African elephants are migrating to safety, telling each other how to get there
qz.com
qz.com
I've read/heard a bunch about "rewilding" as a concept over the last year, introducing mostly megafaunal populations to their historic ranges, sometimes very historic. Hippos, lions and hyenas in scotland for a particularly quirky example. There are some very tentative efforts currently to reintroduce bison, lynxes and some other species to western europe.
Anyway... 350,000 wild african elephants. Declines notwithstanding, it's amazing that such a population still exists. Consider how much impact a herd of elephants have on human interests.. agriculture or whatnot. Imagine how hard it would be to get buy-in for a dozen elephants in spain. The african savannah's megafaunal systems still exist! They really are an amazing thing to still have. It's the system we came from.. most of our most ancient art is about them. The first famous french painting features extinct and extirpated megafauna, lions for example.
On one hand we have conservation, on the continent with the biggest poverty and governance issues. Wilderness, land-use & habitat issues are key issues. Outside of the artic, there just aren't many habits to support those kinds of far ranging species. African land tracts are unique.
Elsewhere we have rewilding, in its infancy. The US seems to be transitioning from one to the other. Europe is very slowly opening up to the idea.
Elsewhere we have some eccentric ideas about engineered hybrids using paleo-genetics, like the idea of bringing back mammoths. The ecological implications are complete unknowns. It's more of a genetics science project, with futuristic zoo implications. It's far from being a wilderness question at all. Resources don't compete.
Projects like the Russian Pleistocene Park don't really need mammoths. They've had a lot success using "closest available substitute" species instead of extinct ones. Maybe African or Asian elephants can (or can be bred to) tolerate that kind of cold and eat local plants.
I'd imagine a mammoth eating sedge in Siberia wouldn't be in as direct competition for resources as an elephant.
It would be amazing to be able to see the megafauna in the wild though, along with protecting the wildlife we currently have.
Lynx and more raptors are the two on the immediate agenda. Wokf and moose (elk) may be at some point relatively soon. Wolves would likely be big game changers for red deer population dynamics, and livestock farming.
Humans became adept hunters in the African context— when they went elsewhere in the world, the native megafauna were unprepared.
We often note that our bodies are so weak relative to animals' but that really understates how game changing the human species must have been. First, bodies have all sort of potential that most people never experience because we don't grow up outside and chase elephants. More importantly, people are is good at figuring things out. We're impressed by inquisitive animals, bears or honey badgers, relentlessly try to get what they want by trying everything. That's nothing compared to humans.
A hippo-or-walrus-like thing might avoid getting eaten by a cat-or-bear-like thing by having really thick skin. Humans can't be deterred that way. We don't need to wait until we evolve longer teeth.
Real people must have been a holy terror.
^Fascinating old human stomping grounds... Early Sapiens predate neanderthals in the region. A rare situation where they displace "us," or at least people with skeletons similar to ours.
Having gotten that off my chest its an intersting article about group learning.
How is it possible that changing the primary existential goal from "save animals" to "make profits" will lead to more efficient animal saving rather than loss of efficiency in animal saving for the sake of profit? That seems like the exact opposite of what would happen.
If elephants are smart enough to recognize an enemy, avoid it, and warn other elephants that have not seen this enemy first hand... do they qualify as people?
They certainly seem at least as smart as dolphins, and their trunks allow for a crude form of tool manipulation that dolphins lack. We humans define our personhood in terms not just of raw intelligence, but also by our ability to modify our environments, so...
I think they do require agency/respect/laws fitting of a properly conscious being though. Often people put humans on a pedestal, but in reality, we aren't special in regards to morality.
Without reason, I'd say there absolutely is something wrong with that. In fact, I'd argue there's no such thing as "human morality", only morality, which applies to humans (and other species). There are certainly some applications of moral law that only apply to humans, but that also applies to other species as well. Again, there's no rightful pedestal to put humans on.
> It derives quite naturally from us being the result of self-interested genes.
You're making an implicitly claim here that what results naturally from our DNA is morally right. You'll have plenty of people arguing that as well.
You can argue that all of these different categories have inherent moral worth and that moral worth is not dependent on the perspective of the person making the judgement about moral worth, but almost nobody actually behaves that way. And I would argue that the people who do behave that way are mostly confused.
> Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the non-human members of the Hominidae or great ape family: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.
I don't know if modifying the environment for your purposes is consideration for being a person, but as humans we are often poor at understanding intelligence, comprehension, and empathy when something doesn't speak our native tongue.
Humans?
Deforestation, strip-mining, dumping waste, drilling, war...
Just because we wrap all that up in an "economy" or "politics" doesn't make it non-destructive.