14 ms·

The last male northern white rhino

193 points by Red_Tarsius 11y ago

bargl 11y ago
Does anyone know if they have tried artificial insemination and if so why it hasn't worked?
- dm2 11y 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 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 11y 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?
    - dm2 11y ago
      The 1st link on the Google search I linked to was my source. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31001941 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31001941 The Guardian article is written by someone who is most likely a freelance writer. Their goal is to pump out articles that make attention grabbing claims while staying truthful. The author was not a rhino expert and likely didn't do much journalism research to find the facts people need to know, but some sob story about the last of it's kind is better news (more shares, more likes, more viewers, more ad revenue).
      - chestnut-tree 11y ago
        "The Guardian article is written by someone who is most likely a freelance writer" The Guardian writer, Jonathan Jones, is the art critic for the newspaper. Hence, the links to art history and a very descriptive interpretation of the rhino in the picture ("His head is a marvellous thing. It is a majestic rectangle of strong bone and leathery flesh, a head that expresses pure strength"). The article is part of a series called 'Framing the debate' which the site describes as follows: "A great photograph doesn't only say more than a thousand words, it can also create a hundred different reactions. In this series we take a close look at contemporary and historical photographs and videos that divide opinion" http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/framing-the-debate http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/framing-the-...
    - azakai 11y ago
      Because realistically it is. There are some sci-fi ideas, as others mentioned, but they are long shots.
  - snowpalmer 11y 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.
    - headShrinker 11y ago
      Agreed. I think most of us can relate to your sentiment. The world perspective might be the animals, trees, and water are connected to us. When these animals die, it's the canary in the coal mine. Our time is coming. You figure when everything is dying around us it's for a reason. One species over there is a singularity, two species is a coincidence, 25% of all living things is indication that something is terribly wrong and it's only going to get worse.
      - ProAm 11y ago
        Sort of, until you realize that 99% of all creatures that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. [1] It's not unnatural for animals to leave the planet and never return, but it's is still sad. [1] http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html
        rcthompson 11y ago
        But it is unnatural for species to go extinct because humans shot them all.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Its more 'natural' if a volcano erupts and kills them all? Or a flood? Or an asteroid? Its not 'normal', I admit that. Extinction by definition can't be a normal event. But natural? I guess if everything man-made is defined as 'unnatural' then sure.
        bduerst 11y ago
        Really it depends on the context and what humans can control. Could we stop a volcanic eruption? Probably not. A meteor strike? Maybe. Could we stop the poaching of near extinct species for some unproven alternative medicine? Hopefully.
im3w1l 11y 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-20150226-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rhino-money-2015...
- dm2 11y 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,"
wuschel 11y 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).
- 31reasons 11y ago
  People who are crazy enough to consume rhino horn for any purpose will discard this attempt as "fake rhino horn".
  - george88b 11y ago
    Not if it is indistinguishable from the real thing and they have no idea as to its origins.
  - wuschel 11y 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 11y ago
    Maybe it's more a lack of access to modern scientific knowledge than 'craziness'.
    - 31reasons 11y ago
      Since when access to scientific knowledge stopped people from believing pseudo-science ?
    - berberous 11y ago
      Are the main customers for items like this the poor and uneducated, or the wealthier segments of Asian society with plenty of access to modern scientific knowledge? Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's analogous to the Dr. Oz / anti-vaccine set in the U.S. Those people have access to all the knowledge they could want, but you still couldn't shake their misguided beliefs out of them.
dm2 11y ago
Here are some approximate rhino population levels as of 2013: http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/state-of-the-rhino-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 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 11y 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.)
  - dm2 11y 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 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_rhinoceros http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rhinoceros#Northern_white...
  - goodcanadian 11y 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.
jader201 11y 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 11y 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/conservation.internationalnews 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-white-rhino-dies-six-alive-world 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-white-rhinos-death-leaves-just-five-left-in-the-world 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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.
    - waps 11y ago
      Large animals that live long lives don't have any real information in their DNA. Essentially every species runs it's own genetic algorithm. Large animals have a generational gap of, let's say 5-10 years, and have numbers in the tens of thousands. Bacterial generational gaps measure in minutes to hours, and their numbers are so large there are no confident approximations. Unsuccessful bacteria species number in the thousands of trillions. One can only imagine what the numbers are for successful species. This means that the genetic algorithm running a pathetitc bacterial species has a clock speed something like 100 terahertz. It does 100 trillion calculations per second. The genetic algorithm that runs "on" the human race has a clock speed of around 5 calculations per second. For most animal and plant species, the speed would be significantly less than 1Hz. Guess which of these two makes the discoveries ... (the theory being that viruses, on rare occasions, transplant DNA "discoveries" from bacteria into other species, so while humans do evolve, they rarely, if ever, successfully mutate. Rather we are the product of natural genetic manipulation by viruses and natural selection. The same applies for plants and other animals) The reason large animals survive at all is that their biomass just does not register on the "success" charts for bacteria. Killing every single plant and animal on the planet and fully converting all that mass into new bacterial biomass would not represent 0.01% change in population size for bacteria. That is the only reason why animals survive : we're simply neither a threat, nor a worthwhile target.
forrestthewoods 11y 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 11y 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.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y 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).
  - 11y ago
eosrei 11y 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 11y 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-kenya-sudan-worlds-last-male-northern-white-rhinoceros http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/27/ol-pejeta...
  - VLM 11y 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.
    - Kluny 11y ago
      See the comment above yours, please.
yellowapple 11y ago
http://i.imgur.com/gzCATUl.png http://i.imgur.com/gzCATUl.png I was incredibly confused for a good 5 seconds.
- masterminding 11y ago
  Lol
Fastidious 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
  applied Gresham's law. Neat idea! Bad rhino horns drives out good
- technotony 11y ago
  There are at least two startups working on this idea. eg http://synbiobeta.com/pembient-bioengineered-wildlife-products/ 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 11y 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 11y ago
Very poignant
patcon 11y 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...
tehchromic 11y ago
It's the saddest thing.
kazinator 11y 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 11y 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.
  - kazinator 11y 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 11y 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.
peterwwillis 11y 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 11y 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.
JoeAltmaier 11y 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-loneliest-plant-in-the-world http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/10/136029423/the-l...
- cmrdporcupine 11y 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.
TheGrassyKnoll 11y ago
Crime
JacobAldridge 11y 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 11y 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/contact_your_state_representatives_about_current/ https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/338f7t/co...
Lorento 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
kbart 11y 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 11y 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.

