The last male northern white rhino

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/12/last-male-northern-white-rhino

by Red_Tarsius • 11 years ago

193 133 11 years ago

bargl• 11 years ago

Does anyone know if they have tried artificial insemination and if so why it hasn't worked?

dm28• 11 years ago

They can but it's risky and there are new challenges with different animals. The process isn't perfect, the animals might die: https://www.google.com/search?q=white+rhino+IVF

It's also not been considered too urgent since they have the sperm and eggs already, they can always put the baby in a Southern White Rhino.

You must also consider the fate of that animal and the security it would require. It might be better to let them go extinct, make a big deal about it, then bring them back. Plus if they did it this way they would get much more recognition verses if they saved the species with a few still living.

artursapek• 11 years ago

It's also not been considered too urgent since they have the sperm and eggs already, they can always put the baby in a Southern White Rhino.

Source? Why is the Guardian article framing Sudan as the species' last chance if this is the case?

snowpalmer• 11 years ago

Somewhat of a relief to read this. As much as I have zero connection with these animals I'd rather not see them go extinct.

im3w1l• 11 years ago

They will have their genomes sequenced, as will the frozen remains of 12 more rhinos. Hopefully we could be able to revive the species later.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rhino-money-2015...

dm28• 11 years ago

What's the relationship between "genome sequencing" and IVF?

This quote from that article was interesting to me, I had always assumed that mammal reproductive systems were relatively similar: "The reproductive system of rhinos is very complex and there is still so much we do not know,"

wuschel2• 11 years ago

There is a start-up that tries to eliminate "the $750 million illegal rhino horn poaching trade by growing rhino horns made from rhino DNA and 3D printed keratin".

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Pembient).

31reasons3• 11 years ago

People who are crazy enough to consume rhino horn for any purpose will discard this attempt as "fake rhino horn".

george88b• 11 years ago

Not if it is indistinguishable from the real thing and they have no idea as to its origins.

wuschel2• 11 years ago

I agree. The trick will to i) undercut rhino horn prices and ii) make it undistinguishable from the original. Quite a challenge, but I like the idea.

rdmcfee• 11 years ago

Maybe it's more a lack of access to modern scientific knowledge than 'craziness'.

manigandham• 11 years ago

Would people crazy enough to consume rhino horn even know real vs "fake" horn?

dluan• 11 years ago

Their idea is that they'll dump their product into places where rhino horns shows up (e.g. in hair conditioner in SE Asia), which would then bring prices down for the real thing. Rhino horn is mainly keratin with extra hormones, which can be readily recreated.

It's really fascinating, and similar to the arms race in detecting purity levels in drugs. Also, mobs and stuff too make it pretty exciting and non-typical 'startup' work.

cgh• 11 years ago

It more or less worked with bear gall bladders. Where I live, black bear poaching for gall bladder export to China was a major issue. Now the Chinese breed black bears on farms for this purpose (the farm conditions are another matter - predictably horrible). Black bears are still poached but not at the same rates.

To the Chinese, consuming these things (rhino horns, bear gall bladders) isn't crazy. It's more or less mainstream, though of course it has zero scientific credibility beyond the placebo effect.

laichzeit0• 11 years ago

I'm by no means an expert on this but I live in South Africa and we like to hunt game. The guys that I work with are regularly at game farms. One complaint they keep repeating is that game farmers don't want to own rhino because of many reasons, some of which (a) they are expensive (b) they are high risk (c) there is little return on investment (no coming here and looking at them on safari is not enough). High risk, expensive investments with little to no return are not a good deal. Making the sale of rhino horn legal is one way you could create the incentive to breed/keep these animals on their farms and also push up the supply of horns making it less profitable to poach.

There are entire farms where crocodiles are bred just for their skin. People like crocodile skin, they make shoes and crap from them. Some people think rhino horn makes their dicks work. Ok fair enough, lets make a shitload of horns.

glibgil• 11 years ago

"I live in South Africa and we like to hunt game... Some people think rhino horn makes their dicks work."

Checks out. This guy is from South Africa.

fixxer2• 11 years ago

You raise an interesting point.

