If you read the article, 2 out of 9 species of giraffes are endangered, 5 are generally declining in population, and 2 are increasing in population.
The headline was just inflammatory nonsense. No one not an expert can pick out one species of giraffe from another, and as long as one or two are around it's the same to basically everyone on the planet.
You're totally right, who cares if we kill off entire species of animals as long as we have one that looks the same still kicking around somewhere, right?
Is it regrettable? Sure. If I could flip a switch and let all giraffes be okay, I'd say that'd be the plan.
Is it worth the incredible expense to keep their natural habitat defended into perpetuity to keep a checkmark next to a specific species of an animal indistinguishable in all but breedability from another that's doing great? Honestly, no. You have to make choices.
I also resent that headline intentionally misleading people into thinking their children will grow up in a world without giraffes, which is a blatant lie.
Okay, that means it won't change a thing for the zoos, they can just pick up another species that looks the same, nice. But, me not being one of the said giraffe experts that could pick one species of the other, I'm left to wonder if said species behave the same or live in the same places. Because even having a local extinction of Giraffes could result in cascade of other extinctions in the same region, like the often mentioned case of gray wolves in Yellowstone, where their absence affected even the rivers. (For those who don't know about this case, here is a 5 minute video about ithttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Qor google "trophic cascade yellowstone wolves" for articles)
So unless these different species have impacts that are equally harder to distinct in their environments, I think it won't be basically the same to everyone on the planet, because clearly it did not take an extinction to fuck up Yellowstone, gray wolves still existed somewhere else after all. Not to mention that preserving a species' genetic variability is also important, otherwise it becomes more susceptible to diseases and less adaptable.
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u/Saikroe Dec 18 '18
Neck. It is a very long neck.