193 points by Red_Tarsius 11y ago

bargl 11y ago

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

dm2 11y 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 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 11y 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?
  - dm2 11y ago
    The 1st link on the Google search I linked to was my source. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31001941 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31001941 The Guardian article is written by someone who is most likely a freelance writer. Their goal is to pump out articles that make attention grabbing claims while staying truthful. The author was not a rhino expert and likely didn't do much journalism research to find the facts people need to know, but some sob story about the last of it's kind is better news (more shares, more likes, more viewers, more ad revenue).
    - chestnut-tree 11y ago
      "The Guardian article is written by someone who is most likely a freelance writer" The Guardian writer, Jonathan Jones, is the art critic for the newspaper. Hence, the links to art history and a very descriptive interpretation of the rhino in the picture ("His head is a marvellous thing. It is a majestic rectangle of strong bone and leathery flesh, a head that expresses pure strength"). The article is part of a series called 'Framing the debate' which the site describes as follows: "A great photograph doesn't only say more than a thousand words, it can also create a hundred different reactions. In this series we take a close look at contemporary and historical photographs and videos that divide opinion" http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/framing-the-debate http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/framing-the-...
  - azakai 11y ago
    Because realistically it is. There are some sci-fi ideas, as others mentioned, but they are long shots.
- snowpalmer 11y 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.
  - headShrinker 11y ago
    Agreed. I think most of us can relate to your sentiment. The world perspective might be the animals, trees, and water are connected to us. When these animals die, it's the canary in the coal mine. Our time is coming. You figure when everything is dying around us it's for a reason. One species over there is a singularity, two species is a coincidence, 25% of all living things is indication that something is terribly wrong and it's only going to get worse.
    - ProAm 11y ago
      Sort of, until you realize that 99% of all creatures that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. [1] It's not unnatural for animals to leave the planet and never return, but it's is still sad. [1] http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html
      - rcthompson 11y ago
        But it is unnatural for species to go extinct because humans shot them all.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Its more 'natural' if a volcano erupts and kills them all? Or a flood? Or an asteroid? Its not 'normal', I admit that. Extinction by definition can't be a normal event. But natural? I guess if everything man-made is defined as 'unnatural' then sure.
        bduerst 11y ago
        Really it depends on the context and what humans can control. Could we stop a volcanic eruption? Probably not. A meteor strike? Maybe. Could we stop the poaching of near extinct species for some unproven alternative medicine? Hopefully.

im3w1l 11y 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-20150226-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rhino-money-2015...

dm2 11y 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,"

wuschel 11y 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).