I've thought about this with respect to the Oryx, which has been extinct in the wild since the ~1920s, but found a niche on game farms in Texas and Argentina. Now, hunting the Oryx is illegal in the United States and I've wondered how long until the animal goes extinct. At $4000 to $7000 to hunt, it was a lucrative trade.

I would guess that the issue with rhino/elephant would be resource management of a herd that does not hit breeding age for quite a few years. Of course, at these prices, that could work out.

Personally, I think the Asian horn powder market is barbaric.

LordKano• 11 years ago

Exactly!

We won't see the extinction of the chicken, cow or pig as long as there is an incentive to keep them alive.

Rhino farming would make it more profitable and thus more likely to protect them and keep them breeding.

Lawtonfogle2• 11 years ago

Consider cows. We eat a lot of cows. In a few years, we would make cows go extinct. Except we also breed a lot of cows so that it doesn't happen.

While many animals are far harder to raise than cows, the difficulty results in lower numbers and thus increased rarity which thus increases the price of the animal once brought to maturity. Any animal that is risking extinction from being hunted should be sufficiently desirable to make this equation balance out to a sufficient population of the animal being raised.

The only issue I really see is that in the long term this will likely lead to such species being slowly domesticated.

dm28• 11 years ago

Here are some approximate rhino population levels as of 2013: http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/state-of-the-rhino-2013

The Southern White Rhino has a population of about 20,000 (Endangered).

TIL about the Woolly Rhino: http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/extinct-woolly-rhino

Would it even be responsible to save the Northern White Rhino right now? Maybe wait a few years, let the current ones die off, then breed several of them using Southern White Rhino surrogates could be one plan.

wbhart• 11 years ago

If they could use southern Rhinos as surrogates, doesn't that imply the southern and northern white rhinos are the same species? So we are not talking about the extinction of a species here, only one less habitat for a species? (Not that this somehow makes it acceptable of course.)

dm28• 11 years ago

I was looking up the differences in them a few minutes ago and there really isn't any, so much so that I'm not concerned with losing the Northern White Rhino sub-species. It's not a good thing, but we do have the required pieces to bring them back and if we don't then there is an identical animal which still has a decent sized population.

I think the tolerance between species is highly variable, but "Fetuses of the Giant Panda have been grown in the womb of a cat by intercurrently inserting panda and cat embryos into the cat womb." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy

However, wikipedia says: "Following the phylogenetic species concept, recent research has suggested the northern white rhinoceros may be an altogether different species, rather than a subspecies of white rhinoceros, in which case the correct scientific name for the former is Ceratotherium cottoni. Distinct morphological and genetic differences suggest the two proposed species have been separated for at least a million years."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rhinoceros#Northern_white...

goodcanadian• 11 years ago

Surrogacy is simply using the womb. It is not interbreeding, so it does not necessarily imply they are the same species.

There are many definitions of species. If they are able to interbreed and create viable (i.e. non-sterile) offspring, they might be considered to be the same species. However, there are cases where offspring are viable, but less fit for a variety of reasons. In this case, many biologists would still consider them separate.

URSpider94• 11 years ago

Not going to dig up a cite right now, but I'm pretty sure that females of one species have successfully gestated embryos of another species, if they are reasonably closely related.

The distinction being that in surrogacy, there is no requirement to mix DNA to make viable offspring. There are likely immunological compatibility concerns at the placental boundary.

Ok, here's the cite http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy

bandrami• 11 years ago

The definition of "species" varies based on the biological specialty you're talking about (it's the least arbitrary of the taxa, but it still is kind of arbitrary). Cladists/geneticists tend to have a view close to the one you mention ("interbreeding with viable non-sterile offspring defines a species"), but even they will say that definition gets too simplistic. Behavioral biologists generally have a more stringent definition of "species" that involves the population's ecological niche.

But, either way, surrogacy is not breeding; it would be a northern egg and sperm implanted in a southern rhino.

jader201• 11 years ago

Is there a story leading up to this one? I guess I was looking for answers to questions like:

- At what point did Sudan become the last male northern white rhino?

- Were similar conservation and breeding efforts done on the previous male northern white rhinos?

- If so, why did those fail (for both conservation and breeding)?

