A day or two ago, I read a highly disturbing essay by William deBuys on the TomDispatch blog. The author traveled to Laos in order to track down an extremely rare animal, the saola, journeying into a remote forest in order to find it. deBuys and his companions found they were not alone in this isolated forest, as poachers had decimated the local wildlife.
The most disturbing sight he encountered was a dead monkey that had been caught in a poacher's snare line. Poachers have adopted industrial methods to harvest wildlife, constructing kilometer long snare lines with loops every few feet to entrap animals, who were forced to walk into the traps by hedges constructed by the poachers. It is essentially the land based equivalent of a drift net. As deBuys described the monkey's fate:
We camped by fish-rich rivers that had been stripped of their otters and saw the remains of dozens of poachers’ camps, some elaborately equipped with butchering tables and smoking racks. Saddest of all was the sight of a red-shanked douc (also called a douc langur), perhaps the most beautiful monkey in the world, dangling upside down at the end of a snare pole, having succumbed to as slow and cruel a death as might be imagined.
My Gut Reaction: Some days, you wonder if the planet would be better off if humanity went extinct.
Analysis below the fold...
The story becomes even more gut-wrenching when one realizes just how indiscriminate and wasteful this industrial poaching really is. As deBuys notes, some of the animals killed in the snares, including the saola, aren't even wanted by the poachers, as they can't be sold for Chinese medicine. This is particularly disturbing when one considers that there are-at most-only a few hundred saola in the entire world. The poachers don't even check all of the kilometer's worth of snares, leaving animals to slowly die and rot.
This type of poaching goes beyond the hunting of one endangered animal, even a critically endangered one like a rhinoceros or tiger. This verges on effectively being a war on nature. The only thing really comparable is the overfishing which is decimating our oceans. Taken together with climate change, habitat destruction, and other ecological devastation, it could help create a far darker world.
I personally don't believe the human race will go extinct due to ecological destruction. There are simply too many of us to be wiped out and we're a pretty resilient species. That said, we could ruin the world. As deBuys warns at the end of his article, we could create a hell on earth:
The dystopian alternative is terrible to consider. Uncounted species -- not just tigers, gibbons, rhinos, and saola, but vast numbers of smaller mammals, amphibians, birds, and reptiles -- are being pressed to the brink. We’ve hardly met them and yet, within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth’s biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity