Javan rhino 'now extinct in Vietnam

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**ShumaGorath**

Frazzled wrote:That doesn't mean you're a hunter. It just means the deer there are dumb.

Correct. Deer here are dumb as hell. I didn't say I was a hunter, I said I was well acquainted with hunting laws. There are two things to do in a state that is 90% forest and that has a population density lower then Afghanistan. Drink and hunt. Either way this is all pretty irrelevant anyway as culls and quotas are still under the purview of hunting laws and one institution handles both, when I was talking about hunting laws being failures I was talking about them failing to do what they were meant to. That being population control.

**biccat**

ShumaGorath wrote:The third section of that article is about diseases. Read past the first page please.

I'm not here to do your research for you.

However, lets assume for the moment that your article says what you say it does (rather than what it actually says) and that in one example you have shown that a single extinction event has caused a failure of the North American ecosystem.

This still doesn't show that increased biodiversity is a good thing. That's even setting aside the balance between human expansion and natural animal environments.

**Frazzled**

ShumaGorath wrote:
Frazzled wrote:That doesn't mean you're a hunter. It just means the deer there are dumb.

Correct. Deer here are dumb as hell. I didn't say I was a hunter, I said I was well acquainted with hunting laws. There are two things to do in a state that is 90% forest and that has a population density lower then Afghanistan. Drink and hunt. Either way this is all pretty irrelevant anyway as culls and quotas are still under the purview of hunting laws and one institution handles both, when I was talking about hunting laws being failures I was talking about them failing to do what they were meant to. That being population control.

Thats your problem right there. Not enough hunters.

Full disclosure. Until the Zombie games start I am not a hunter by choice.

**ShumaGorath**

biccat wrote:
ShumaGorath wrote:The third section of that article is about diseases. Read past the first page please.

I'm not here to do your research for you.

However, lets assume for the moment that your article says what you say it does (rather than what it actually says) and that in one example you have shown that a single extinction event has caused a failure of the North American ecosystem.

This still doesn't show that increased biodiversity is a good thing. That's even setting aside the balance between human expansion and natural animal environments.

You are very clearly reading neither my posts nor the article. The article directly states that due to decreased predation thanks to unnatural selection and predator dieoffs that the deer population has exploded beyond our apparent ability to control. That has caused increased rampancy and severity in diseases among the denser population, diseases that have spread to humans in the past. It has caused harm to the lumber industry as saplings now find it significantly harder to survive to adulthood. It has caused significant damage to floral diversity as the preferential feeding habits of deer are driving some forms of flora to extinction. These are all bad and most will have more severe or lengthy runoff effects if the trend continues.

If you want me to somehow explain the moralistic virtues of health or economy to you then you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm not going to do it simply because you are (as always) too stubborn to even look at the bare facts and basic logic in front of you.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Frazzled wrote:
ShumaGorath wrote:
Frazzled wrote:That doesn't mean you're a hunter. It just means the deer there are dumb.

Correct. Deer here are dumb as hell. I didn't say I was a hunter, I said I was well acquainted with hunting laws. There are two things to do in a state that is 90% forest and that has a population density lower then Afghanistan. Drink and hunt. Either way this is all pretty irrelevant anyway as culls and quotas are still under the purview of hunting laws and one institution handles both, when I was talking about hunting laws being failures I was talking about them failing to do what they were meant to. That being population control.

Thats your problem right there. Not enough hunters.

Full disclosure. Until the Zombie games start I am not a hunter by choice.

We pay people to hunt these damn things. What we need is to restore the wolf and bear populations to something respectably able to handle the populations for us. But then thats increasing the number of predators in an ecosystem where we can still be killed by teeth so don't expect this problem to get fixed any time soon.

**biccat**

ShumaGorath wrote:You are very clearly reading neither my posts nor the article. The article directly states that due to decreased predation thanks to unnatural selection and predator dieoffs that the deer population has exploded beyond our apparent ability to control.

Except that it doesn't.

