:31 to the brink of extinction,
9:33 and in just a few months,
9:35 local sparrow populations
9:37 collapsed across China.
9:39 At the time,
9:40 the extermination was celebrated
9:42 as a major victory.
9:44 Piles of dead
9:45 sparrows were displayed
9:46 in public squares,
9:48 and individuals were rewarded
9:50 for their participation.
9:51 It was an ecological tragedy
9:54 that would soon turn
9:55 into a human tragedy.
9:58 Farmers quickly
9:59 found out about the super important
10:00 role sparrows played
10:02 in farmland ecosystems
10:04 without one of their
10:05 main predators around,
10:07 the crop eating insect populations,
10:09 especially locusts, exploded.
10:12 Then they went to town on the farms
10:14 and devastated them.
10:16 Locust swarms in particular,
10:18 grew to devastating sizes,
10:20 stripping entire fields
10:22 of rice, wheat, and millet
10:24 within hours.
10:26 Birds of prey
10:27 that fed on sparrows declined too.
10:30 It was a full on
10:31 environmental collapse.
10:34 The timing couldn't have been worse.
10:36 This happened at a time
10:37 when other failed government
10:39 policies had led to food shortages.
10:42 Ecological and political factors
10:44 combined
10:45 to create the Great Chinese Famine,
10:47 one of the greatest man
10:49 made disasters in history.
10:51 Tens of millions of people
10:53 died.
10:55 Some studies show that in areas
10:57 where sparrows were abundant
10:58 before the campaign
11:00 suffered the steepest declines
11:02 in food production.
11:03 Rice production
11:04 went down by 3% and wheat yields
11:07 shrunk by 1.5%.
11:10 This might not seem like a lot,
11:12 but since there were already massive
11:14 food production issues,
11:16 it certainly worsened the famine.
11:19 But these kinds of grand
11:20 events rarely have just one cause.
11:23 Ecosystems, as well as human politics,
11:26 are very complex.
11:28 To make the connection
11:30 between the sparrow killing campaign
11:32 and 50 million unnecessary deaths,
11:35 I think that's,
11:37 an oversimplification
11:39 is that they were still sending
11:40 large amounts of grain
11:42 to their friends
11:43 in Africa and the third world.
11:46 You know, global
11:47 communist, solidarity.
11:49 I think that kind of structural policy
11:53 is a huge factor.
11:55 Natural disasters also play
11:57 some kind of role.
11:58 By 1960, the government
12:00 quietly removed sparrows
12:02 from the four pests list,
12:04 replacing them with bedbugs
12:06 as a new target.
12:08 And having learned
12:09 about the great importance of sparrows,
12:11 China even imported
12:13 sparrows from the Soviet Union
12:15 to help restore
12:16 ecological balance and control
12:18 insect populations.
12:20 The famine was not only a famine,
12:23 a human famine,
12:24 it was also an ecosystem collapse
12:27 because once
12:28 there was no food,
12:29 people were desperately
12:31 eating anything.
12:32 So the people that I knew very,
12:34 very well remembered
12:36 that they used
12:37 to pull bark off the trees
12:38 to try to get some nutrition there.
12:41 We should really think
12:42 about this famine
12:43 as not only a human catastrophe,
12:45 but also an ecosystem catastrophe.
12:48 The war on sparrows
12:49 wasn't the only time
12:50 ideological policies
12:52 without consideration
12:53 for the environment has led
12:55 to human catastrophe.
12:57 In the Soviet Union,
12:59 the virgin lands campaign
13:00 tried to expand
13:01 agricultural production
13:03 by plowing vast areas
13:05 of grassland in Kazakhstan,
13:07 Siberia and the Volga region.
13:10 It seemed like a good idea at first,
13:13 but the project soon backfired.
13:15 The destruction of native vegetation
13:17 exposed the soil to wind erosion.
13:20 This led to enormous dust storms
13:22 similar to those
13:23 in the American Dust Bowl.
13:25 The fertility of the soil
13:27 declined and harvests collapsed,
13:30 leaving the USSR
13:31 with chronic grain shortages.
13:34 Today, farmers
13:35 in Asia and North America
13:37 are attacking pikas and prairie dogs,
13:39 respectively.
13:41 Prairie dogs are accused
13:42 of eating the cows grass
13:44 and building burrows
13:45 that might injure the cows.
13:47 Their numbers are shrinking,
13:49 and this negatively affects
13:51 populations of burrowing owls
13:53 and ferrets
13:53 that depend on their burrows.
13:56 In parts of China,
13:57 the charming inspiration
13:58 for Pikachu is unfairly
14:00 considered a modern pest.
14:03 There's this wonderful little rodent
14:05 in the highlands of Tibet,
14:07 in the Himalayas called a pika.
14:10 It's a completely adorable.
14:12 The Chinese are still pouring
14:13 rodenticide into all of their burrows,
14:16 because they think
14:18 that the cattle will break their legs
14:21 if they step in the burrows.
14:23 But actually,
14:25 the scientists who study
14:26 these guys have shown that the burrows
14:29 create a sponge like sort of effect
14:32 on the grasslands,
14:33 and it's actually really beneficial
14:37 for a water retention,
14:39 which is very much needed,
14:40 because that's where the headwaters
14:43 of the major rivers of China,
14:44 India, Nepal all lie.
14:47 So this is another example.
14:48 You know,
14:49 we haven't learned our lessons,
14:51 on these things.
14:52 So please don't mess
14:54 with the soil and protect the species
14:56 that keep our ecosystem in balance.
14:59 And don't buy into
15:00 oversimplified narratives
15:02 where a single species is
15:04 labeled as an enemy.
15:05 Complex problems
15:07 rarely have single species,
15:08 villains, or quick fixes.
15:11 They demand long
15:12 term solutions.
15:14 China's war on sparrows
15:16 lives on as a cautionary tale.
15:18 Bold action without science
15:20 and foresight risks sowing
15:22 the seeds of its own failure.
15:30 So what should we talk about next?
15:31 Please let me know in the comments
15:33 and don't forget to subscribe
15:34 for new episodes every week.
15:36 Thanks for watching.
15:38 See ya and take care.
