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Revive and Restore, at the following weblink, is one of my favourite charities:-

https://reviverestore.org/

One reason I like them is because they post genuinely interesting and informative milestone updates for a lot of their projects; explaining each step closer to achieving their goals (under the 'Progress to Date' tabs).

But those goals themselves are controversial for some. Because their work is essentially about bringing back dead species and making near-extinct ones viable again through genetic manipulation. As things stand, two of their flagship projects are to bring back the Heath Hen and Passenger Pidgeon to America; two species which were essentially hunted to death relatively recently. I suspect that they will succeed with those two within the decade.



But some people see bringing back dead species as playing God. Others view it as wasted effort and resources which could be spent conserving existing species; a strong argument in light of David Attenbrough's most recent programme. Others still would argue that they went extinct for a reason, and it's pointless to bring them back. Finally, some people fear that acquiring the ability to bring species back will make us blase about conservation, as people will simply feel they can resurrect a species if they wipe them out.

How many of you would side with one of the above arguments? Or if you have another against it, what would that be?

I for one am thrilled by the idea that we could undo some of the damage we've done and bring back some dead species.

I think conservation movements currently hamper themselves to some degree because they have become so invested they do not ever take a step back to look at the larger picture.

Take for example, the Polar Bear. If we want to talk about wasted effort, that is a good place to start. Polar bears are screwed. We would be better off setting things up to help a future generation revive the species than trying to save a sinking ship. There are many other species in the same boat. This project stands to increase the options available to those looking to restore a 'natural' state. Even if the species simply go extinct again we will learn a lot from it.

Standard disclaimer about this being a personal opinion, take with a grain of salt and so on.

 Ketara wrote:
But some people see bringing back dead species as playing God.

It's a weird argument, because there is no shortage of animals that went extinct due to poor adaptations - but the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the white rhino, and so on; these were all killed by man, not any supernatural force. Nothing wrong with righting an wrong we ourselves committed.

 Ouze wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
But some people see bringing back dead species as playing God.

It's a weird argument, because there is no shortage of animals that went extinct due to poor adaptations - but the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the white rhino, and so on; these were all killed by man, not any supernatural force. Nothing wrong with righting an wrong we ourselves committed.

Why is there a difference between the two?

Reviving extinct species is definitely a good idea, or at least having the ability to do it so we have an option in the event of some sort of major disaster. Take steps to put contingencies in place for any vulnerable species, like is being done with the White Rhino, so if it does go extinct we can revive them. If anything, we should establish some sort of genetic vault for creatures like we have with the Svalbard Seed Vault for plants.

Bringing back the Wholly Mammoth, Passenger Pigeon, etc... are just test runs for getting this technology up and running in case we need to rebuild entire biospheres because of an asteroid strike or Yellowstone exploding.

RE: Polar bears. They're really not in danger of going extinct for a few reasons. 1) They can easily be bred in captivity. 2) Sea ice disappearing will force their prey to shore as well eventually. They will definitely experience a population crash, but they do have an absolute defense against extinction as long as they are bred in zoos.

I think this sort of thing should also extend to greater habitat manipulation. We've been indoctrinated that Non-Native species = BAD by default, when really selectively doing that could have good results.

One possible example was the idea to relocate Rhinos to Australia in certain areas for conservation. They could build up populations in an area without the threat of poaching but still has similar climate.

North America used to have Cheetahs. If Cheetahs were reintroduced they would not have the pressure from the rest of Africa's large predators(one of the major reasons for declining cheetah population is because they lose most of their kills to Lions, Hyenas, and Leopards) and they would have plenty of prey like Pronghorn and Deer. Its a possible lifeline for the species.

Mammoths could restore a lost part of the tundra ecosystem. Much like how Elephants shape the terrain in Africa, Mammoths used to do the same in the Tundra.

 Grey Templar wrote:

One possible example was the idea to relocate Rhinos to Australia in certain areas for conservation. They could build up populations in an area without the threat of poaching but still has similar climate.

I like this idea. The problem with rhinos is that their pieces are worth lots of money, and when the locals earn approximately $2 US value in wages per month, killing a rhino is an easy way to net a house, a good looking wife, a field full of mealies and all the Chibuku branded beer cartons you can drink. Send them to Australia, where all the locals are willing to pay double for plastic toy soldiers?