"Overexploitation in the second half of the nineteenth century led to major declines in deer numbers and range"

It's quite apparent that human activity can adequately control the deer population. This "overexploitation" was controlled by strict hunting laws, reintroducing population, and reducing natural predators of deer. But in addition to government attempts to increase the population of deer, private activities (adding forests, planting fields of edible plants, etc.) also promoted growth of deer population.

It's the attempts at control that led to the problem of overpopulation in the deer population.

ShumaGorath wrote:If you want me to somehow explain the moralistic virtues of health or economy to you then you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm not going to do it simply because you are (as always) too stubborn to even look at the bare facts and basic logic in front of you.

I'll accept that improved health and economy are adventageous, but I'm not willing to blindly accept that biodiversity is a driving force of either. In fact, there's a lot of disagreement among ecologists as to whether biodiversity is good or bad, and there's been a lot of attetmpts to quantify the facts one way or another.

**ShumaGorath**

Except that it doesn't.

"Overexploitation in the second half of the nineteenth century led to major declines in deer numbers and range"

It's quite apparent that human activity can adequately control the deer population. This "overexploitation" was controlled by strict hunting laws, reintroducing population, and reducing natural predators of deer. But in addition to government attempts to increase the population of deer, private activities (adding forests, planting fields of edible plants, etc.) also promoted growth of deer population.

It's the attempts at control that led to the problem of overpopulation in the deer population.

By the middle of the twentieth century, wolves (Canis lupus) had disappeared
from continental Europe and most areas south of the North American boreal forests
(Boitani 1995, Paquet & Carbyn 2003). Mountain lions (Puma concolor) were
also extirpated in eastern North America (McCullough 1997). Without predators, ungulate populations increase rapidly to (or beyond) the carrying capacity
of available forage (McCullough 1997, Messier 1994, Potvin et al. 2003, Sæther
et al. 1996). Their high intrinsic rate of population increase may also allow deer
to escape predator control while making overshoot of habitat carrying capacity
and ﬂuctuations in population size more likely.

The most obvious factor contributing to the rapid growth of deer populations is
increased forage. Widespread agricultural and silvicultural activities considerably
improved deer habitat throughout the twentieth century (Alverson et al. 1988,
Fuller & Gill 2001, Porter & Underwood 1999). Tree planting after logging and
early successional forested landscapes provide abundant, high-quality food that
increases deer habitat carrying capacity (Bobek et al. 1984, Fuller & Gill 2001,
Sinclair 1997). Forest harvesting and the resulting interspersion of habitats provide
good cover and abundant forage for deer (Diefenbach et al. 1997). Many openings
are also intentionally managed to boost forage quality and population growth
(Waller & Alverson 1997).

That is the preceding and following paragraphs. The ones surrounding what you quoted. I know you read selectively, but at least debate defensively. Make sure it's not this easy to show that you aren't reading the material.

Recent research suggests, however, that large predators play important ecological roles. They appear to control the abundance of the “mesopredators” [e.g.,
raccoon (Procyon lotor), skunk (Mephitis mephitis), etc.] that prey on birds and
small mammals (Crooks & Soul´e 1999, Terborgh 1988). The presence of two
or more predator species in the same region could work synergistically to exert
signiﬁcantly more population control on ungulates than either alone could exert
(e.g., Gasaway et al. 1992). In the Glacier National Park area, a study by Kunkel
& Pletscher (1999) concluded that combined predation from cougar and wolves
is the primary factor that limits deer and elk populations. Analyzing results from
27 studies across North America, Messier (1994) used functional and numerical
responses of wolves to moose to conclude that equilibrial moose densities would
decline (from 2.0/km2
to 1.3/km2
) in the presence of wolves. Furthermore, if habitat quality deteriorates or mortality from another predator increases, wolves are
predicted to hold moose to a much lower equilibrium (0.2 to 0.4 moose/km2
). Predation effects are often nonlinear (Noy-Meir 1975) and involve lags in the manner
illustrated in Figure 2b and 2c (substitute deer for plant abundance on the y-axis
and predation for browsing pressure on the x-axis). Indeed, under a combined scenario, a functional guild of large predators might keep deer populations down to
densities compatible with the upper curve of plant abundance in Figure 2c. Loss
of predators could then ﬂip the system to the alternate state represented by the
bottom curve.

