Extinct is forever.
In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams wrote about traveling around the world with zoologist Mark Carwardine to document animals on the brink of extinction and efforts being made to pull them back. One of the more hopeful stories involved the last - twenty-two, I think? - Northern White Rhinoceroses in the wild, all in Garamba National Park in Zaire. Northern White Rhinos, which are related to but genetically distinct from the more populous Southern White Rhinos, had once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But thanks to habitat encroachment and indiscriminate hunting, their numbers dropped to just a few hundred in the 1970s, and then 22 by the time of Adams's 1988 tour.
The situation was desperate in 1988, but a glimmer of hope existed. Dedicated individuals taking great personal risks were putting enormous effort into protecting and preserving this last wild population. The biggest threats to the rhinos were poachers, who would kill the rhinos to take their horns to be made into ornamental dagger handles for sale in Yemen. With international support and a maintenance of the status quo in the local political environment, it seemed just possible that the rhino population might recover, albeit at a glacial pace.
Everything went to hell since then.
Zaire is no more. Like its neighbors, it is awash in violence and chaos. Sudanese poachers, long a threat to Garamba, have taken advantage of the chaos. The wholesale slaughter of the rhinos continued without restraint. The numbers dropped...and dropped...until only four specimens were left in the wild. Now those four are nowhere to be found.
Gareth Suddes's Another Chance to See, which follows up on the fates of the animals visited by Adams, posted this entry this week:
Poachers kill last four wild northern white rhinos
You can follow the sad story through his Northern White Rhinoceros archives.
So now they're gone. A few specimens still exist in zoos, but they do not form a viable breeding population. At this point I think the only hope is to collect and preserve DNA material, put it in cold storage, and hope that some future scientists will be able to do something with it.
This is wrong. This is unnecessary. Yet another magnificent creature has passed from the Earth, perhaps forever, in our lifetime. During our period of stewardsdship. While we were the watchmen on the walls.
What are we doing to stop the next species, and the next, and the next after that, from being driven to extinction?
SaveTheRhino.org
World Wildlife Fund
Another Chance to See
It breaks my heart to hear this.
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