...Wait, hang on a minute. Maybe not. I don't think wargaming needs to be responsible for the death of the rhino to fund plastic krack addictions!

 Ketara wrote:


How many of you would side with one of the above arguments? Or if you have another against it, what would that be?

None of them.

This is your business to do, and no one else's.

By investing sums of cash into a PR campaign in China implying many traditional remedies actually make your wang smaller or fall off entirely would save a bunch of species practically overnight.

Or if you have another against it, what would that be?

The really obvious ones:

Law of Unintended Consequences. There isn't any consideration for the ecosystems they'd be reintroduced to, disease vectors, food sources, etc. There's a guess that there would somehow be a net neutral or vaguely positive effect, but nothing really provable to show that assumption is true.

Opportunity Cost. There's a lot of provable, demonstrable good that could be done with the same money instead, especially in the hands of other charities. Even in the hands of other animal-focused charities.

Personally I find the idea that we somehow have an obligation to bring back animals from extinction out of some sort of 'species guilt' rather absurd. No one alive owes the Dodos a thing. Even _if_ the science exists to bring back a stable breeding population out of the genetic shortcuts involved, which... eh. If all you want is some novelty Zoo exhibits, I guess that's one thing, but it feels rather ghoulish. The point is, a thriving species needs a bit more space than that.

For things like reintroducing cheetahs and mammoths to environments that they died out in originally and are completely unrecognizable to what they were adapted for (not to mention all the human stuff in those spaces), impractical doesn't even begin to describe it.

 Ouze wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
But some people see bringing back dead species as playing God.

It's a weird argument, because there is no shortage of animals that went extinct due to poor adaptations - but the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the white rhino, and so on; these were all killed by man, not any supernatural force. Nothing wrong with righting an wrong we ourselves committed.

This is my stance on it. I agree that it would be a waste of resources to bring back a species that couldn't adapt to its environment in time itself. But if we have a chance to undo mankind's damage, and that animal would likely thrive again? Great!
If you think about it, we already played vengeful God taking the species out to begin with. Why let it stop there with the bad stuff, and not play benevolent God in return?

Voss wrote:Personally I find the idea that we somehow have an obligation to bring back animals from extinction out of some sort of 'species guilt' rather absurd. No one alive owes the Dodos a thing.

I'm agreed with this point too, but I doubt many see it as actual guilt. It's more seeing it as a chance to right someone else's wrong. Let's face it, there are loads of charities that already do this - it's not like Unicef could blame itself for starving children across the world, but they still want to make childrens' lives better all the same. And why not?

A few thoughts

1) Species go extinct for reasons- but when that reason is something like human hunting to extinction or habitat damage; then the species essentially went extinct due to a very short term abnormality of human activity.
This means that other segments of the ecosystem likely were not changing as much as a result. So you lose a species because humans hunted them all down; this leaves all the rest of the system that that species was interacting with; all intact and potentially damaged as a result - causing further damage down the line of their own.

Eg remove a predator and a prey species might change behaviours and cause increased habitat damage which could spill over into farm crop damage.


2) Restoration is a pointless affair unless you can also repair and restore the damage that originally caused the loss of the species in the first place.


3) "Wasted resources" is a tough one. There are A LOT of competing theories and ideas on conservation and what one group might waste another uses. The UK is actually rather bad at this because there are SOOO many different conservation groups; it was only fairly recently that they started coordinating together more so (my impression is that in the not so distant past there was a LOT of rivalry between them - or at least between some in certain areas). An example is land purchases - in the past many of the larger groups would be competing to buy the same land, often to them put into the same or similar restoration efforts. So you'd have the same objective, but they'd be bidding against each other putting the land price up.

Another is how many UK based conservation sites are very micro-managed; yet when those same larger groups talk to overseas conversation groups and advise they often strongly suggest that they don't micro manage. Granted scale comes into it- the UK is tiny and what works for a tiny reserve in the UK is different to when you're managing a reserve that might be a county in size.



As for the ethics of genetics I think its a good use of resources and study. At the very least it will likely help advance genetic understanding of viable populations which might well help toward research on methods to repopulate from very small population numbers. So gives potential for helping breeding and repopulation efforts with species where we still have some individuals in captivity to breed from.