31reasons 11y ago
People who are crazy enough to consume rhino horn for any purpose will discard this attempt as "fake rhino horn".
- george88b 11y ago
  Not if it is indistinguishable from the real thing and they have no idea as to its origins.
- wuschel 11y 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 11y ago
  Maybe it's more a lack of access to modern scientific knowledge than 'craziness'.
  - 31reasons 11y ago
    Since when access to scientific knowledge stopped people from believing pseudo-science ?
  - berberous 11y ago
    Are the main customers for items like this the poor and uneducated, or the wealthier segments of Asian society with plenty of access to modern scientific knowledge? Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's analogous to the Dr. Oz / anti-vaccine set in the U.S. Those people have access to all the knowledge they could want, but you still couldn't shake their misguided beliefs out of them.

dm2 11y ago

Here are some approximate rhino population levels as of 2013: http://www.rhinos.org/rhinos/state-of-the-rhino-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 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 11y 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.)
- dm2 11y 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 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_rhinoceros http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rhinoceros#Northern_white...
- goodcanadian 11y 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.

jader201 11y 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 11y 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/conservation.internationalnews 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-white-rhino-dies-six-alive-world 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-white-rhinos-death-leaves-just-five-left-in-the-world 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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.
  - waps 11y ago
    Large animals that live long lives don't have any real information in their DNA. Essentially every species runs it's own genetic algorithm. Large animals have a generational gap of, let's say 5-10 years, and have numbers in the tens of thousands. Bacterial generational gaps measure in minutes to hours, and their numbers are so large there are no confident approximations. Unsuccessful bacteria species number in the thousands of trillions. One can only imagine what the numbers are for successful species. This means that the genetic algorithm running a pathetitc bacterial species has a clock speed something like 100 terahertz. It does 100 trillion calculations per second. The genetic algorithm that runs "on" the human race has a clock speed of around 5 calculations per second. For most animal and plant species, the speed would be significantly less than 1Hz. Guess which of these two makes the discoveries ... (the theory being that viruses, on rare occasions, transplant DNA "discoveries" from bacteria into other species, so while humans do evolve, they rarely, if ever, successfully mutate. Rather we are the product of natural genetic manipulation by viruses and natural selection. The same applies for plants and other animals) The reason large animals survive at all is that their biomass just does not register on the "success" charts for bacteria. Killing every single plant and animal on the planet and fully converting all that mass into new bacterial biomass would not represent 0.01% change in population size for bacteria. That is the only reason why animals survive : we're simply neither a threat, nor a worthwhile target.

forrestthewoods 11y 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 11y 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.
- Lawtonfogle 11y 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).
- 11y ago

eosrei 11y 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 11y 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-kenya-sudan-worlds-last-male-northern-white-rhinoceros http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/27/ol-pejeta...
- VLM 11y 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.
  - Kluny 11y ago
    See the comment above yours, please.

yellowapple 11y ago

http://i.imgur.com/gzCATUl.png http://i.imgur.com/gzCATUl.png I was incredibly confused for a good 5 seconds.

masterminding 11y ago
Lol

Fastidious 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
applied Gresham's law. Neat idea! Bad rhino horns drives out good
technotony 11y ago
There are at least two startups working on this idea. eg http://synbiobeta.com/pembient-bioengineered-wildlife-products/ 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 11y 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 11y ago

Very poignant

patcon 11y 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...

tehchromic 11y ago

It's the saddest thing.

kazinator 11y 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 11y 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.
- kazinator 11y 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 11y 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.

peterwwillis 11y ago

manishsharan 11y 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.

JoeAltmaier 11y 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-loneliest-plant-in-the-world http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/10/136029423/the-l...

cmrdporcupine 11y 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.

TheGrassyKnoll 11y ago

Crime

JacobAldridge 11y 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 11y 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/contact_your_state_representatives_about_current/ https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/338f7t/co...

Lorento 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

kbart 11y 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 11y 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.