Africa. The black market for exotic animal parts. Asian consumers purchasing illegal folk medicines, and the extinction of the pillars of our wilderness in the latest installment below the fold.
I already covered (overemotionally) how one of the last Amur Leopards in Siberia was brutally shot in the tail and then beaten to death, presumably by sport hunters.
China and India's booming trade in animal parts, like rhino horn, is not getting enough attention in the star-crossed MSM. As too many wildlife refuge advocates know, once the tiger or the rhino or the orangutang is extinct, the symbol encompassing an entire ecosystem is gone. Those ecosystems face a monthly battle just to continue, as most of the world is now deforested, and desert is the only expanding climate zone.
Here is the astonishly short story from Agence France Presse via Yahoo:
LUSAKA (AFP) - Poachers have shot the last two white rhinos in Zambia, killing one and wounding the other, in a night operation at the Mosi-Oa-Tunya national park in Livingstone, an official said Tuesday.
The shooting of the two endangered animals in a heavily-guarded zoological park near Victoria Falls in Zambia's tourist resort town of Livingstone took place last week.
"I can confirm that one of the white rhinos was shot dead by suspected poachers. The other one was wounded and is undergoing treatment," said Maureen Mwape, spokesperson of the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA), which would be investigating the shooting.
The dead female rhino's horn was apparently removed.
Zambia's white rhinos were all killed by poachers but the government managed to acquire six from South Africa in 1993, of which the injured male is the last to survive.
While we don't know who shot these rhinos and why and how this came about, we do know that the up and coming countries of the century, China, India and Brazil, are not getting enough attention in analysis and news. Rhino horn is one of the most commonly known folk medicine products on the Chinese and various Asian black markets.
Brazil is fighting tooth and claw to save the Amazon, much of which is now no longer rainforest but in semi-permanent drought from soybeans and ethanol and cattle (with clients including McDonald's).
China is the toxic twin-sister of our own mighty country, belching coal, converting millions of new consumers into motorists, hydro power gone wrong--for one non-encapsulating example, the manmade extinction of the Yangtze River Dolphin is almost passed from our minds, one which really did not need to happen (of course, does any?)
And secret Asian consumers are buying up the last great wild beasts of the 20th century for cures that range from unnecessary to unproven to outright quackery.
How is this tolerable?
Our present lifetime seems to show a world divided between squalor enveloping the last bits of wilderness and a decaying first world, post-human rights, post-reason, buying up every bit of slaughter and genocide.
There will be no real African wilderness without rhinos, no Asian jungles and mountain preserves that don't have leopards and tigers, no Indonesian rainforests without rhinos and orangutangs. Once they go, you are not going to find enough people signing on to save endangered squrrels or snakes or moths.
Wiki on the white rhino:
The White Rhinoceros or Square-lipped rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) is one of the five species of rhinoceros that still exist and is one of the few megafauna species left. Behind the elephant, it is probably the most massive remaining land animal in the world, along with the Indian Rhinoceros which is of comparable size. It is well known for its wide mouth used for grazing and for being the most social of all rhino species. The White Rhino is the most common of all rhinos and consists of two subspecies, with the northern subspecies being rarer than the southern. The northern subspecies may have as few as 13 remaining world wide.
The southern subspecies has over 10,000 rhinos, so you're thinking, hey, great, right? Even though animal populations do not stay stable, land is being gobbled up in pretty much every part of Africa and Asia. The number belies the story really, because Africa is a huge continent, and even though we're talking about megafauna, imagine a race or a people being down to the size of the max population of a casino in Las Vegas. People deprived or without access to critical resources keep encroaching on the wildlife.
The course of time paints a very different picture than a stable population of one subspecies of megafauna. Overall, most megafauna are on a clear road--not vague, not shadowy--to extinction if not for zoos, which really don't count anyway. (Conversely to zoo "wildlife", when a feral human is found they have to be nursed and watched essentially all their lives. You can preserve the genes in captive wildlife, but not put the "wild" back in.) Overall, wildlife is being reduced to tinier and spindlier threads connecting one body of water to one piece of land no human communities can yet make much use of. This is not the kind of generousity that will give animals and many plant species the genetic material and broad availability to clean food, water and air to sustain themselves for more than a few hundred years in the best of all outcomes.
Every month we're getting closer.
As one of my good friends says, if you're a progressive and you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
UPDATE: While Zambia is a very fascinating country, I didn't want to make the diary too long by included this recent story: If you remember hearing about China's involvement in contracting out for mines and raw material in Africa (including Sudan) this story of Hu Jintao visiting the Zambian president and getting rights to Zambian mines is textbook A of our multipolar world, and perhaps so is the fact that I've linked so much through yahoo, a business known for its complicity in human rights violations.)