For the 300,000 years of our evolution animals have represented people’s gods, inspired us, fed and clothed us and worked for us. In return, we are betraying them.
Across rivers and seas, the skies, savannas, forests and jungles, in the past 40 years our planet has lost half of its number of animals, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s "Living Planet Report 2014: Species and Spaces, People and Places". Seventy-five percent and 66% of terrestrial and marine environments respectively have been severely altered by the Anthropocene, a devastating combination of human actions that include triggering and worsening climate change, destroying natural habitats, industrialised farming, and the direct exploitation of animals.
Earth has suffered five mass extinctions — an accelerating, rampant loss of biodiversity — the last, 65-million years ago. Writing in The New Yorker in 2009, Elizabeth Kolbert proclaimed that we are ushering in a sixth extinction. The evidence is overwhelming: the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List identifies more than 32,000 creatures as endangered. Kolbert’s article was subtitled "This time, the cataclysm is us".
Even iconic creatures are not safe from people. Paradoxically, the tallest animal on earth has slipped under the radar in a strangely silent descent towards extinction. In just a decade, giraffes have switched from IUCN categorisation of "Least Concern" to "Vulnerable" or "Critically Endangered". Zoologists are playing catch-up in understanding giraffes; as recently as 2016, a fresh study concluded that there are four distinct species, and five subspecies. Populations have dropped 40% in three generations — just 30 years, given the average life span of 10 — and there are now fewer than 70,000 mature individuals across Africa. The Kordofan giraffe numbers less than 2,000. Poaching is the primary threat, feeding demand for tails as coveted status symbols, or their long hairs woven into fly whisks. So it is that human vanity can destroy a statuesque species to swat a pest.
It’s a tragedy of unfathomable proportion that we see value in fellow beings only when they are dead, or believe in the magical power of animals but prefer to pretend we can absorb this spirit through consumption rather than peaceful wonderment and cohabitation. Every year tens of thousands of wild animals are poached, maimed, or illegally transported to satisfy mankind’s greed, vanity or superstitious ignorance.
The World Economic Forum estimates the criminal wildlife trade to be worth up to $23bn. In 2018 the black-market price for rhino horn peaked at $65,000/kg, significantly more than the average gold and platinum price across the year — and cocaine or heroin too. Efforts to shape demand downward have had some effect, but cultural traditions in China and other Asian nations are deep-rooted, and as a conspicuous marker of wealth, horns continue to be used as dagger handles and shaved into cocktails. Or, powdered for traditional remedies — for which there is zero medical efficacy. A 2014 survey of Chinese consumers by US-based Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that demand is so significant that it would be impossible to match through regulated rhino farm projects.
Appallingly, SA — home to about 80% of Africa’s remaining rhino populations — has a history of pushing to reverse or soften conventions and laws banning international trade. Perhaps the most tragic indictment on the global regulatory framework is the fact that the country’s rhino conservation efforts are regarded as a success story — yet 594 rhinos were poached last year, and 8,288 in the past decade.
But the world’s most trafficked and poached animal, accounting for 20% of all illegal wildlife shipments, is the pangolin. Global wildlife trade monitoring organisation, TRAFFIC, has identified 159 pangolin smuggling routes, predominantly to China and Vietnam. Almost weekly there are reports of huge illicit hauls, such as two Singapore seizures days apart in April 2019 totalling 26t of pangolin scales destined for Vietnam — a black market value of $76.5m, but an undefinable, irreplaceable loss of 38,000 individual creatures. International laws supposedly protect all eight pangolin species, but an estimated 1-million pangolin have been killed in the past decade. These shy, small, delicate scaly ant-eaters, beautiful in appearance and name, may be extinct before most people even know about them.
Bad news in black and white
A century ago, over 1-million African penguin breeding pairs inhabited the SA and Namibian coastlines. Now, after decades of egg-poaching which imperilled their breeding, and guano-stripping which ravaged their colonies, a 10-minute stroll along the Boulders Beach boardwalk in Simonstown will allow you to see about 10% of the remaining population of these tottering, tuxedo-ed creatures. Today there are fewer than 18,000 pairs; they are projected to die out in less than a decade as rapacious overfishing wipes out their food supply, the pelagic shoals of anchovies and sardines.
Data for the Galápagos penguin is even more distressing. There are fewer than 1,000 breeding pairs remaining.
Penguins are a sentinel species of the seas. Their decline is an alert signal across marine resources and ecosystems. Like the ruination we are sowing on land, our reckless exploitation of the oceans prompts scientists like oceanographer and marine biologist Sylvia Earle to warn that in 50 years "the fish will simply be gone."
River dolphins represent a tragic tale of two continents. In South America, the Amazon and Orinoco river basins are being degraded by encroaching human activities. The freshwater dolphins of these rivers — gorgeous dusky pink, inquisitively offering wondrous smiles for the camera — are rapidly descending towards extinction. Numbers are halving every 10 years, according to a 2018 study by Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. Mortifyingly, it warned that the dolphins’ most patent threat is the escalation of river fishing, with dolphins specifically targeted because their flesh is valued as bait.
The Ganges, flowing through the Indian subcontinent — one of the world’s most densely populated regions — is home to a dwindling population of fewer than 2,000 blind Ganges River dolphins. It is esteemed as a holy river. Cruelly, the dolphins and all its other aquatic life seem doomed in an environment where the dumping of toxic chemicals and human waste, sand mining, and riverbank logging are prevalent practices.
In the 4,400km transboundary Mekong river, traversing five countries, there may be fewer than 300 Irrawaddy dolphins. In Myanmar and Cambodia, the Irrawaddy has a legendary relationship with traditional local fishermen — but this cannot seem to halt a slide to extinction: a 2015 census determined 150 remained across these two countries. In Laos, a 2016 count could trace just three.
For our callous, immoral attitude towards nature, we are now paying a price. Renowned primatologist Jane Goodall points out that a pandemic like Covid-19 has been predicted by epidemiologists studying zoonotic diseases, those that jump from animals to people. "We have increasingly been creating conditions in which this can happen, including trafficking which brings animals together from different parts of the world, destined to be sold for entertainment or food … also, the factory farms all over the world where we breed cows, pigs and chickens in the most terrible conditions."
Corporations in food production preach their operations’ so-called sustainability. In reality, the word is a cover for insidious production. There’s strong evidence that the recent, ongoing Amazon fires — turning 15,000m² of rainforest into ash and killing an estimated 2.5-million individual animals — were deliberately started as corn and soya farming land grabs tacitly encouraged by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. Similarly, diagrams and photographs capturing deforestation in Indonesia are stark: in less than 50 years, nearly 25% of its tropical forest has been converted to croplands, severely threatening the habitat of iconic species including indigenous rhino, elephant and orangutans.
"There’s nothing complicated here," says Philip Lymbery in his powerful, provocative book Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were (Bloomsbury, 2017). "If you fell vast swathes of rich jungle and replace it with one type of vegetation, you kill the vast array of plant and animal life that virgin forest would otherwise sustain." On Indonesia’s Sumatra island, clearings for palm oil plantations have slashed the most biodiverse lowland forests to a fraction of what they were a few decades ago. One consequence: now only as few as 400 Sumatran tigers remain.
The havoc we are wreaking within the natural world evokes a combination of emotions: shame, helplessness, fury and sadness. We are diminished without the wonder of wildlife, forfeiting beauty, inspiration and imagination. Profoundly, New York University environmental studies professor Jennifer Jacquet expresses the sense of hollowing lament: "This makes me a little less fulfilled as a human being."
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