Of course we still swing back to the issue of habitat loss and persecution/hunting/poaching causing us to have species with no where viable to release them into.




On the subject of polar bears - melting of icecaps is nothing new. However historically there weren't fences, roads, rails, cities, towns, farms, farmers etc.... all between them and simply migrating south.

Law of Unintended Consequences is the key point as noted above. The moment a species disappears from its habitat, nature will immediately start to fill that void through other species. If any real sort of time has passed, then the balance will return and that niche filled.

If we start interfering again and put back the species that was there originally, then we're just upsetting the balance again that nature will have originally filled. The only real way you could do it was if the species went extinct in the wild, but we already had a revived population ready to go the moment it happened. So there was no real gap in time for things to rebalance.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Law of Unintended Consequences is the key point as noted above. The moment a species disappears from its habitat, nature will immediately start to fill that void through other species. If any real sort of time has passed, then the balance will return and that niche filled

Not always, many times the niche remains unfilled or what takes the niche simply results in increasing populations in another species which then puts more pressure on other species as a result. It's important to remember that the human induced loss of species is comparable to an extinction event. Which means we are seeing very short term impacts. On the plus side this means reintroduction is often possible; on the downside it means that we are losing species before nature can fill the niches up once more and the system can balance properly. Remembering that the system is NEVER balanced in a perfect state and is often in a constant state of balance by imbalance. Plus natural systems are rarely balanced to an annual repeating scale; many times population rises and falls can be over many decades rather than fast annual shifts. Such studies are often hard to come by because we don't have many years of accurate record keeping for many speices; but studies of some hunted species show such a dip and rise over many decades. Deer in Yellowstone are said to be on such a cycle, so you'd have records from grandparents at how rich the hunting was and then more modern records showing lower numbers. However going back more generations you'd see that dip repeated.

Honestly?

I fear we don’t really, like really really understand the ecosystem for this sort of thing.

So whilst they are of course laudable in their goal, there does seem to be a high risk, based on my own completely ropey and fragmentary understanding of ecosystems.

After all, most of our current understanding is based invasive species, and why, on reflection, whoever thought transplanting species was a massive dumbass.

 Super Ready wrote:

Voss wrote:Personally I find the idea that we somehow have an obligation to bring back animals from extinction out of some sort of 'species guilt' rather absurd. No one alive owes the Dodos a thing.

I'm agreed with this point too, but I doubt many see it as actual guilt. It's more seeing it as a chance to right someone else's wrong. Let's face it, there are loads of charities that already do this - it's not like Unicef could blame itself for starving children across the world, but they still want to make childrens' lives better all the same. And why not?

That's... a little different. No, that's understating it a lot. Bringing back a dead species next week or next century doesn't matter. Preventing children from dying next week is a much bigger deal. Guilt doesn't come into it, its an actual ongoing life-saving operation where actual living children benefit by virtue of having food and not dying (or not suffering life long health problems from malnutrition, which is more common). There's a level of urgency there that isn't comparable.

Voss wrote:

Opportunity Cost. There's a lot of provable, demonstrable good that could be done with the same money instead, especially in the hands of other charities. Even in the hands of other animal-focused charities.

I've always found this to be a rather specious and vague counter-argument that gets frequently deployed as an obfuscatory tactic against any worthwhile cause. Usually by someone who dislikes a proposal, but lacks a better reason to oppose it.

'Why are you wasting money on a model railway museum when you could be feeding starving children in Africa?'
'I think it's misaligned priorities to spend money bailing out companies when that money could be housing the homeless'
'Why on earth are we funding opera grants when there was an earthquake in country X?'

It holds some very basic merit, but it literally rules out ever doing absolutely anything that isn't immediately alleviating suffering in some god-forsaken corner of the earth. It also fails to recognise that people are permitted to have personal favourite 'good causes' or to prefer one act of do-gooding over another.

Like I said, people usually use it to try and stop something they disagree with but lack a more coherent foundation for that disagreement. It is interesting to note that those who use it also rarely have a specific cause in mind, just usually some critical-sounding general good cause in a far off place. They rarely say 'This money can be put to better use putting up a block of housing for the homeless at 23rd New Street', or 'How about we do a fundraiser instead to sponsor a local disabled cafe to open up', or the like. It's always used more as a deterrent and a morally acceptable fobbing off that requires no commitment to doing anything concrete.

