Page 11 - De-Extinction: The Science of Bringing Lost Species Back to Life

the root causes of extinction, such as human population
growth and climate change. “Screwing around with science
to save a white rhino might be fun and I would like to see it
preserved and am all for biodiversity, but it’s so far down the
list of things we should be doing first.”
So what should we be doing to save the northern white
rhino? The animal’s habitat is in war-ravaged African countries
such as South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. Governments there have been unable to prevent
poachers from killing rhinoceroses for their horns, which
some people—especially in China and Vietnam—believe
are effective medicine. Well-armed poachers hack off rhino
horns to sell on the black (illegal) market for large profits.
They leave the animals to die. Journalist Peter Gwin says, “The
slaughter has to stop if rhinos are to survive.”

DEEXTINCTION DREAMS

No animal can survive if it is hunted to excess. No animal
can survive if its habitat is gone. Unless we work to save wild
animals and their habitats, any effort toward de-extinction
may be futile. We will revive species only to see them go
extinct again.
The good news is that efforts to save animals and their
habitats really do work. In a 2010 scientific paper in the
journal Science, more than one hundred researchers assessed
the state of the world’s vertebrate animals. The researchers
concluded that as dire as the extinction crisis is, many more
species would have gone extinct without conservation efforts.
They found that efforts to control invasive species and remove
them from certain environments have been particularly
effective. Fighting habitat loss has been less successful.

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