- How far back were conservation and breeding efforts executed and failed, leading up to the last one?

- Is this a case of hunting efforts out-pacing diligent conservation and breeding efforts, or was there not enough education and funding for truly diligent conservation and breeding efforts?

Unfortunately, the goal of this article seems to be to strike at the readers' emotions vs. present a factual story of the past and present. Not saying the former is bad, just that I was hoping for more of the latter.

svl• 11 years ago

There's eight links of "related content" underneath this article. Not all about this particular species, but pretty easy to filter through to see what's directly related:

In 2007, there were 14 of these rhinos left, 4 wild and 10 in captivity: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/mar/04/conservat... - this article also cited a number of 30 back in 2000.

In October 2014, the second-to-last male died at the relatively young age of 34, leaving just 6 and removing the last realistic hope for breeding: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/18/northern-...

In December 2014, the next-to-last male died, of old age, leaving just 5: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/15/northern-...

It's painting a pretty dismal picture altogether. I guess conservation efforts were too little, too late, with the remaining population already too small and too aged to ever offer much hope for success. :(

Red_Tarsius• 11 years ago

The article frames man-made extinction as unethical toward animals. The real problem is the diminishing biodiversity. Every time a species goes extinct, we – as well as ALL future scientists – lose invaluable sources of data.

As one door closes an opportunity is forever lost. The effects of man-made extinctions reverberate through time and fill the pool of unreachable truths (Hofstadter).

It's unethical toward the whole human race as well.

repsilat• 11 years ago

Thankfully people are at work sequencing the DNA of the rhino so that we don't lose all of that data.

Of course, there's much we won't get back. There was no doubt a huge amount of variation in the historical population of the rhinos that just isn't present in the handful that remain.

toufka• 11 years ago

The DNA itself isn't sufficient. It's not the working system. You'd never know that this protein does X, if you've never seen an animal that can do X. And expression outside of it's original system (the organism) will hardly guarantee that it performs X.

The biodiversity argument is not a warm and touchy-feely one, but it is certainly an economic and social one that should only enhance the touchy-feely arguments of saving a precious animal. A rhino is a 3 billion year old piece of technology that we were gifted a glimpse of. One that we yet have a lot yet to learn from. And we, as species, smelted down that technology to make a ring or necklace. Imagine if a future civilization a billion years more advanced bestowed their version of the iPhone to us, and we melted it to extract the shiny gold... what fools.

guard-of-terra3• 11 years ago

We shoud devise ourselves to collecting as much cell cultures as possible. Then we do not lose information and might as well recreate this diversity in the future.

For example, Siberia will really like to get rhinos, mammoths and other large animals back, and it is possible to breed them from existing warm-climate ones. And there's a lot of space for them to thrive.

saidajigumi• 11 years ago

Then we do not lose information and might as well recreate this diversity in the future.

This is an understandable position, but difficult in practice. We're losing "information" in a lot of other ways as well. Habitat destruction is probably the most obvious part of that for many species. It's not enough to have a genome without knowledge of what I'll call that genome's "context of relevance". Which amounts to a vast web of climate, local environmental history, other organisms in that context, and so on. All of that will likewise affect any given organism's epigenetic expression, something else that a naive recording of genetic data will miss.

Likewise, we're destroying what amounts to animal "culture". Go read Elizabeth Marshall's The Tribe of Tiger[1], esp. the part that describes the extremely interesting relationship between the Bushmen tribes of the Kalahari desert and the resident prides of lions.

As far as we can manage, it's still best to preserve as much as possible of our "archives of life" in living form vs. recorded on media somewhere.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Tiger-Elizabeth-Marshall-Thomas/...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God

shaneofalltrad• 11 years ago

Another thing to factor in all of this is micro-fauna; parasite resistance and symbiotic parasite loads that we can not replace. If we bring back any of these, we need to insure a way to offer them resistance to new disease, and offer them symbiotic micro-fauna that their bodies can handle, so they do not just die of internal disease and get eaten alive by what would normally be a good bacteria to say a modern mammal.