If your asking people to give your favorite charity money (which blatantly you are), you need to demonstrate that its somehow worthwhile. You even quoted the relevant bit from me- there are charities that do real work to save living animals.

If this kind of reductio ab absurdium is your response to criticism, you've certainly failed to impress me. 'No one can ever do anything worthwhile ever!' is not a reasonable takeaway.
You also _blatantly_ ignore that I gave other reasons not to do it, and failed to address them in even the cursory fashion.

Voss wrote:
If your asking people to give your favorite charity money (which blatantly you are), you need to demonstrate that its somehow worthwhile. You even quoted the relevant bit from me- there are charities that do real work to save living animals.

If this kind of reductio ab absurdium is your response to criticism, you've certainly failed to impress me. 'No one can ever do anything worthwhile ever!' is not a reasonable takeaway.
You also _blatantly_ ignore that I gave other reasons not to do it, and failed to address them in even the cursory fashion.

I apologise. I thought you were merely listing random objections that one could utilise. Not that you actually held those beliefs. It's why I never addressed you directly in my answer, I was just noting that I'd heard that argument a million and one times as a specious excuse against ever actually doing anything good. I didn't realise that you were seriously attempting to raise it (and the other points you mentioned) as actual counter-arguments that you personally subscribed to.Is that the case then?

I'm also not particularly shopping for donations. I honestly thought that what they did was cool and so shared it accordingly along with a suitable debate topic (the morality around bringing back mammoths and suchlike is a pretty decent chat I thought). Not absolutely everything on the internet needs be viewed through the lens of total cynicism and manipulation, American election being on or not.

This page briefly discusses how this is being considered one day for the Thyacline, which went extinct in the 1930s in Tasmania, and for which they still have a "wet specimen":

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/extinction-of-thylacine



I can see how the further back "Jurassic Park" type examples could cause all kinds of issues, but for this example I am 1000% for it!

Locally to me we've actually reintroduced beavers, as they were hunted to extinction on the British Isles.

Mechanically this is no different to resurrecting a species, this just happens to require less Jurassic Park tech.

Seems to be going well, it's taken years to get to the point where they've been released, and even then they're heavily controlled on how far they can roam.

Next on the list is apparently the Wildcat, but I don't see that doing so well as a fundamental cause of that struggling in the first place is that they easily interbreed with domestic cats, so they're not so much dying out as being diluted to death.

I don't see how releasing them in the South West solves that issue anymore than it does in Scotland where they're still wild, but I assume there's a plan for that.

It's weird Tides should raise the Thylacine, as there's compelling, if not conclusive, evidence that there's still a relic population in existence, but bringing an animal back from the brink is just as worthwhile I think.

That thylacine "wet specimen" they have only has viable dna because it WAS preserved in alcohol, not formalin or formaldehyde (which breaks down dna).

It was mostly hunted to extinction in Tasmania, but it went extinct on the mainland due to increased competition from the dingo (which was an introduced predator during one of the migrations - of which there were several )

I think there are also enough stuffed Thylacines that we can get some DNA from them too, so its not just the one preserved pup.

Wildcat I can't see working in the UK; its only remote areas of Scotland where you'd get a chance and a hope of curtailing interbreeding with domestics and ensuring a viable breeding population of wildcats in isolation.

PineMartins are on the list and much like Buzzards, weren't extinct, but were hunted out of most areas. They've got the added boon that they predate on the fearsome grey-squirrel which is a non-native invasive species that drives out the red squirrels (it not only out competes it for food; is bigger; but it also carries, but does not die from, squirrel pox - which the reds do die from).

There's also been lingering calls for the Lynx to make a return. Though that one is somewhat harder as UK sheep farmers are not really experienced in dealing with an actual predator threat (besides those giant roks that fly off with whole herds of sheep).

Saving starving children and funding research of genetic revival are not competing goals.
Corporate tax cuts and starving children are competing goals and reflections of ideologies.
Just like "don't take showers to save the planet" is complete and utter tosh, because no amount of individual "saving" will ever compare to the waste generated by industry that now safely pushed the blame on you, the citizen. Your plastic straw murdered the last sea turtle, not the massive trawler nets floating in the ocean.