That's from the section on predators and natural population control.

I'll accept that improved health and economy are adventageous, but I'm not willing to blindly accept that biodiversity is a driving force of either. In fact, there's a lot of disagreement among ecologists as to whether biodiversity is good or bad, and there's been a lot of attetmpts to quantify the facts one way or another.

I've posted material to back what I'm saying. Please do the same.

**biccat**

ShumaGorath wrote:That is the preceding and following paragraphs. The ones surrounding what you quoted.

Look, if you're interested in serious debate, the internet is not the place for it. However, I was not using your resource to substantiate my point, I was using your own article to discredit your point. When the supporting evidence you provide directly contradicts what you're trying to argue then pointing out the inconsistency is sufficient.

As always, personal insults removed.

ShumaGorath wrote:I've not posted material to back what I'm saying. Please do the same.

You're right, you haven't. So I suppose I will do the same.

**LordofHats**

sarpedons-right-hand wrote:It matters because it was not an extinction caused by natural selection. It was man made.

Is man not part of nature? Can we not out compete other species like any other creature?

I read a very interesting article a year ago poking at how modern conservation and environmentalists have taken an approach to nature that ignores natural selection, despite citing it as a reason for the immorality of human action. Species that cannot survive as the environment around them changes die. It's that simple. Nature is not a paradise that never changes.

Now, I think we can argue about the morality of man driving a species into extinction, but you won't find it in simple claims of natural selection.

**Orlanth**

It sounds like you need to kill the market. Get people to send their toe nail clippings to an animal welfare group where it all gets reduced to powder and packaged as rhino horn in the same packages the oriental medicine cartels use. its the same stuff anyway.

Once you have flooded the market with the stuff send out videos showing you have and all the different rhino horn products you have mimiced.

it might help to video some masked guy at your factory pissing into the mix, or snotting into it or something.

People who buy packets of rhino horn rarely see anyone who has seen a rhino. So product authenticity is difficult to verify.

You could possibly even kill the market if the animal groups video is just a hoax.

What are you buying rhino horn or human toe nail clippings? Kind of kills the sale.

**MeanGreenStompa**

biccat wrote:
Chowderhead wrote:Domino Effect. Without the Rhino, something will grow wildly, and the thing that feeds off that will grow wildy, etc etc.

Basically, it feths up the Ecosystem.

Did the ecosystem get "fethed up" when the thylacine (1936) went extinct? Lord Howe Long-eared Bat (1996)? The Pyrenean Ibex (2000)? Smallpox?

While it's possible that sudden extinctions (i.e. killing all of the horses in the central plains) could have disastrous effects, the gradual extinction of species has a history of not totally fething up the ecosystem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species

Also, horses in the central plains are an invasive species. They were introduced by the Spanish. The original new world horse species were all wiped out during the last ice age.

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LordofHats wrote:
Is man not part of nature? Can we not out compete other species like any other creature?

I read a very interesting article a year ago poking at how modern conservation and environmentalists have taken an approach to nature that ignores natural selection, despite citing it as a reason for the immorality of human action. Species that cannot survive as the environment around them changes die. It's that simple. Nature is not a paradise that never changes.

Now, I think we can argue about the morality of man driving a species into extinction, but you won't find it in simple claims of natural selection.

Humanity is, as far as we know, the only species that is self aware. We comprehend how we are changing the environment and how this can and does impact other species.

And killing a 10 ft herbivore to grind it's horn down for a totally useless love potion, driving a species into oblivion, is just a terrible shame.

**LordofHats**

MeanGreenStompa wrote:Humanity is, as far as we know, the only species that is self aware. We comprehend how we are changing the environment and how this can and does impact other species.

And? From a practical stand point, being able to consciously consider that I just killed something is not really a reason not to do it... unless I'm queasy or don't want to clean up the mess.

And killing a 10 ft herbivore to grind it's horn down for a totally useless love potion, driving a species into oblivion, is just a terrible shame.

