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Malaysia's last known Sumatran rhino dies
- Lio 7y agoNot really sure what to say about this sad event except that folk medicine is utter bollocks and those who peddle it are charlatans and frauds.
- jmclnx 7y agoTrue, but at this point are the main issues I believe are. Land use, people need to farm and live somewhere. Poor people need to feed their kids, and poaching is rather lucrative for them when their children is starving. Issues it seems the world will never fix, thus wildlife suffers :(
- folli 7y agoWhat's your point? That this is okay?
- dpcan 7y agoI think the point is that it's hard for Western civilization to understand the true hardships people face in other parts of the world, and the fact that they are killing animals for single body parts is absolutely absurd to us, but to them, it's a last resort for survival in a society that seems quite hopeless. 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.
- everdrive 7y agoThey'd do anything except spare another life from coming into the world, and spare everyone else the constraint on resources.
- rayiner 7y agoBirth rates in the developed world have dropped tremendously. The birth rate in Indonesia is only a bit above replacement, same as the USA in 1970.
- hhas01 7y agoYou know what makes birth rates drop? Higher standards of living. 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.
- option 7y agoI think the point is that the only effective way to prevent this is to create more lucrative opportunities for people than poaching
- pinkfoot 7y agoOr breed the animals, harvest the horns without killing anything, sell them for USD. Like we do with chickens. Context: done more than my share of rhino protection in Africa.
- option 7y agowell that sounds like safer and more lucrative opportunity than poaching ;) p.s. thanks for doing something about it
- hombre_fatal 7y ago> [Just] breed the animals, [it's that easy] TFA points out efforts to breed this rhino failed.
- xwdv 7y agoBasically yea. Swallow your privilege and accept that people and their families need to eat, and they can’t wait decades for their situation to get better, they have to eat now. And if that means a species must go extinct, so be it. 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.
- Lio 7y agoPeople are just another form of animal life living on this planet, nothing more and nothing higher. 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.
- rayiner 7y agoYes it’s okay. People are more important than animals. Europeans cut down all their forests and killed most of the native wildlife, and now live wonderful lives driving around in cars and drinking lattes. The people in the rest of the world have the right to do the same thing.
- saagarjha 7y agoHow many countries doing this can the world support?
- rayiner 7y agoAll of them. With $100/ton carbon recapture, and a nuclear grid country like France could be at net zero at around $500/per person annually. (They might have to be vegetarians, but Indians have that covered.)
- guelo 7y agoSince the western lifestyle produces 17 tons/person/year, even if that $100/ton we're a scalable reality it would still be way too expensive. One way to pay for that would be a carbon tax, but it's becoming pretty obvious at this point that environmentalists are going to lose the argument for doing anything at the coordinated global governments level, so that means the only possible salvation is going to come if someone can figure out how to make money from it. The price needs to be negative per ton. Let's hope that capitalists can save us.
- rayiner 7y agoThanks to nuclear power France is at 5 tons per capita per year. About 1.3% of French GDP. Way cheaper than the economic damage that will be inflicted by “doing anything at the coordinates global governments level.”
- guelo 7y agoCapitalists don't like nuclear, it only works if it's subsidized by governments. But due to your ideological position about the damage that governments cause, which is also the most powerful ruling ideology in the world, nuclear plants are not going to be built.
- irrational 7y agoThe rest of the world see the standard of living of Europeans and North Americans and want the exact same standard of living. If this means they have to do the same thing that the Western world had to do to reach those levels, then so be it. Go through an industrial revolution with polluting factories and industries. Subjugate nature and move all wild animals into zoos. Have a few world wars. Create terrible working conditions that require the need for unions. Overthrow government after government until one that is good enough to allow personal freedoms comes along. Etc.
- rayiner 7y agoDamn skippy.
- hhas01 7y agoThis. Meanwhile us westerners are so determined to hang onto what we already got, we won’t lift a finger to help them raise their own standards of living any less destructively. 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.
- jacquesm 7y agoThe interesting bit is that the people that are most vocal about this all live in countries that have far less diversity than the ones they berate for not properly protecting their wildlife. We have one wolf here in NL, it is all over the news.
- rapnie 7y agoThe 'one wolf' story was years ago. This year's news is NL has the first wolf litter (in Gelderland). https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/world/2019/06/20/return-wolf-wild-cubs-born-netherlands/39605361/ https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/world/2019/06/20/retur...
- recursivecaveat 7y agoFrom everything I have seen, people in poaching-affected countries take it very seriously. Wildlife is a symbol of their culture and an important source of tourism revenue. Poaching is also a criminal enterprise, and breeds violence in the same way that drug trafficking is not generally a peaceful exchange of goods and services.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- smabie 7y agoThat’s not true. I live in a place where people actually believe it. If you are not aware of the lack of efficacy of something, it’s not exactly a fraud.
- Angostura 7y agoThe people who peddle it are claiming to know that it is efficacious. Either they don’t know, in which case they are fraudulently claiming knowledge they don’t possess, or they do know it doesn’t work, in which case the are fraudulently claiming it works. Either way - it’s fraud.
- smabie 7y agoThose aren't the two possibilities. What if they do know that it works? Or think they know? People have been doing crazy things that don't work for thousands of years, to say all of that stuff is a fraud is a little myopic.
