There's Only One Place On Earth Left Where You Can See a Western Black Rhino

Well, We Did It: The Western Black Rhino Is Extinct

Well, we did it.

Human beings managed to wipe out the western black rhinoceros.

Congratulations, everybody.

The western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) once lived across parts of central and western Africa. By the end of the twentieth century, decades of hunting and poaching had reduced its population to almost nothing. Surveys in Cameroon failed to find surviving animals, and in 2011 the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the subspecies extinct.

Not because an asteroid hit the Earth.

Not because the climate suddenly changed beyond anything the animal could survive.

Not because some new predator appeared.

We killed them.

Rhinos have been slaughtered largely because people will pay enormous amounts of money for their horns. Rhino horn is keratin—the same basic material found in human fingernails and hair—but centuries of traditional beliefs and the modern status-symbol market have nevertheless created a lucrative international trade.

A magnificent animal that survived everything nature could throw at it couldn't survive us deciding that part of its face was worth money.

There were warnings. There were conservationists. There were laws. Everybody knew what was happening.

And we did it anyway.

That's the part I find difficult to comprehend. Extinction is forever. There will never be another western black rhino wandering through Cameroon. There will never be a population that rebounds. There will never be a calf born somewhere that gives conservationists hope.

They're gone.

The other surviving rhinoceros species and subspecies remain under varying degrees of pressure from poaching and habitat loss. Which means the extinction of the western black rhino shouldn't merely be something we shake our heads about.

It's a warning.

Somewhere right now there's another animal whose population is becoming a number small enough to count.

And humanity still gets to decide whether that number eventually becomes zero.

There's at least one Western Black Rhino left 

For a culture that prides itself on an ancient tradition of wisdom, China sure is a backwards, cruel, moronic place. Fuck you, China, and I hope you poison yourselves to death with your ignorance. 

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