And it's pointless is a much better argument than 'it's not natural selection' Good job

Although just as a trivia, I've heard that the whole aphrodesiac thing is a myth. They use it for fevers apparently.

On the other hand, I don't really see an environment collapsing because the last of an already long term declining a species has been wiped out. We would already see the terrible consequences before now as the species declined. There are probably consequences, but since no one is crying about Vietnam's ecosystem collapsing I figure it's nothing world altering. Now Otters. I hear they're pretty important

Prairie Dogs too apparently.

**MeanGreenStompa**

LordofHats wrote:
MeanGreenStompa wrote:Humanity is, as far as we know, the only species that is self aware. We comprehend how we are changing the environment and how this can and does impact other species.

And? From a practical stand point, being able to consciously consider that I just killed something is not really a reason not to do it... unless I'm queasy or don't want to clean up the mess.

I'm not arguing about killing an animal. I've hunted and fished since I was a boy and I'm a dedicated eater of the dead. I believe that wiping out species is morally wrong, I believe it the same way Christians believe in the bible. I believe we are custodians and that the wholesale eradication of species is going to continue to have detrimental effects on the world we live in.

LordofHats wrote:

And killing a 10 ft herbivore to grind it's horn down for a totally useless love potion, driving a species into oblivion, is just a terrible shame.

And it's pointless is a much better argument than 'it's not natural selection' Good job

Your twee and unwarranted patronisation aside, the added weight of the end product being totally useless at it's claimed purpose is a fairly salient point.

**LordofHats**

I was not attempting to be insulting, that's just how I am sometimes

My whole bit in this thread is basically that treating humans as if they are somehow separate from nature is logically flawed. We are part of nature. If anything we're probably the worst invasive species on the planet

We can out compete anything we encounter. My problem is that in a lot of cases, I don't see why it matters. We already alter our environment to our advantage and we don't wreck ecosystems as much as we alter them. I see some cases why it matters, like prairie dogs and the great plains. Others I don't see why any of us should care. Wolves as an example, as much as I like wolves as animals.

Probably a good thing I'm not an environmental biologist

**ShumaGorath**

Look, if you're interested in serious debate, the internet is not the place for it. However, I was not using your resource to substantiate my point,

Oh, shock. Biccat wasn't interested in a serious debate and shrugged off supporting evidence because he doesn't like to hear things that contradict his opinions. Surprise.

I was using your own article to discredit your point.

You failed. All you really managed to do was copy paste the second paragraph of the material I posted and repeatedly reference it while refusing to listen to either basic logic or the repeated request that you read past the first page. You managed to discredit yourself more then anything I was saying.

You're right, you haven't. So I suppose I will do the same.

Sorry, that was a typo. Most people might assume as much, but hey, you're not interested in factual debate, just talking point pissing matches so I'm not shocked you didn't. Either way, feel free to post anything that supports your insistence that people in the fields pertinent believe that biodiversity is bad. Keep in mind that stuff rick perry says isn't pertinent.

**Pacific**

biccat wrote:
Monster Rain wrote:The real bummer is that there are people that really don't care that they are possibly killing the last animal of that type on the planet.

Why does it matter that the animal is extinct?

Why I oughta....

No! Wait... !

You got me before Biccat, with your cunning ploy, I shall not be taken so easily this time..

**biccat**

ShumaGorath wrote:feel free to post anything that supports your insistence that people in the fields pertinent believe that biodiversity is bad.

You're moving the goalposts. I never said that biodiversity is bad, I said that a decrease in biodiversity is not necessarily the worst thing ever.

This appears to be an interesting article questioning your argument.

As always, personal insults removed. Rarely have I had to cut out all but a fragment of a single sentence in doing so.

**Frazzled**

Arguying with Shuma will do that. Ignore is your friend here.

**Gitkikka**

Javan rhino? Never heard of it. Was it tasty? I bet it was tasty.

**ShumaGorath**

You're moving the goalposts. I never said that biodiversity is bad, I said that a decrease in biodiversity is not necessarily the worst thing ever.

When you repeatedly ask why biodiversity is good it implies that you believe the opposite. Especially when you issue a request for proof.

