
Giraffes Added to the Endangered Species List (2016) - Red_Tarsius
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/giraffes-silently-slip-endangered-species-list-180961372/#pjgVVUWGgDD6WdVV.01?no-ist
======
lgleason
Some sub-species are dwindling and others are thriving, there are farms in
South Africa where they are raised, not unlike how you raise other animals for
food consumption and then they do the whole trophy hunting thing with some of
them. The hunting funds the the efforts to care for and breed the animals.
Depending on the value of the Animals, farmers will spend big money on the
care of the animals because there is profit to be made from it. Given how
corrupt the governments are in that part of the world and the poverty this may
be one of the only realistic options for preserving some species. When the
population doesn't have the basics, let alone disposable income, funding for
conservation tends to be de-prioritized.

~~~
aphextron
> Given how corrupt the governments are in that part of the world and the
> poverty this may be one of the only realistic options for preserving some
> species. When the population doesn't have the basics, let alone disposable
> income, funding for conservation tends to be de-prioritized.

I wish more people could understand this. Hunters paying for high dollar
trophy hunts are literally the only thing keeping African megafauna from total
extinction at this point. It may hurt for someone who loves animals in a
"Disney" sense to understand this, but most hunters have a far deeper love,
respect, and appreciation for the natural world than any new age
"environmentalist".

We (hunters) have been doing this work for generations now, and it's not
pretty. Not everything can be turned into a touchy feely bumper sticker that
agrees with your political stance. The reality is that wild animals are a
natural resource which must be carefully managed if they are to continue
existing.

~~~
bradyo
What if we provided the proper funding and... didn't hunt them.

~~~
emodendroket
Who's "we"? Who's volunteering to replace the large sums of money wealthy
foreigners are willing to pay to shoot a lion?

~~~
herriojr
It's not just that. If you pay to shoot a lion, it's not going to be a young
lion that will sire a lot of children. It will be an old lion that is actually
reducing the potential population growth. This is a good thing if we want to
increase the number of lions.

Hunting is a necessary evil. In terms of US conservation locally, hunting is
fairly highly regulated. It is actually needed in a lot of areas where people
go hunting for deer due to natural predators no longer existing. If it wasn't
for hunters, there would be large population growths of deer to the point
where they begin to kill off other species that rely on the same food sources
as well as starve themselves.

In the past, before things were so regulated, it wasn't unusual for
populations to be decimated by humans. Passenger Pigeons are now extinct;
Deer, Bison, and Elk in certain areas were killed off. Heck, in Ohio, Deer
were reintroduced after being decimated, so they would run-a-muck if there was
no hunting unless they were to reintroduce wolves to the area (good luck
getting people to agree with this).

All of this is due to humans creating imbalances in nature that conservation
is now trying to keep in check, and hunting is necessary for certain species
which no longer have natural predators, or in the case of lions, to ensure
males that will sire more children get a chance to.

Here's some Ohio History on Fauna: [https://ocvn.osu.edu/news/ohios-wild-
history-frontier-fauna-...](https://ocvn.osu.edu/news/ohios-wild-history-
frontier-fauna-1750-present)

TLDR -- unchecked hunting bad, regulated hunting good

~~~
acjohnson55
> It will be an old lion that is actually reducing the potential population
> growth. This is a good thing if we want to increase the number of lions.

Maybe...but nature actually does a pretty good job of taking care of the old
lions. But your point stands in other situations.

------
wufufufu
Solutions (not all serious):

    
    
      1. Paid trophy hunting where proceeds go towards reservations
      2. Make giraffe burgers common and desirable so we have giraffe farms for manufacturing giraffe meat
      3. Domesticate giraffes and make them the new dog/cat
      4. Similar to #3, progressively breed smaller and smaller giraffes so they're hardier, take less space, and can eat anything. Make them the new deer (how deer are viewed in the US).