North America used to have Cheetahs. If Cheetahs were reintroduced they would not have the pressure from the rest of Africa's large predators(one of the major reasons for declining cheetah population is because they lose most of their kills to Lions, Hyenas, and Leopards) and they would have plenty of prey like Pronghorn and Deer. Its a possible lifeline for the species.

Mammoths could restore a lost part of the tundra ecosystem. Much like how Elephants shape the terrain in Africa, Mammoths used to do the same in the Tundra.

Our mountain lions, wolves, chupacabra, and bears would be displeased. Also the first time a cheetah kills a person, well thats it for this company.

 Overread wrote:

There's also been lingering calls for the Lynx to make a return. Though that one is somewhat harder as UK sheep farmers are not really experienced in dealing with an actual predator threat (besides those giant roks that fly off with whole herds of sheep).

Aren't there any wolves left in the UK? Not that anyone really know how to deal with predators anyway. Every time a herd gets attacked, there are calls to reduce or just plain eradicate the local wolf population.
Some shepherds have even complained about bears. There's like fifty bears left in the whole Pyrénées mountains but that's still too much apparently...

 Tiennos wrote:

 Overread wrote:

There's also been lingering calls for the Lynx to make a return. Though that one is somewhat harder as UK sheep farmers are not really experienced in dealing with an actual predator threat (besides those giant roks that fly off with whole herds of sheep).

Aren't there any wolves left in the UK? Not that anyone really know how to deal with predators anyway. Every time a herd gets attacked, there are calls to reduce or just plain eradicate the local wolf population.
Some shepherds have even complained about bears. There's like fifty bears left in the whole Pyrénées mountains but that's still too much apparently...

Wolves were wiped out generations ago and have been long gone. There are some rumblings every so often about reintroduction, but with the urbanisation and farming development of the UK they'd basically have only Scotland to roam in and even then we are simply so far removed from dealing with a "large predator" that it would be a nightmare. Heck the UK doesn't even have feral dog populations*. Even with wolves having very low human threat levels they'd be a huge issue to just get to the point of people not panicking about being eaten by wolves; and that's even in these modern times where wolves are more considered noble than savage.

Thing is there are ways to mitigate and work with larger predators; even if the shepherd can't be with the flock all day. Guard dogs raised within flocks have been used to good effect in many countries. That said its more hassle, cost and pressure for the farmer. Furthermore it only takes a generation to lose skills. Even in nations where wolves have been lost and restored in very short spans of time the loss of skills in a generation of farmers means that you have to basically retrain them from scratch; even if their grandparents got along fine.
For a country with no wolves in such a long period of time its a huge order to get the UK to accept. Heck we have enough problems getting eagles reintroduced since they can threaten lambs at vulnerable times.



Sheep farming also has a bit more of a political issue because its so heavily subsidised already. Other conversation groups make more pressure on having sheepfarms and stone walled hills torn up to be replaced with woodland rather than sheep-mown grassland.


*From what I'm aware we basically do not have them at all. You might get the odd dog here and there, but no population

switzerland reintroduced the lynx some time ago.

They rarely kill sheeps, and the rate of natural deaths is due to weather, etc. is 4000 to 50 or respectively 80 dead sheep from weather etc vs 1 from a Lynx.

That's the big difference between the continent and the islands. Wolves were hunted to extinction in most of Europe. As far as I know there haven't been any major efforts to reintroduce them anywhere, but the population that survived in Italy has just been spreading naturally ever since the species became protected.

But unless they can learn how to cross the channel, they won't come back on their own in the UK so it's up to the people to decide whether they want wolves back or not.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I think conservation movements currently hamper themselves to some degree because they have become so invested they do not ever take a step back to look at the larger picture.

Take for example, the Polar Bear. If we want to talk about wasted effort, that is a good place to start. Polar bears are screwed. We would be better off setting things up to help a future generation revive the species than trying to save a sinking ship. There are many other species in the same boat. This project stands to increase the options available to those looking to restore a 'natural' state. Even if the species simply go extinct again we will learn a lot from it.

Standard disclaimer about this being a personal opinion, take with a grain of salt and so on.

My personal opinion is that, alot of global warming is going to be reversed before we can help these species.
And while im no scientist, sometimes i feel as if people and conservationists focus too much on preventing more and individual efforts than a way to prevent it using science.
Like, why not a genetic super tree that breaths in a gak ton of carbon monoxide?