Malaysia's last known Sumatran rhino dies
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/12/dna-analysis-shows-sumatra...
While humans have no doubt accelerated their demise, the overall problem stems from "rising sea levels that submerged the land bridges connecting the islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra to the Malay Peninsula and mainland Asia, subsequently fragmenting suitable habitats for the rhino."
Finally, Sumatran rhino populations are so small, remote, and fragmented that poaching is less of a concern for this species than issues like land use.
Payne also noted that the findings reinforced the importance of supporting efforts to prevent the species from going extinct.
“Animal species do come and go over periods that can be most conveniently measured in units of tens of thousands of years,” he said, but added, “To say that we should just let some species go extinct because it is ‘natural’ is nonsense.”
For the same reason the Internet Archive is worth keeping: Sumatran Rhinos (and all other species) contain irreplaceable information accumulated over millions of years of evolution. You never know when or how some of that information might turn out to be useful. But once the last backup is gone, it's gone forever.
Yeah, we don't know what terrible unforeseen consequence letting this species go will have.
But we don't know what good consequence it might have either.
It seems to me that a Sumatran Rhino is a lot more like a dog or a cow or a chicken than it is like a smallpox virus. It's true that we can't eat them or keep them as pets, but just the ability to go see one in the wild has value IMHO.
Two thoughts:
1. A common mistake is to think that just because something has value, it's good to do. This reasoning ignores cost! Only by comparing cost and benefits can we make informed choices.
2. This value is specific to you. Others assign less or more value for this.
3. Causing a species to go extinct eliminates all possibility of anyone extracting any value from it now or in the future. That has an unknown and potentially enormous cost in the long run.
I tend to take the view that life — all life — is extremely rare in the universe, and that alone is enough to warrant as much action as realistically possible to preserve it. A species might never be useful for anything, but it is the unique product of countless generations before it; a story of complexity and beauty that, it could be argued, dwarfs any of humanity’s greatest achievements.
If you included our own species in that evaluation you may reasonably conclude that ours is not worth saving, above all others.
What would one reasonably label a species that hyper-populates, spreads itself spatially, destroys the other species and their habitations in the spaces it expands to, consumes at a rate far above utility, hordes whatever resources it can gather and spends its efforts calculating how to increase these efforts?
Unless the intelligence we evolved with is used to benefit the rest of life which flourished with our own, then it is hard to call it a virtue, or even deem us any more worthwhile, or worth preserving, more than any other life form.
Or if every animal life is net more pain than enjoyment.
Or if it's the only way to have any lifeform exist into perpetuity. Then we're net beneficial to all other life on the planet as long as any of it survives along with us; disregarding that we're perpetuating a boatload of genes just by continuing to exist.
Any individual animal has a survival instinct. We have a survival instinct that encompasses much larger groups than that of any animal.
When there’s enough for everyone and more, and we take enough resources for 50 because then we get it faster, cheaper, and shinier... well, I wouldn’t personally describe that as survival instinct.
Again, I would love to see nothing go extinct. Only reason I left my first comment is that I think it is unfair to classify the extinction of species during our lifetimes as "meekly accept[ing]" as opposed to "sad but rational given our limitations".
I am Malaysian. I wish I could say that despite our best conservation efforts, we just couldn’t save the Sumatran rhino. Instead, both within Malaysia and without, we hardly give even a moment’s thought to the damage we do as we do it.
If only our quandary was, “which species won’t we be able to save?” instead of “what species are we going to sacrifice so we don’t have to change our lifestyle?”
If more species is best, should we bread or genetically engineer new ones? Is that “better”?
> If more species is best, should we bread or genetically engineer new ones? Is that “better”?
I get what you're saying, but you have to draw the line somewhere. For example, if more money is better, why not work 3 jobs?
I suppose I agree that just calling something "natural" isn't a great argument on its own.
My main disagreement here is the arbitrary decision that this is a "negative outcome".
OK, but then you still have to decide whether you value quantity over quality. Is it better to have N people living comfortable fulfilled lives, or 10N people living in poverty and misery?
Even if you decide to cast your lot with quantity over quality, you have to decide whether the quantity you're going to value is head-count of person-years: is it better to have N people with a life expectancy of 100 years, or 10N people with a life expectancy of 20 years?
I assume we're not talking about killing 90% of the population if it happens to be 10N...
So I'll happily just defer to accepting any people who happen to exist.
Not to mention humanity has a global effect on species population, it would be hubris to assume a species going extinct nowadays is separate from that, even if they have been in a steady decline for quite some time.
Those are some of the largest islands on earth. The problen for rhinos in the case of Java is that it's 100% farmed, not submerged land bridges.
Have to be hopeful.
Edit: slash es.
Maybe Docker the technology, but Docker the company is on the endangered list itself
it's perhaps a reflection of our priorities as a society...
It requires a mixture of educating local people about sustainable land use, better environmental monitoring (this is what I do), changing consumer habits so we don't need to deforest to satisfy our food needs, and so on.
There is a lot of money already involved and there are lots of startups doing good work on sustainability which indirectly is beneficial. For example lab grown meat might reduce pressure on livestock farming.
The cause of the death is categorized as "shock", it is hard to not feel the potential for self-reflective sadness here whereby the cause of shock could be dramatically extrapolated to be shock for the violence of humanity and whatever their desires were that warranted killing these rhinoceroses and not protecting and coexisting with them.
That was fast :(
I don't think many of us know what we are capable of when it comes to actually trying to survive and provide for our young when there is little to no opportunity outside our front doors. We have computers in front of us where we type and complain online, but I can be honest with myself, and I'll be doing absolutely nothing with my day today to stop this from happening.
Families who don’t have to raise their kids to work a harsh unrelenting subsistence living, who don’t need to birth twice as many infants knowing half of them will die of malnutrition and disease long before they reach adulthood, who have access to family planning and reliable birth control, have the luxury of choosing quality rather than quantity. Others don’t.
Look back in your own family tree (or stump, in your case), and it’s only three or four generations since us westerners did the same, for the same reasons. So if you’re going to sit up there on your high horse, consider what your ancestors had to go through to put you there, and show some basic consideration for others still struggling on that road.
Like we do with chickens.
Context: done more than my share of rhino protection in Africa.
p.s. thanks for doing something about it
TFA points out efforts to breed this rhino failed.
Unless you want to say the lives of some obscure animal you only see in photos and will probably forget about after a few days anyway is more important than human beings like you and me, maybe you shouldn’t judge.
If someone is going to drive another form of life to extinction for the sake of an erectile disfunction remedy that _doesn’t work_ ...sorry but I am going to judge them for that.
The arguments being made here that not just poaching a bit but to full on extinction is fine because people are poor is just nonsense.
This is a fallacy. The forest in Germany covers 11 million hectares, 32 percent of the total area of the country
The forest in Ethiopia covers 4 millions of hectares, a 4 percent of the total area of the country.
Ethiopia had the same 30 percent of forest than Germany in the previous generation, but.. huh, they chosed to distroy it.
And now, here comes the bad drought and bleached bones, and the next rock concert for collecting european money for Ethiopia, and ONG projects, and the money spent in fire weapons and endless wars because nature is not here anymore to save the day...
It seems in retrospect that exercising your "right to press the self-destruction button because cavemen in Europe killed european rhinos long time ago", is not a wise move.
When Ethiopia gets wealthy, it will afford to have more forest.
Oh well, let’s hope the next species to come along once we’ve driven our own dumb selves to extinction is much better at learning from others’ mistakes.
https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/world/2019/06/20/retur...
Either way - it’s fraud.