~~~
mrnobody_67
Arguably chickens and cows are an incredibly successful species because of the
economic incentives for food production....

~~~
pvaldes
But we enjoy the 1% of the rainforests in what wild red fowl live. After
feeding billions of humans, men, women and children, we are still so
ungrateful that had not granted this species an international "earth-treasure"
park for the protection of the chicken and all other species in the same
ecosystem. Bos primigenius are now extinct, and we left for die the last real
wild horse in Poland after chasing it toward a hole and breaking their legs.

------
Sir_Substance
Except that they aren't on the endangered species list, they are on the
vulnerable species list:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe)

This has been your regular reminder that "endangered" is a technical term with
a specific meaning, and that misusing it makes it harder to focus global
resources on species that are actually endangered. Thank you for your
attention, please return to freedom and consumption.

~~~
martey
From the Wikipedia article you mentioned:

> _Two subspecies, the West African giraffe and the Rothschild giraffe, have
> been classified as endangered, as wild populations of each of them number in
> the hundreds._

~~~
scott_karana
Okay, so two of nine extant subspecies are endangered... And the other seven
are not.

~~~
Sir_Substance
And also, to call Marty out on not reading the article, the first paragraph of
TFA makes it clear and obvious that the article agrees with my interpretation
and knew it's headline was factually incorrect, but chose sensationalism
anyway:

>announced yesterday that it was moving the giraffe from a species of Least
Concern to Vulnerable status in its Red List of Threatened Species report.
That means the animal faces extinction in the wild in the medium-term future
if nothing is done to minimize the threats to its life or habitat. The next
steps are endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild and extinct.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, it's bizarre that the article's title is falsified in the first
paragraph. But maybe the title is using "endangered" in a nontechnical way.

~~~
grzm
I'd agree that it's in a non-technical way. Most people only think of "the
endangered species list". Colloquially, "Not on" would be on Least Concern
(which is every species that's not on anything higher), and anything higher
than (including Vulnerable) that would be "on the list". The paragraph your
parent quotes further explains the details as to what specifically was
happened, which also educates people that what they may believe is a binary
state (on/off the list) is actually more granular than that.

Edit to add: looks like there's a step between Least Concern and Vulnerable:
Near-threatened. Also, the definition of Vulnerable is "faces a high risk of
endangerment in the medium term."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_species)

~~~
mirimir
And quibbling aside, it's a horrible situation. We are for sure in the midst
of an anthropogenic mass extinction.

------
InitialLastName
It's like we're going back and killing off the megafauna we missed the first
time around.

~~~
aleksei
I don't think we've gone back to it, it's just taking us longer than we
expected.

~~~
InitialLastName
It seems to me that we paused in killing them off so rapidly from ~10,000
years ago when we stopped spreading around the world (there were a few
stragglers, but the bulk of them were gone by then) to ~19th century when
industrialization and globalization started letting us destroy all habitats
everywhere.

------
emiliobumachar
I'll suggest again that we should legalize fraud in some narrow cases
regarding faking endangered animal parts.

Let startups and big corporations manufacture convincing fake shark fins,
rhino horns and giraffe tails, and mail it to anyone who would try their luck
passing it off as the real thing.

------
jarcoal
Compassion and foresight are in short supply these days.

------
nroets
This article (and most comments here) assumes that all African countries are
the same.

Hans Rosling of gapminder made it clear how different they are. South Africa
is very dependent on tourism.

And it's not just SA National Parks. The municipality of Tshwane/Pretoria has
reintroduced giraffe and other herbivores into some of its reserves. And now
it collects more revenue from ticket sales and property tax.

------
illlogic2
"many giraffes are slaughtered just for their tails, which are considered a
status symbol and have been used as a dowry when asking a bride’s father for
his daughters hand in marriage in some cultures."

Humans are the most wasteful species.

~~~
njarboe
I would say more that humans have evolved to be very interested in status (as
stated in the text you quoted) and that wasting resources is high on the list
of how to show your high status. Status used to be critical to survival when
being kick out of the tribe was basically a death sentence. Tim Urban wrote a
good article about this[1] with some good ideas to ponder about the value of
caring about what other people think about you.

[1][https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-
op...](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-
life.html)

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
„Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves
modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation
with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no
longer a real concept.“

James Damore will be eager to know more about this theory.

