Shout Out to Korea

So...Korea! Good job on legalizing whaling!

No really, there's nothing like some honest corpse-inducing research to help preserve endangered species! Especially with those Japanese friends of yours.

You know, historically, you guys don't seem to get along so great. But pull out some anti-whaling activists and BOOM, Japan and S. Korea are best friends.

Now, not to be culturally insensitive, but. You see, you have this great guise you try to maintain that denotes that you're doing scientific research... by harpooning whales ...and keeping them alive for hours...and then dissecting them.... for lunch.

See, where I come from, that's called KILLING FOR CONSUMPTION. Last time I checked (after the 16th century), you didn't have to kill something to study it. Especially because we have great technology now like boats, underwater cameras, wet suits, all this amazing stuff that - guess what - lets you study a whale without killing it! Brilliant, isn't it?

See, my main problem with this is not the fact that you want to do research (it's still one of the issues...) but DUDE YOU'RE NOT DOING IT FOR RESEARCH. Come on, at least be honest. Take the blows like men! Don't hide your short little whale-eating selves behind some big loser government claiming that you have absolutely no commercial interests in the killing of whales whatsoever.

Like I said, I get it. Cultural thing. Like the yellow-finned tuna that you've more or less fished to extinction. Or the 73 million sharks your ever friendly trading neighbors China love to fin for nothing but fun. But I mean, honestly. They're whales. For every whale you kill, you crush the dreams of exactly 34,721 poor children who are raised on stories filled with whales - and who will, at this rate, never get to see one in real life unless they go to Sea World and watch Shamoo. Or they happen to get lucky and watch Animal Planet at a time when there are actually wild animal shows on. But I digress.

I don't know what you're thinking, S.K., but this isn't going to get you many friends. I don't know if you're just generally miserable potatoes over there because of your majorly screwed up education system that leaves your country with the most unhappy teenagers in the world and you just want to inflict the pain of your childhood on a poor unsuspecting whale or just plain off your rocker.

All I have to say is, good day to you, you miserable abusive whale-eating liars. Welcome to the Sea Shepherd Hates You club.

Rhinos and Things

http://www.rhinoconservation.org/2012/05/04/almost-all-of-the-worlds-javan-rhinos-documented-in-one-video/

This page has a really beautiful video. Also, a very sad one.

Coincidentally, it's the same video.

So basically, someone's managed to compile footage of about 3/4 of the world'd Javan rhino population. Pretty cool, right?

Yes. And no.

Yes, because these are animals that are almost never seen - even park rangers are lucky if they lay their eyes upon one of these elusive creatures.

No, because the video only has 30 rhinos in it. There were more people than that in my school's last graduating class (our entire school has less than 500 people). If you do the math, that leaves only about 10-15 rhinos off the tape. Sad? Most definitely. And the truth is, that's probably how it's going to stay.

The rhino world has had a rather tumultuous year. While they've enjoyed the successful birth of Andantu, a Sumatran Rhino, they've also had to deal with some of the worst poaching rates in the last few decades.

Barely half way through the year, and the number of dead rhinos in South Africa alone was NINETEEN TIMES the number from 2007.

Slacking off? I think yes. If you can have one year where only 13 rhinos are killed, then isn't there pressure to keep the numbers down? I would think so.

To digress, Nepal has actually felt this pressure internationally. And it's done a wonderfully beautiful job. Even if they can't quite fix that Royal family of theirs, they can boast that not a single one of their rhinos was killed last year. How AMAZING is that? I applaud them, admire them. Finally, someone is doing something right. Perhaps South Africa can take a hint or two from them.

But, back on track. Javan rhinos.

We really need to keep up with 'em. We're like, this close (imagine me holding two fingers together) to losing them like we've already lost so many other species. In fact, we've already lost one of the subspecies. Brilliant, right? The Vietnamese subspecies of the Javan rhino (I've always wondered about the logistics of that, giving that I know my geography....) was officially declared extinct some time late last year. Scientists were even so fortunate as to find the remains of the poor dear, who'd, naturally, been killed for her horn.

Which brings me to the last of my rather disorganized and drifting points. Why is the demand increasing? We've got a bazillion different conservation agencies working around the clock to educate people, to patrol, to curb the trade. However, the statistics don't show it - not one bit. We've got all sorts of big numbers showing growing interest (and more murder), and they're only getting bigger.

And while some speculator might think this is absolutely brilliant for the stock market, I might have to disagree. Get your heads out of the dark recesses of the holes you've buried them into and smell the burning corpses/confiscated rhino horn. IT'S NOT RIGHT. It's not medicine; it's not gonna increase your libido and it certainly isn't going to cure cancer.

Go donate your money to a cancer research institute. Don't spend it killing those who can't save themselves.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Screw giving people the benefit of the doubt. Nine out of ten times the person is guilty of what they are accused!

(Note: this is an observation, not a statistic. Also, in political circumstances it more like five to five because half the time they're just trying to get rid of the opposition.)

We were walking through Bangkok airport and at the baggage claim the tv has a slide with a slow loris saying 'Stop Wildlife Trafficking' or something along those lines. And it made me think. (No seriously, I do that.)

I mean, how often do you think someone who traffics wildlife actually gets caught? Looking around, even in the middle of the night, I could see several people who looked suspicious. Of course, you can't just go all Homeland Security on them without warrant in a foreign country. So that day, through that airport, I bet hundreds of animals were tortured in bags everywhere.

And I mean, they threaten you, they really do. 'You will be caught.' 'Fines of up to -insert number here-!' 'Jail time.' Yeah right. They made a big deal out of it when Wong served 6 months. That's it! Of course I wonder why after all these years and all this awareness, we still can't control the Illegal Wildlife Trade. But then I remember we can't even get our economies or governments in order because we're all so in love with buying cheap low quality goods of China and these ghostly investors who have priority over everyone else.

After that, I just think about how screwed all the normal people and animals are.

The Importance of Data

:D Need I say more?