This appears to be an interesting article questioning your argument.

What argument? I was arguing against your insistence that decreased biodiversity has questionable or minimal impacts on the environment. I presented a series of examples wherein they have a largescale impact. Science and the natural world doesn't deal in absolutes and you never specified that you were arguing on a macro scale or even on an interspecies scale I was dealing with what you were posting.

Individual extinctions occur constantly in the natural world, not all cause collapse or even changes notable by humans. The extinction of megafauna however nearly always does.

As always, personal insults removed. Rarely have I had to cut out all but a fragment of a single sentence in doing so.

Well it's nice that you finally bothered to look into providing some sort of source and clarified your opinions on the issue.

**biccat**

ShumaGorath wrote:When you repeatedly ask why biodiversity is good it implies that you believe the opposite. Especially when you issue a request for proof.

No, I'm questioning the "conventional wisdom" that decreased biodiversity is necessarily bad, or that an extinction event like this one (losing the last rhino in an environment) is a bad thing. Species extinction has occurred for millions of years and the environment tends to get on pretty well. The idea that we can or even should control extinctions is the core of the argument I'm raising. We seem to think we know more than we do, as evidenced by your article on deer populations.

ShumaGorath wrote:What argument? I was arguing against your insistence that decreased biodiversity has questionable or minimal impacts on the environment.

Well, that one. The one you've been making in this thread. That biodiversity is always a positive.

ShumaGorath wrote:Well it's nice that you finally bothered to look into providing some sort of source and clarified your opinions on the issue.

Perhaps you should approach these issues in a less aggressive manner, such as not jumping to personal attacks if you want to have a meaningful discussion.

**ShumaGorath**

No, I'm questioning the "conventional wisdom" that decreased biodiversity is necessarily bad, or that an extinction event like this one (losing the last rhino in an environment) is a bad thing. Species extinction has occurred for millions of years and the environment tends to get on pretty well.

There are interesting fossil records of monospecies megaflora dominating the environment and causing mass extinctions and dieoffs in prehistoric times. Megafauna as well. There isn't really a conventional wisdom regarding extinctions in a natural environment as they are a natural occurrence, however uncontrolled unnatural selection such as this produces unforeseen consequences as a part of the environment that was not outmodded has died due to unnatural interference on a macro scale. Also, people like rhinos and the loss of megafauna is a sad event culturally and could be construed as bad that way.

The idea that we can or even should control extinctions is the core of the argument I'm raising. We seem to think we know more than we do, as evidenced by your article on deer populations.

The article I posted points more to the sins of our forefathers then our own. We're a lot better at understanding ecosystems now.

Well, that one. The one you've been making in this thread. That biodiversity is always a positive.

There are no absolutes, though I would argue that unnatural extinctions have typically adverse effects.

Perhaps you should approach these issues in a less aggressive manner, such as not jumping to personal attacks if you want to have a meaningful discussion.

And you should clarify your points and back them up earlier so people don't feel as if they're being trolled.

**halonachos**

Chowderhead wrote:
biccat wrote:
Monster Rain wrote:The real bummer is that there are people that really don't care that they are possibly killing the last animal of that type on the planet.

Why does it matter that the animal is extinct?

Domino Effect. Without the Rhino, something will grow wildly, and the thing that feeds off that will grow wildy, etc etc.

Basically, it feths up the Ecosystem.

As someone stated earlier, this means that more Chinese businessmen will be impotent which means the population in China will decrease. As the population decreases then their labor force decreases and as that happens the price of goods increases due to the inability to produce as much as before. This forces businesses to relocate their factories to India or some other third world country where they have a larger population, this causes an economic depression in China that adversely affects America's economy to the point that the entire world market is in trouble. The world eventually agrees to erase the national debt of every single country in order to keep the world economy afloat and effectively reboots the economic system. China then loses its external income and riots sweep the streets as the number of poor increases, eventually China enters a Civil War and loses far more people than it is capable of reproducing. Russia, America, and the EU enter China in order to secure vast tracts of land left behind in the power vacuum.

The end result, a new Call of Duty on a disc made in India.