~~~
freehunter
Yeah in a world where people are known to commit suicide because of rejection
from their peers, in a world where people die homeless on the streets of the
richest cities due to rejection from their peers, I would strongly disagree
that social survival is no longer a real concept.

~~~
0xfeba
Yeah, very much alive in blue collar and white collar jobs.

------
magoghm
It seems that if you use Microsoft Azure for image recognition you would come
to the conclusion that there are giraffe's everywhere:
[http://aiweirdness.com/post/171451900302/do-neural-nets-
drea...](http://aiweirdness.com/post/171451900302/do-neural-nets-dream-of-
electric-sheep)

Maybe it's because Microsoft worked on a project to help conservationists
protect giraffes:
[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/machinelearning/2016/04/...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/machinelearning/2016/04/11/how-
microsoft-is-helping-conservationists-protect-the-masai-giraffe/)

This might be an example of how a specialized dataset that was used to train
an AI for a specific task, was later taken as part of another dataset to train
a more general AI and the result was an AI with a "distorted view" of the
world.

------
almostApatriot1
African fauna are finished. Is there any doubt of this?

Over a billion more people there by 2050 and the continent will be the hardest
hit by climate change. We're just burying our heads in the sand about the
reality of it.

~~~
shp0ngle
We Europeans (and to some extent Asians and Americans) killed our local fauna
to make space for our cities, our farms and our factories.

Now Africa is growing very quickly. We should let it grow as we once did.
Saying that they don't have the right to build cities and factories, since
African nature is so nice and our isn't anymore, is a bit Euro centric.

~~~
ohmatt
I agree in theory, but (in my opinion) the difference is that we now realize
how much we screwed things up in other places, so we don't want more people to
do it. It's a flawed argument, seeing as modern civilization isn't really
doing everything it can to prevent climate change, so the obvious, easy answer
is to not let underdeveloped civilizations follow in our footsteps.

Again, I don't disagree with your reasoning, and it is easy to back up by
saying everyone else has done it, why would we stop them from doing it. I
guess my argument against this point is that every society in the world should
be doing their best to try to prevent things like this, so we shouldn't just
let people do obviously terrible things to the environment, just because we
have previously done it.

This is obviously a high-level response, not getting into particulars, but I
hope you get the point at least.

~~~
scoggs
I was thinking how maybe industrialization in general led to the killing off
of many of the larger and more rare fauna around the globe so would that mean
that Africa following in our more industrialized footsteps, even if it isn't
us directly guiding their hands in doing so, is still somewhat our fault for
inspiring that notion?

People cite their distaste and dislike of American and European all over the
world yet the vast majority of those places champion all things American or
European / white, if only in things like food, music, entertainment, fashion,
and lifestyle -- if not more / everything. I know it's not "our"
responsibility after a certain point so I'm just being curious on a very
"surface level" here.

------
cup-of-tea
If you're planning to have children, they might not be able to see a giraffe
in their life. Think about that for a moment.

~~~
Falling3
While I understand (and agree with to some extent) the sentiment, I hate that
this is the first and most prevalent argument. Instead of worrying about the
loss of individuals that make up a species, the concern always seems to be
what humans are going to miss out on being able to look. If we focused more on
valuing the individual organisms and how we interact with them, then maybe we
wouldn't get into this position so frequently.

~~~
k__
Why should we mourn the loss of a species?

We lost species all the time, it's a normal part of evolution.

Also, why is it sadder that humans lead to their extinction than when other
species extinct each other?

~~~
QuotedForTruth
The ridiculous rate at which it is happening is not a normal part of
evolution. It is the 6th great extinction event known. [1]

Its "sadder" because its preventable. Humans are self aware and know that we
are causing this. If we change our behavior it wont happen.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction)

~~~
weregiraffe
There is nothing "normal" about evolution, unless you include everything in
it. Humans are a results of evolution, like any other species. And great
extinctions are completely natural.

~~~
saagarjha
Generally mass extinctions weren't directly caused by the actions of one
particular species, though…

