Conservation Efforts

     Kind of a gloomy blog, huh? animals poached from zoos, young animals orphaned and dying because they're too young to survive and their mothers were poached, the rapid decline of a species already almost extinct because some fool has the idea that a part of it can heal or make women love him. But that's the point I'm trying to make. We need to do something in order to prevent another species from going extinct. Humans already have a bad rep--the Dodo bird, the Passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian tiger (also known as the Thylacine, others call it the Tasmanian wolf). Why add another species to that list? there are probably even more animals on that list, whose names I don't know, or who never had a name--passing into extinction due to our pollution of the environment before even being discovered.
        So what can we do? Well, (and I believe that these have come up before) there is a game farm in South Africa that removes the horn--leaving a stump that will grow back--to deter poachers, which seems to be working. (A game farm is a place where some of the animals raised there are sold when the population is too big to be supported by the resources there in order to keep those resources available to the animal's population. The money goes to aid conservation efforts.) There have been efforts to capture and put radio collars on tigers, in order to study their movements. Another article states that there have been plans to take the last thousand females, protect them, and give them the chance to breed, hoping that their offspring will spread into other area of habitat previously occupied by tigers (as it has become a situation--ironically--of too few tigers for their available land. Most of the time, it's the other way around.)  A cheetah conservation project utilizes not only GTS collars to track the cheetah, but also a database that records a cheetah's footprint and uses it to identify an individual.  And the Nairobi nursery of the David Sheldric Wildlife Trust is the most successful orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation center in the world, most of the animals there are orphans due to poaching or human-wildlife contact. The elephants, once healed, will move to two holding centers where they will live until they feel ready to leave and be wild animals again. TRAFFIC and CITES monitor and regulate the trade in animal and plant species, and TRAFFIC also has awareness campaigns aimed at the souvenir trade.
      But what can you do, personally? For one thing, you can be more aware of what you buy. Don't purchase an animal for a pet if it is a member of an endangered species, or of a species of wild animal in general--no matter how cute it is (many become hard to take care of as they mature, and can end up released into the area and cause havoc). When buying a souvenir, be careful and try not to buy products made from animal parts, because you probably won't be able to tell if it was poached or not. The same is true for purchasing coral and shells. You can't tell if you are contributing to the loss of a species.








                                       Sources:

 
          traffic.org. TRAFFIC, n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2012.

         Gwin, Peter. "Rhino Wars." National Geographic Mar. 2012: 106-23.
 Print.nationalgeographic.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.
           Hance, Jeremy. "Tiger brutally killed in zoo, body parts taken to sell for Chinese   medicine." mongabay.com. N.p., n.d. 25 Aug. 2009. Web. 22 Apr. 2012.