What really pisses me off about this is the mentality of human beings toward other living creatures. Specifically, how every god damn living thing on the planet is seen as ours to control, like the whole of nature is our own little fishbowl entirely full of our own pets. And once our pets are limping along, gasping for breath, we pretend to care.

There are five northern white rhinos left. All of them were in zoos until four were moved from a zoo in Czech Republic to a conservancy in Africa.

Can you imagine being the last human being and living out the rest of your short, lonely, depressing life in a tiny artificial habitat, poked and peered at by weird creatures for god knows why?

Most of these animals were born in captivity. That means they don't even reflect the mentality of the original animal in its natural habitat. This is effectively no longer a wild animal; it is our pet. The hope, one imagines, is that somehow scientists can figure out how to breed enough of them that they could reintroduce them to the wild, but this is a risky, expensive, difficult, long-term process. But the track record of this system over the past 50 years proves this will not work.

In order to try to convince poachers not to kill them, there was a systematic attempt to dehorn rhinos in captive populations in the 90s that continues today. In order to keep these animals alive, we mutilate them, ignoring the long process of evolution which adapted these animals with very pronounced and specific biological features. This still doesn't stop poachers from killing them for a multitude of reasons, but it reduces the likelihood of human and rhino caused mortality.

Extinction is a natural process, which occurs due to geological transformation, climactic oscillation, and species interaction. About 99.9% of all species that have existed on the planet are extinct.

Human growth, however, has drastically accelerated the extinction of species. Some of the ways humans cause extinction include water pollution, overfishing, overgrazing, thermal pollution, excess turbidity, deforestation, agricultural development, urban conversion, introduction of alien species, and of course, hunting. In rainforests, which include up to 80% of the species diversity of the planet, deforestation causes the loss of up to 50,000 species a year.

Considering all of that, think about this: we are guarding one fucking rhino. We know it's not going to breed; they've been trying for 50 years and made one or two cows. So naturally this begs the question: why the fuck are we pretending so hard to care about this one giant mammal when it's already too late?

We don't actually care for, or need, this species. It is effectively already completely removed from nature, so it has no effect on its environment or other species. The only reason we're dicking around like this is guilt. Guilt that we abused our pets, and so we make a lame attempt to put a band-aid on it and say we're sorry, so that our parent or God or whatever moral authority you choose will forgive our sins.

But feeling guilty doesn't save lives, and it doesn't keep an environment healthy. So this process of burning the world, then giving it CPR when it can no longer crawl, does nothing to help the fauna of the planet. We're not actually helping. We're trying to make ourselves feel better. And this false compassion is fucking infuriating.

Sorry for the rant.