- refurb 7y agoHumans are not always logical. That’s never going to change. Still worthy to correct damaging beliefs, but they aren’t going away entirely.
- techer 7y ago“No more than 100 Sumatran rhinos remain in the wild (some estimates put the number as low as 30), scattered on the islands of Sumatra, Indonesia.” Have to be hopeful.
- DodgyEggplant 7y agoSadly, startups innovations did not find (or even tried) a way to save animals and wild life. If Disney would contribute 1% of all income they got from animals based movies? If Docker would contribute 1% to save whales?
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoThat 1% should go to wealthy investors because they’re the only ones who can then use that money to make the world a better place. Edit: slash es.
- krastanov 7y agoYou really need an "/s", otherwise nobody will get you are joking.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoSo it seems.
- maxmalysh 7y agoReally sad. We could have saved dinosaurs from extinction, then...
- sidlls 7y agoDinosaurs aren't extinct. They're all over the place. They just are much smaller, have wings, and fly these days.
- taf2 7y agoI think it’s an interesting idea we’d need to have someone like gates, focused on how to use that money for effective impact otherwise likely that money would just go to waste... hence nice idea but lot of work to back it up for real impact...
- arcticfox 7y ago
- dpflan 7y ago"Its death was a natural one, and the immediate cause has been categorised as shock," Sabah State Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Christine Liew is quoted as saying. 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- holoduke 7y agoWonder if at one point our DNA skills become so strong that we can recreate every extinct animal where we have DNA from.
- opless 7y agoI think we all know that good will come of that.
- notelonmusk 7y agoShaka, When the Walls Fell
- opless 7y agoJohn Hammond, his face wet.
- phaedryx 7y agoMaybe start a zoo, or maybe I'll call it a "park", for kids?
- dpcan 7y agoAnd hire 1 IT guy.
- farrelmahaztra 7y agoJust make sure to remember the magic word
- dudul 7y agoWho will install the coolest Unix System to manage the network.
- xwdv 7y agoIf we can write entirely new DNA why bother recreating extinct animals? Let’s create new ones. Hell, let me create my perfect woman.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Proven 7y agoThe government made it too cheap to get while supplies were limited. Government business as usual.
- josteink 7y agoI saw a BBC documentary last night with David Attenborough, saying it may soon be extinct. That was fast :(
- matthewmarkus 7y agoIt needs to be noted that the Sumatran rhino has been on the decline for thousands of years now: https://news.mongabay.com/2017/12/dna-analysis-shows-sumatran-rhinos-peaked-in-ice-age-never-recovered/ 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.
- lisper 7y agoImportant context from that article: 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.”
- corndoge 7y agoWhy is it nonsense? It is natural.
- lisper 7y agoIt is nonsense that we should accept any negative outcomes simply because they are natural. If we accepted this form of argument, we'd still have people dying from smallpox and polio, both of which are "natural". The whole point of technological civilization is to be the masters of our own fates and not to meekly accept whatever happens to be "natural".
- briefcomment 7y agoOk, but why do we need to do anything to keep certain animal species around? It might be nice to have Sumatran rhinos around so you could see something new and cool, but there are hundreds of thousands of cool species to see. I would guess that the Sumatran rhino does not hold a crucial position in any ecosystem. It's certainly not the same to us as having people die out because of smallpox etc. People mean much more to us than animals. If we have the money, the means, and the time to preserve the Sumatran rhino, then let's save it. If we have better things to do, let's do that instead.
- ghastmaster 7y agoWhen referring to a species no longer existing in a region, it is usually referred to as being extirpated. The title taken literally, claims Malaysia has announced the species extinct, when in fact, it is not. It has been extirpated.
- hhas01 7y agoIt’s the BBC News site, not a top-tier zoology journal. Given the one thing rarer than the Sumatran rhino is popular press readers who know what “extirpated” is, “Extinct in $location” is entirely appropriate phraseology. #KnowYourAudience
- ghastmaster 7y agoThe title originally posted on hacker news was reflective of my original comment. BBC did not use the term extinct in their headline, but in the bold preface of the article. I appreciate and expect esoteric language in hacker news. I suspect the audience here does as well.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoThe usage of term 'Extinct' in the content is confusing. There are no more Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia, there are about 100 expected to live in the islands of Indonesia.
- briefcomment 7y agoThe use of the "extinct" in this context seems disingenuous then. Probably explainable by the likely fact that "extinct" in a headline will attract clicks.
- briefcomment 7y agoTo whoever downvoted the above, I don't think we view a town becoming a ghost town as an "extinction". As long as the species still exists, it seems inaccurate to use the term extinct. "Dwindling", "near extinction", "increasingly endangered" all seem more accurate in this context. Only reason I call this disingenuous is that it was probably a "cynical" decision to decrease accuracy in return for clicks.
- dang 7y agoThe submitted title ("The Sumatran rhino is now officially extinct in Malaysia") was taken from the article's subheading, which is a great place to look when a title is baity or misleading. In this case, though, the article title seems more precise, so we've switched to that above.
- ijiiijji1 7y agoAnother sad statistic in Holocene/Anthropocene extinction event.