Lorento2• 11 years ago

What kind of information would we lose, besides information about the extinct species themselves? For example, are there unsolved questions in science that could be solved if we still had a specimen of a missing species? I don't see that it's interesting to study an extinct species for its own sake, since we would be lost in regret at not still having dinosaurs, etc. too.

gohrt4• 11 years ago

Many species have unique biochemical/mechanical features, which are interesting and possibly usable in other technologies.

rangibaby• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home

forrestthewoods• 11 years ago

If I were living in abject poverty and someone told me that if I killed an animal and sawed off it's horn they'd get me $300,000 I would probably murder that animal.

I view poaching as a poverty issue. Poachers are largely in poverty and buyers of animal goods are largely in cultures with major poverty issues. Yes some rich people in those cultures spend outrageous sums of money on items, but I contest that if you eliminate poverty the majority of these issues are also eliminated.

sharp11• 11 years ago

Poachers are not largely in poverty. Poachers are primarily large, well-funded criminal syndicates, although they do (sometimes) use impoverished locals for their hunting ability and knowledge of local conditions.

The boom in trade in rhino horn, elephant ivory, etc. has been largely fueled by increasing incomes in China and elsewhere. It is not the result of poverty.

Lawtonfogle2• 11 years ago

Think of a fast food place. The people making the most money are the well funded groups running it (the corporations and to a lesser extent the franchise owners). But the day to day operations are only possible by the hoards of workers who would often rather be at a different job but are there because of economic necessity.

Those who benefit the most from poaching are the well funded criminals. But the locals do benefit, the well funded criminals just ensure the locals only benefits as much as needed to ensure they still get their own big payday.

If the locals weren't benefitting at all, it wouldn't end all poaching, but it would have a significant effect. If instead the locals benefitted from stopping poaching, it would have an even greater effect.

Consider the case of control animal hunts where big game hunters pay to hunt the infertile old elephants who are still consuming resources that could otherwise go to the herd. The money spent helps the local economy, including to help pay for protection of the younger fertile elephants, and it helps the herd by culling the older elephants (my understanding is that the older ones interfere with the fertile elephants mating, there could be some benefit to having older herd leaders who are infertile, so it isn't a simple calculation).

agapos• 11 years ago

I wonder what would happen if a certain "Poachers' testicles are the best aphrodisiacs." rumour were to spread...

tehchromic2• 11 years ago

Poverty has many forms.

gohrt4• 11 years ago

use impoverished locals for their hunting ability and knowledge of local conditions.

That's what GP said. The people doing the dirty work are in poverty.

patcon2• 11 years ago

Hm. You've made me realize that the high cost of poaching (getting shot on sight) makes poachers less likely to even try to avoid killing the animal. What if we made it "legal" or forgivable to tranq and remove the horn, but kept the massive punishment (jail or shot on sight) for killing animals like this? Would that change the motivations, at least theoretically. (Yes, I admit, it's hard to imagine a poacher having the skills the tranquilize and properly remove a horn without injuring the animal...)

I mean, if we think of the rhinos and horns like a fleecy flock of sheep in a commons, it's like we're telling people who want to shear the sheep that they will be shot on sight. This boosts the price of wool, and encourages people to shoot the sheep and quickly skin it. Otherwise, there is no way to get any wool ever. Seems like there must be a way to encourage a more long-term approach of shearing the sheep and leaving it to produce more wool and more sheep...

erroneousfunk• 11 years ago

This has already been thought of: http://thewildlife.wbur.org/2014/10/15/dehorning-rhinos-a-wh... It's not the best solution -- rhino horns grow back slowly, poachers don't want to wait around for years with a flock of rhinos, and it makes the rhinos less able to do their thing in the wild.

eosrei2• 11 years ago

The impending extinction of the Northern White Rhinos is discussed in chapter three "Leopard-skin Pillbox Hat" of the book Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. Yes, that Douglas Adams. It's his only non-fiction.