~~~
BookmarkSaver
Except that isn't necessarily true. Wasn't one of the first major extinction
events caused by over-oxygenation of the environment?

~~~
saagarjha
1\. Cyanobacteria aren’t one species and 2. on the whole, oxygenation didn’t
work out so well for the anaerobic bacteria that caused it, did it?

------
0x737368
I know this opinion is probably going to be wildly unpopular on an
engineering-centred newsfeed, but most of our problems could be solved by
going back to a more primitive lifestyle or at least trying to emulate it. So
far ever since we tried to solve a problem with technology a multitude of new
ones have sprung in their place. Solve lack of food - people form
progressively larger living spaces until disease wipes them out. Solve disease
by using medicine - the disease mutates until we have no more antibiotics to
prevent it. If nothing kills us off we start multiplying exponentially until
climate change and pollution reach levels incompatible with life. And to what
end? From what I see most people living in the developed world have a pretty
uninspiring lifestyle - sedentary, devoid of meaning(probably less relevant
here since most people here are brimming with enthusiasm for their job, but
that is not the case for most people), depressed and isolated. On the flipside
of such benefits as buying meat in supermarkets and Netflix-watching leisure
we're ruining the climate, killing off most living creatures that we have no
use for and condemning most of the ones that we do need to a life that is most
unenviable to put it lightly, and consequently tightening the noose around our
necks ever tighter.

For the majority of the homo sapiens' history we were hunter-gatherers and
were doing fine because that is how we were designed by nature. Because our
population didn't spiral out of control or was at least tempered by the amount
of food, our hunting and gathering didn't throw whole ecosystems out of
balance. Small communities offered close relationships that are rare to find
now in our multi-million strong cities. Hard conditions permitted for only the
most fit to survive so there was no need for extreme medical intervention.

I find this whole narrative parallels how when people who grow tired of cities
and go into the forest to try out that lifestyle at first completely
disregard, say, the Native American's techniques to build houses and try to
build cottages until a tree almost kills them when it barberchairs and even if
they do manage to build something that resembles what they're used to they
have to abandon it quickly because it's just hard to build and maintain,
doesn't go well with fire and so on. Then over trial-and-error they eventually
come back to the original Native American design because it was tried for
millennia and can't be improved any further.

So this very much reminds me how now everyone says how sitting is bad for you
- yeah, no wonder. Or how the obesity sky-rocketed when some unscrupulous or
ill-advised agencies decided to recommend that ridiculous amount of
carbohydrates and sugars aren't bad for you, but fats are. The physique and
athletic ability that so many people strive for by going to the gym was
effortless for hunter-gatherers because they didn't overeat and physical
activity were a part of their daily life(not to say that hunting all day is
effortless, just the physique came as a by-product of surviving).

Of course, our population has grown much too large for everyone to go into the
forests, so we've kind of screwed ourselves already by burning that bridge,
however I think we can at least steer humanity in the right direction by
looking at where we came from and trying to chart our future path using that.

~~~
pharrington
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck)
may be a starting point for surveying the current hypotheses about the human
population bottlenecks that have occurred in the past. You're also expressing
a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary selection mechanisms, resulting
in incoherent conclusions. (most egregious example: "Hard conditions permitted
for only the most fit to survive so there was no need for extreme medical
intervention." The "most fit" for a selection lie at a tail end of a
distribution. There is "no need for extreme medical intervention" only when
ignoring the concerns of more representative samples of the distribution.)

~~~
0x737368
Can you explain what is incoherent in thinking that in times where you can't
survive unless you're mostly physically fit enough to do so without medical
intervention? I understand that most physically fit will be an outlier, but my
point is that the average fitness would have been better because of more
fierce natural selection due to lack of medicine.

I'm genuinely interested in hearing criticisms about this hypothesis since
it's been brewing in my head for a while and I figured the best way to test it
is to put under some form of peer-review.

~~~
pharrington
The average fitness only increases while the species' environmental is stable.
Humans are a _famously_ migratory species that also compulsively reshapes it's
environment. (see also: non-human species in human dominated environments
experiencing accelerated evolution)

~~~
0x737368
I think the misunderstanding comes from me using the term "fit" without
actually specifying the precise meaning. I meant it more as having better
general health in the colloquial sense(e.g. not having life-threatening
congenital diseases) rather than fitness in the Darwinian sense where certain
characteristics allow one to prevail in natural selection.

Do you have any suggestions on what I could read to better understand the
issue at hand and get a better idea of what I'm trying to talk about? Perhaps
a good book on the history of ancient humans?

------
jannyfer
Can we add (2016) to the title?

~~~
sctb
Yes we can! Thanks.