According to the book, the primary use for the horns is to make jewelery. There were thousands of Northern White Rhinos in the early 1900s, 1,000 in 1980, 13 in 1985, and the population got up to 22 by the time the book was published in 1990. He thought we could save them.

nacs• 11 years ago

This [1] article explains another big reason:

The appetite for killing rhinos to saw off their horn is fuelled by demand in the far east, which has risen as countries such as Vietnam, one of the biggest consumers of rhino horn, and China have become more prosperous.
Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same material as human toenails, but an unfounded belief that it cures everything from hangovers to cancer and can serve as an aphrodisiac, has fed demand and sent prices soaring to an estimated $75,000 (£50,000) a kilo.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/27/ol-pejeta...

eosrei2• 11 years ago

Douglas argues against the aphrodisiac myth:

There is a widespread myth about what people want rhino horns for - in fact two myths. The first myth is that ground rhino horn is an aphrodisiac. This, I think it's safe to say, is just what it appears to be - superstition. It has little to do with any known medical fact, and probably a lot to do with the fact that a rhino's horn is a big sticky-up hard thing.
The second myth is that anyone actually believes the first myth.
It was probably the invention of a journalist, or at best a misunderstanding. It's easy to see where the idea came from when you consider the variety of things that the Chinese, for example, believe to be aphrodisiacs, which include the brain of a monkey, the tongue of a sparrow, the human placenta, the penis of a white horse, rabbit hair from old brushes, and the dried sexual parts of a male tiger soaked in a bottle of European brandy for six months. A big sticky-up hard thing like a rhinoceros horn would seem to be a natural for such a list, though it's perhaps harder to understand, in this context, why grinding the thing down would be such an attractive idea. The fact is that there is no actual evidence to suggest that the Chinese do believe rhino horn to be an aphrodisiac. The only people who do believe it are people who've read somewhere that other people believe it, and are ready and willing to believe anything they hear that they like the sound of.
There is no known trade in rhino horn for the purposes of aphrodisia. (This, like most things, is no longer strictly true. It is now known that there are a couple of people in Northern India who use it, but they only do it to annoy.)
Much horn is used in traditional medicine in the Far East, but a major part of the trade in rhino horn is caused by something much more absurd, and it's this: fashion. Dagger handles made of rhinoceros horn are an extremely fashionable item of male jewellery in the Yemen.
That's it: costume jewellery

Further arguments against on: https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poa...

Update: Argh! From savetherhino.org:

There is a belief in the West that rhino horn is used as an aphrodisiac and sexual stimulant but this is not correct and seems to have been misunderstood or misinterpreted by Western media. However, research has shown that people in Vietnam are starting to believe this rumour as they are consuming it for new reasons.

Great.

VLM3• 11 years ago

"Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same material as human toenails"

And hair and fingernails and ..

Which brings up the obvious point that the best way to "save the rhino" is to gather about 1000 pounds of nail clippings, grind them up, and put them on ebay as counterfeit rhino horn. That'll poison the marketplace (something we're pretty good at) which will help ruin the profitability of rhino poaching, and it'll also kill the price, changing rhino poaching from "a worthwhile risk with the possible reward of a zillion bucks" to "an idiotic risk with little return"

The governments and activists involved should be flooding the market with counterfeit rhino horn today, if they really cared about the rhino.

archagon• 11 years ago

As an aside, I just read (well, listened) the book and it was amazing. Truly one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. It's both hilarious and incredibly poignant, in a way that never feels overbearing or out of place.

I highly recommend listening to the audiobook version narrated by Adams himself. It's quite excellent; Adams is really a perfect narrator. You can find it on YouTube, since I don't think it's available for purchase anymore.

(On the bright side, many of the animals mentioned in the book are doing better these days.)

yellowapple2• 11 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/gzCATUl.png

I was incredibly confused for a good 5 seconds.

masterminding• 11 years ago

Lol

Fastidious• 11 years ago

That article is so painfully sad. I have done nothing to cause their extinction, yet can't help but feeling guilty. It might be because I have done nothing.

"Human beings – we always kill the things we love."

notnot• 11 years ago

Biology startup idea:

Since Rhino horn is just like keratin and dirt or something, design a process to create spot-on fake rhino horns and flood the market with them.

You would make lots of money at first and eventually drop the price of rhino horn to the point where it wouldn't be economically feasible to harvest real Rhino horn.

_lce0• 11 years ago

applied Gresham's law. Neat idea!

Bad rhino horns drives out good

technotony• 11 years ago

There are at least two startups working on this idea. eg http://synbiobeta.com/pembient-bioengineered-wildlife-produc...

Personally I think it's a bad idea, as it's demand which drives this not supply. fixing supply may only increase demand for the 'real thing' even more.

timc3• 11 years ago

Exactly what will happen, more supply will create more demand, which in turn will create a demand for a premium product - the real thing

euphoria83• 11 years ago

Very poignant

patcon2• 11 years ago

This short article about a rhino made me curiously sad. I'm not a die-hard animal lover, but it just somehow seems allegorical to many of humanity's problems...

tehchromic2• 11 years ago

It's the saddest thing.

kazinator2• 11 years ago

There needs to be some international treaty which declares poachers to be subhuman, such that they can be hunted for sport, without prosecution for murder: immunity in the country where the hunting takes place, as well as immunity back home, or in any state which is a signatory to the treaty.

After that, to be a poacher will mean taking a tremendous risk: simultaneously becoming not only hunter, but hunted. Hunted by a group of psychopaths who appear wherever poachers appear, anywhere in the world, to take advantage of the treaty.

And, of course, many of those psychopaths will be none other than ... competing poachers. All traces of cooperation among poachers will be gone, replaced by paranoid mistrust of the purest kind.

A poacher won't even be able to sell an elephant tusk to anyone without fear. If you're approached by someone offering a tusk, he can be defined by the treaty as a poacher, which means you can legally kill him and take the tusk (and the same risk upon yourself as you try to do with that tusk what he just did).

1971genocide• 11 years ago

Sounds good in theory but in practice this would turn out to be terrible.

How do you even define a poacher ? Maybe they start using intermediaries.

They use anonymous locations as a way to sell the horns ?

Maybe once their buyer appears on site to take the horn, they take a picture and shot the buyer calling him the "poacher" to collect the poacher money and resale the horn ?

Allowing legal murder of humans should only be instituted by the state and not be individuals, even the state screws up the process and individuals are much less trustworthy.

The poaching problem requires both attack from supply side and demand side using various soft techniques. The only reason the horns are important is due to its social value.

We do not have poaching problems with ants,spiders,monkeys,etc. because killing and the keeping their body parts has little social value to humans and there exists a strong penalty if you have a dead monkey in your house !

This is frankly china's problem.

kazinator2• 11 years ago

How do you even define a poacher?

Quite trivially. First, precisely identify certain geographic areas (habitats of endangered animals subject to poaching). Then, anyone in those areas with any sort of equipment for poaching (guns, traps, whatever) is by definition a poacher. To make it simple, a poacher killer, if armed, is also defined as a poacher while inside one of these areas. "Inside" also includes air space, which extends 30,000 feet above ground, and three miles beyond the border of the area. Anyone who would be a considered a poacher if standing in the area is also a poacher if in the air space. All passengers and crew of the craft are considered poachers if any one of them satisfies the definition.

peterwwillis• 11 years ago

What really pisses me off about this is the mentality of human beings toward other living creatures. Specifically, how every god damn living thing on the planet is seen as ours to control, like the whole of nature is our own little fishbowl entirely full of our own pets. And once our pets are limping along, gasping for breath, we pretend to care.

There are five northern white rhinos left. All of them were in zoos until four were moved from a zoo in Czech Republic to a conservancy in Africa.

Can you imagine being the last human being and living out the rest of your short, lonely, depressing life in a tiny artificial habitat, poked and peered at by weird creatures for god knows why?

Most of these animals were born in captivity. That means they don't even reflect the mentality of the original animal in its natural habitat. This is effectively no longer a wild animal; it is our pet. The hope, one imagines, is that somehow scientists can figure out how to breed enough of them that they could reintroduce them to the wild, but this is a risky, expensive, difficult, long-term process. But the track record of this system over the past 50 years proves this will not work.

In order to try to convince poachers not to kill them, there was a systematic attempt to dehorn rhinos in captive populations in the 90s that continues today. In order to keep these animals alive, we mutilate them, ignoring the long process of evolution which adapted these animals with very pronounced and specific biological features. This still doesn't stop poachers from killing them for a multitude of reasons, but it reduces the likelihood of human and rhino caused mortality.

Extinction is a natural process, which occurs due to geological transformation, climactic oscillation, and species interaction. About 99.9% of all species that have existed on the planet are extinct.

Human growth, however, has drastically accelerated the extinction of species. Some of the ways humans cause extinction include water pollution, overfishing, overgrazing, thermal pollution, excess turbidity, deforestation, agricultural development, urban conversion, introduction of alien species, and of course, hunting. In rainforests, which include up to 80% of the species diversity of the planet, deforestation causes the loss of up to 50,000 species a year.

Considering all of that, think about this: we are guarding one fucking rhino. We know it's not going to breed; they've been trying for 50 years and made one or two cows. So naturally this begs the question: why the fuck are we pretending so hard to care about this one giant mammal when it's already too late?

We don't actually care for, or need, this species. It is effectively already completely removed from nature, so it has no effect on its environment or other species. The only reason we're dicking around like this is guilt. Guilt that we abused our pets, and so we make a lame attempt to put a band-aid on it and say we're sorry, so that our parent or God or whatever moral authority you choose will forgive our sins.

But feeling guilty doesn't save lives, and it doesn't keep an environment healthy. So this process of burning the world, then giving it CPR when it can no longer crawl, does nothing to help the fauna of the planet. We're not actually helping. We're trying to make ourselves feel better. And this false compassion is fucking infuriating.

Sorry for the rant.

manishsharan• 11 years ago

Can someone explain the fascination of the so called 'asian medicine market' with rhino horns, tiger bones and penis and other such endangered animal parts ? I had earnestly hoped that viagra and other erectile dysfunction medication would rid the blackmarket for tiger bones but that hasn't happened in the least bit.

JoeAltmaier5• 11 years ago

Another last male living thing: a cycad in London. Yes, supposed to be gone in the last great extinction.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/10/136029423/the-l...

cmrdporcupine• 11 years ago

Ok but it can and does make hybrids. So they could hybridize it with a closely related species. Then backcross the pistillate offspring from those crosses with this original male. And keep doing that until there's >95% cycad genetics. You'd have low genetic diversity, and there might be issues with low vigor and runts because of that, but you'd have a population of cycads. I'm sure hybridization happened in the wild anyways.

TheGrassyKnoll2• 11 years ago

Crime

JacobAldridge• 11 years ago

On the extinction of species, I am reminded of John Donne's note on how connected we are (ought to be?) as mankind - perhaps a sentiment that needs to be extended more into nature:

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

adamnemecek• 11 years ago

If you want to get involved to prevent things like this in the future, contact your representative a lot of states are currently considering banning the sales of rhino horn and ivory. You can read more about it here https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/338f7t/co...

Lorento2• 11 years ago

Wow, there are also 2 females. Is there any technical reason why they don't just use artificial insemination to make some more babies? It would be pretty irresponsible to let the species go extinct because they didn't really try to save it.

typpo• 11 years ago

What is the best way to personally contribute to rhino conservation? A quick search yields many rhino charities. Would be great to know which, if any, are actually making an impact.

blizkreeg• 11 years ago

I am curious if environmental/wildlife groups and/or the government in the countries where their horns are in demand done anything to educate the public re: their unfounded beliefs/superstitions?

If individuals don't realize the impact of their actions on the world at large, shouldn't the government or public groups (e.g., in Vietnam or China) step in and take a stand on it, no matter how unpopular that stand is?

You'll never win the fight against the poachers. The only way is to cut the demand at source. Too late for that unfortunately. This really made me sad.

whybroke• 11 years ago

Markets often result in the Tragedy of the commons[1]. Here again is the extinction of an in demand spices rather than husbandry to perpetuate the supply. Likewise fishing stocks that frequently collapse and climate change resulting from oil production.

Ironically there is a way to prevent these disasters when there is sufficient public will and control over the market.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

kbart• 11 years ago

It's so fuckin sad, I literary cried reading it. I simply don't get how we (as humankind) cannot prevent such disasters happening while wasting billions on much less important things.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

The two main reasons are:

1. Lots of humanity doesn't agree that those are less important things, and

2. Among those that have a value system that does agree with you on that point, there's still a tragedy of the commons problem.

The last male northern white rhino

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